Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior.

Summary

‘No Name Woman’

The first person narrator, now an adult woman, recalls a story her mother told her when she was a girl. The narrator is the first American generation of Chinese immigrants. She calls herself a Chinese-American but her only connection to China are the stories of her mother. She cannot not properly distinguish what is the Chinese tradition, what is but her mother’s story, and how to make it all fit to her life in America. Her mother told the children stories whenever she wanted to warn them about life. The stories were harsh in order to make the children prepared for the harsh reality. The mother told the narrator the story of her aunt when the girl had had her first period to warn her against what could happen to her, too.

All the men of the family left for America, ‘the Gold Mountain’, for economic reasons in 1924 (3). The village had just celebrated seventeen hurried weddings to ensure that the men will return home again. The narrator’s aunt was married to a man from a neighbouring village, whom she saw for the first time at her wedding day. The man immediately left to America. Several years later the aunt became pregnant, obviously as a result of an adulterous liaison. The narrator suggests that the aunt must have been commanded by some man to lie with him and she had to obey, because ‘[w]omen in the old China did not choose’ (6). Or maybe the aunt deliberately gave up her task of preserving the tradition at home, while the men were abroad, in exchange for a few fleeting moments of love. The narrator however cannot think of the aunt as a creature driven by lust, she does not know any such Chinese woman.

The narrator’s aunt was a much beloved child and the only daughter in the family. The aunt’s grandfather apparently wished for a girl, as he once attempted to exchange the youngest son, the narrator’s father, for a girl-baby. The aunt was exceptional in that she paid attention to her appearance, which was unusual among Chinese village-women. She wore her hair in an elaborate bun and she used a ‘depilatory string’ for her forehead and the tops of her eyebrows (9). It was a rule that married women lived with their parents-in-law. When the aunt was discovered to be pregnant, her parents-in-law could have ‘sold her, mortgaged her, stoned her’, but they sent her back to her own parents instead (8). ‘All the village were kinsmen’ and it was unthinkable to have a life of one’s own, so the aunt’s pregnancy was a business of the whole village (11).

On the day when the aunt was expected to give birth to her child, the villagers raided the house where she was staying. They broke in, destroyed all they could find, slaughtered the cattle and painted the walls with its blood. The aunt was punished severely because there were bad times and lack of food. She was punished for breaking the ‘roundness’, the symbol of safety, the symbol of a whole family (13). When the raiders left, the family spoke to the disgraced aunt for the first time and cursed her as a ‘ghost’ who has ‘never been born’ (14). The aunt gave birth to the baby in a pigsty and then drowned both herself and the newborn in a family well. The child would have been lost anyway because it had no descent line, once the mother was cursed to non-existence. The aunt never told the name of the father.

The aunt’s brother, the narrator’s father, never talks about his sister and does not allow her name to be spoken. The narrator does not even know the aunt’s name. The aunt’s punishment from the family was their deliberately forgetting her. She does not have any marked grave and her ghost does not have food and gifts carried to her resting place. Her ghost remains always hungry, begging food from other ghosts. The narrator herself took part in the aunt’s punishment when she was forbidden to mention the aunt to the father. Now, fifty years after the aunt’s death, she is the first to talk about her.

‘White Tigers’

Chinese girls learn from the stories of the adults that they fail if they become but wives or slaves. They could be heroines and swordswomen. The narrator thinks that perhaps it is because of the women’s former power, now lost, that the feet of girls are bound when they are seven. The narrator as a little girl used to listen to the stories of her mother before sleep and so the stories are confused in her mind with her dreams. The narrator liked to go to watch films featuring swordswomen with supernatural faculties. Her mother’s stories had a great impact on her young mind. She was also taught by her mother the song of the warrior woman Fa Mu Lan, who took her father’s place in battle and returned victorious to her village. The narrator decides to become a woman warrior, too. She elaborates a detailed dream story of herself growing up to be a glorious heroine.

