Tony Meeuwissen’s 1977 cover for Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade.  A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle.  One peaceful moment.

— Maxine Hong Kingston, in "Maxine Hong Kingston" by Helena Grace (Manchester University Press; June 30, 2006) (via Make Believe Boutique)

Portrait study of Maxine Hong Kingston (from March this year, I think?)

I've read many excerpts of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston over the years in class, particularly as a scholar of magical realism and folklore. But only this weekend did I read it all the way through.

It's a beautiful memoir of a mother-daughter relationship and the complicated issues of being the child of immigrants. She and her siblings are caught between the inaccessible, impossibly far-away China and the traditions it gave their parents and the new America, which they also can't quite access due to the "foreignness" of their parents, the racism, the things their parents insist they can't do or must do. They're unable to fit in, but unable to get their parents to explain the customs or family history as well.

Girls are utterly dismissed in the Chinese culture Maxine grows up in—and yet her mother is so strong, giving a strong untouchable womanhood and telling her stories of woman warriors and of being a ghost-hunter and fierce trained nurse—and yet the American feminine also pulls at Maxine—and so she is caught between all these ideas, trying to figure out what's real and what isn't, incurring all kinds of abuse. She listens to the stories, the myths, and tries to line those up with the mother she grew up with and the things she's said to belittle her. It leaves her confused and even sick, but there's still something there that rings between generation and generation. She ends with a story of a woman and a tribe who are singing in different languages, but who recognize the vibration of each other's song enough to empathize.

Sometimes Maxine's writing can be a bit twisty even for a lover of magical realism, but it always came back around. There's a reason this is a classic, it tells a powerful story that sticks with you about what it means to feel a string between you and a loved one, connecting you even if you can't always manage to access them. It digs into interesting narratives of silence, girlhood, assimilation, and (disrupted?) generational memory.

Content warnings for suicide; g-slur, r-slur, n-word; animal cruelty; ableism; racism, Sinophobia.

"The birds surround me and eat and sing.

I am unequivocally happy."

----Maxine Hong Kingston

Female Foot-Archers training for the Traditional World Nomad Games of ethnic sports held in Kyrgyzstan

(Women Hold Up Half The Sky)

* * * *

“Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.” ― Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

Maybe because I was the one with the tongue cut loose, I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat... If only I could let my mother know the list, she—and the world—would become more like me, and I would never be alone again.

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

“Shortly after relating Brave Orchid’s cautionary tale, the narrator [in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior] directly addresses her Chinese American readers: ‘Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?’ The narrator asks a particular segment of her readership: what are the imaginative strategies you deploy to make sense of your ‘Chineseness’ when there are so many versions of it being offered to you? The question undermines the very idea of any singular, unified, or coherent Chinese culture that could be handed down in an unbroken line by family, education, or popular culture—each of these sources is simply another ‘peculiar’ perspective that informs one’s own. Similarly, no definition of ‘woman’ within the feminist imagination could possibly explain the heterogeneous experiences of unevenly situated Chinese and Chinese American women in a single family across time and continents…The surprise of The Woman Warrior is the fact that not even a shared cultural heritage or the bonds of family can provide a solid basis for mutual understanding between women. Rather than speaking from a position of self-righteous certainty as a ‘Western Feminist,’ as some critics have claimed, the storyteller ‘crowdsources’ fresh perspectives on the meaning of a family legend, thereby treating multiple points of view on a single woman’s life as all potentially equally valuable.”

Ramzi Fawaz, Queer Forms

“We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.”

― Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

C’est en effet un livre audacieux, et très spécial.

Honnêtement, il y a eu des moments où j’ai manqué de me perdre, parce que, précisément, délibérément, l’autrice mêle à son autobiographie les mythes chinois, pour montrer sa confusion, et c’est tellement réussi qu’on s’y perd !

L’écriture est très belle, précise, lyrique, crue parfois. Intense.

Le propos est également dur, car le sort des femmes chinoises n’est guère enviable dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. Naître femme, c’est un peu une malédiction, avec un horizon extrêmement réduit. Le livre commence par raconter le sort malheureux de la sœur du père de l’autrice, ça donne le ton. Ton étonnant en 1975, année où le livre fut écrit avant d’être réédité cette année.

Cependant, sa mère, Orchidée Vaillante, en faisant des études, puis en émigrant en 1960 en Californie, réussit à infléchir un peu le destin ; les histoires de femmes guerrières, édifiantes, aident aussi à se rêver autrement pour ses filles. Mais que de douleurs pour une petite fille qui hérite de cet écartèlement entre l’identité chinoise pétrie de codes et de symboles, et le monde américain, si différent. Pas étonnant qu’il y ait beaucoup de folie qui éclose chez de nombreuses femmes transplantées sans ménagement dans un environnement incompréhensible. On est frappé d’ailleurs en lisant cette éducation atypique par l’absence de paroles autres que principes ou fables, des paroles qui EXPLIQUENT ce que les uns et les autres vivent, ce qu’il se passe. Pas étonnant non plus que le silence frappe les jeunes écolières chinoises dans leurs écoles américaines. La langue, c’est ce qui façonne le monde, comment parler quand celui-ci est opaque et en lambeaux ? Comment oser prendre la parole quand toute votre histoire familiale vous a enjoint à vous taire ?

Il semble que Maxine y soit parvenue, grâce à son intelligence, son courage, et une envie d’affronter plutôt que de subir, même si ce fut terriblement douloureux, psychiquement et physiquement.

Et elle a réussi à faire un livre totalement personnel, et qui a dû parler à un grand nombre des sino-américains, un livre plein de beauté et de rage.

Personnellement, j’ai adoré l’utilisation du terme fantôme dans le livre, qui dépasse largement l’acception habituelle ; ils y sont d’ailleurs très nombreux. Quelle terreur en lisant celui du dortoir de l’école de médecine d’Orchidée Vaillante… cette figure protéiforme de la mort, du mal, de l’inconnu, est très forte, et nous manque bien dans notre culture occidentale si rationnelle j’ai trouvé. La « jeune fille parmi les fantômes » (sous-titre du livre) a bien su composer avec eux, et cela semble être un art bien complexe.

A feeling went through Wittman that nothing wrong could ever happen again--or had ever happened. It's very good sitting here, among friends, coffee cup warm in hands, cigarette. Together we fall silent as the sun shows its full face. The new day. Good show, gods. Why don't I, from now on, get up for every dawn? My life would be different. I would no longer be fucked up. I set out on more life's adventure with these companions, the people with whom I have seen dawn. My chosen family. We're about to change the world for the better.

Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston

"Writing is different. Ordinary people don't understand. Other people get into occupations by accident or design; but writers are born. We have to write. I have to write. I could work at selling motels, or slopping hogs, for fifty years, but if someone asked my occupation, I'd say writer, even if I'd never sold a word. Writers write. Other people talk." - W.P. Kinsella - Shoeless Joe (book that inspired Field of Dreams)

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston (1976)

In a time of destruction

In a time of destruction,

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I've learned exactly who the enemy are. I easily recognize them—business-suited in their modern American executive guise, each boss two feet taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye.

 - Maxine Hong Kingston (b. October 27, 1940)

She is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese immigrants living in the United States. She has contributed to the feminist movement with such works as her memoir The Woman Warrior, which discusses gender and ethnicity and how these concepts affect the lives of women. Kingston has received several awards for her contributions to Chinese American Literature including the National Book Award in 1981 for her novel China Men.