She would be called off by a bird at the age of seven and lead high to the mountains. There she would meet an old man and an old woman who would give her a choice: ‘You can go pull sweet potatoes, or you can stay with us and learn how to fight barbarians and bandits’ (22). She chooses the latter. Her training will last for fifteen years and prepare her for avenging her village. At the age of fourteen she is led blindfolded to the mountains of white tigers and left alone to find her way back to the hut. For several weeks she fights both external and internal enemies: predators, starvation, exhaustion, hallucinations. A rabbit would save her from dying of hunger by jumping into her fire and so sacrificing itself for her meat. She passes the survival test. The following seven years of her training are taken up by her dragon lessons, the dragon’s body being identified with the whole of the natural world. She works hard every day but she is happy: ‘When it rained, I exercised in the downpour, grateful not to be pulling sweet potatoes. […] I was grateful not to be squishing in chicken mud, which I did not have nightmares so frequently about now’ (29-30). Her teachers show her a water gourd in which she can watch her parents, their exploiters, and witness her brother and her husband-to-be being led away on conscription.

At twenty-two she is ready to return to her village. Her parents welcome her and carve the words of revenge on her back with knives. A white horse appears to carry the woman warrior to the battle. She is showered with presents as if it were her wedding. She puts on her men’s clothes and armour and gathers a large army of volunteers on her way. They march to the capital of Peiping to dethrone the tyrannous emperor. Her first opponent is a snake masked as a giant. When his army sees that they have been led by a snake, they join the woman warrior’s side. She carefully conceals her female identity, otherwise she would be executed for disguising as a man. She wins all her battles and is celebrated in fairy tales. Kuan Kung, the god of war and literature, rides before her.

She is found by her husband who has been looking for her. She gets pregnant, but her condition does not keep her from fighting. She hides from battle only once, when she gives birth to her son. She sends the baby to her parents when he is one month old. After this she feels lonely and distracted so that she is nearly captured by an enemy. In Peiping her army beheads the corrupt emperor and crowns a peasant instead. She confronts the baron who plagued her village. She reveals herself to be a female and beheads the startled man for his crimes. His fortress is cleansed from villains. She discovers a room where abandoned women with bound feet are locked. She releases them and they would be later said to become an amazon army buying up girl babies and killing men. She returns to her parents-in-law and announces: ‘Now my public duties are finished. I will stay with you, doing farmwork and housework, and giving you more sons’ (45). She is made into a legend celebrating her ‘perfect filiality’ (45).

The narrator finishes dreaming and returns to her actual disappointing American life. As a girl she has been subjected to many tribulations and humiliating experiences. Though she gets straight A-s at school, she is constantly blamed for the unforgivable fact of her being a girl. The Chinese have numerous sayings against girls: ‘Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds’, ‘Better to raise geese than girls’, ‘When you raise girls, you’re raising children for strangers’ (46). The narrator is very apprehensive about her sex and starts rebelling. She stops getting straight A-s and when she is called a ‘bad girl’, she is sometimes pleased, because ‘a bad girl’ is ‘almost a boy’ (47). In the sixties she studies at the Berkeley college, but even this does not help her to win respect: ‘I studied, and I marched to change the world, but I did not turn into a boy’ (47). The narrator sadly observes: ‘Even now China wraps double binds around my feet’ (48).

The life of Chinese immigrants in America is harsh. They are frequently subjected to discrimination. The narrator’s family loses their laundry shop twice when the site is needed for a parking lot or something else. Bad news arrive also from those relatives who remained in China. They are persecuted by communists, even despite their being no wealthy landowners but poor people. Members of the family face torture, imprisonments, forced labour, and executions. One of the narrator’s uncles is betrayed by a bird, another than the one the narrator keeps on looking for to shows her the glorious life of a woman warrior. The uncle spotted two doves on a tree and climbed for them to feed his starving family, but he was caught by communists and punished for his not sharing the food by execution.

The adult narrator is still haunted by her native Chinatown which does not acknowledge girls. She asserts a link between herself and the woman warrior. She hopes that her people will soon recognize the connection so that she could return to them. What they have in common are the words. Chinese idioms for ‘revenge’ is ‘report a crime’ and ‘report to five families’ (53). That is exactly what the narrator is doing: ‘The reporting is the vengeance––not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words’ (53).

‘Shaman’

The narrator’s mother keeps her medical diploma in a metal tube smelling of China. The narrator examines the mother’s photo on the diploma and wonders about her expressionless face. Chinese do not smile for photos. The mother’s picture contrasts to the snapshots of the father, taken in America, in which he always smiles. The narrator relates the story of her family’s emigration and the story of her mother as a doctor.

After the father’s emigration and the death of her two toddler children, the mother had herself enrolled at a college. She enjoyed the life without her parents-in-law, though she lived in a dormitory room with five other women. She was already in her mid-thirties but she did not tell her age because she would be expected to be more clever than the younger students. She excelled in her studies, but she had to work very hard. There was a room in the dormitory haunted by a ghost. Nobody dared to live in there, but the mother showed her courage by sleeping there overnight. She was visited by a Sitting Ghost, who sat on her chest and pressed her with its weight. She won over the ghost by the power of her will and promised to kill it. The next day the students, led by the mother, burned oil and alcohol in the room to incense it. The ghost was defeated.

The mother returned to her village to practice medicine and became very respected for her skills. She bought herself a slave girl and a white dog to attend her during her night errands and fought both ghosts and diseases. She acted especially as a midwife and her terrible stories about deformed children and girl-babies killed at birth keep on haunting the narrator. In order to come to terms with her American reality, the narrator tries to ‘push the deformed into [her] dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories’ (87). The narrator often had to listen to ghosts stories when she was a child helping in the family laundry. The stories frightened her. She heard about various heroes fighting with various ghosts and found that eating a ghost is an effective means of getting rid of it. This is what her mother practised. The narrator recalls with disgust her mother’s cooking. She would cook anything she could find and have the family eat all leftovers, no matter many days old.

When the Japanese invaded China, the mother hid in the mountains with other refugees. She set up a hospital there. Chinese villages were bombed. There was a crazy woman among the refugees whose behaviour made the villagers think her a Japanese spy. She was stoned to death. The mother emigrated to America in 1940, fifteen years after her husband. She gave birth to six more children, though she was in her mid-forties then. The narrator, the eldest surviving child, perceived the Gold Mountain as crowded with ghosts of white people. Still she did not wish to return to China. She feared that her father would take two more wives and that she herself would be sold.

The narrator, now an adult white-haired woman, is on a visit to her mother. The mother reproaches her for visiting her too little. She pities having left her home in China and complains of the hurried way of life in America: ‘This is terrible ghost country, where a human being works her life away’ (104). The daughter wonders why the mother keeps on working so hard despite her old age. The mother thinks she would deteriorate even more if she stopped working to retire as her husband did. All of the relatives who remained in China are dead now, so the neighbours would like to take their land. The father agrees, and so twenty-five years after the Revolution, the family gives up their return to China: ‘We have no more China to go home to’ (106). The mother would like to see all her children and their families living with her. The narrator cannot do so, the Bronx climate makes her ill and she prefers her own home in California. She does not want to live with ghosts again. The mother accepts her choice.

‘At the Western Palace’

The narrator’s mother retained her Chinese name even in America. Unlike many other immigrants, she had herself always called Brave Orchid and did not use any English alternative. When she was nearly seventy, she had her sister, Moon Orchid, transported from China.

Brave Orchid waits for her sister at the San Francisco airport with her dutiful niece and two of her ‘American children’ (113). She observes that nowadays immigrants have an easier way than she herself had at Ellis Island. She is unhappy with her American children, who could not sit patiently with her and ran away to examine shops and magazine stands. Her niece pleases her more, she behaves as a Chinese and does not care that her manners do not fit to America. The sisters are reunited after fifteen years. They are oblivious to the elapsed time and keep on wondering how the other looks old, though they are both of about the same age. Moon Orchid brings her nieces and nephews presents. The children are only interested in the ingeniously made papers dolls, including one of the woman warrior Fa Mu Lan. As to the presented shoes and dresses, they never think of wearing them.

The young are indifferent to, even bothered by the Chinese traditions which the elders start performing to welcome the arrival of a relative. The old generation of Chinese immigrants seeks to hold on to the traditional way of life, but they are more influenced by the American ways than they think. In contrast, the children already born in America seek to assimilate completely to their new environment. The elders think them secretive, antisocial, unfriendly. The second generation of Chinese-Americans still speak Chinese next to English, but the third generation, the grandchildren of the original immigrants, cannot not speak any Chinese at all.

Moon Orchid and her three children were supported generously by her husband who now lives in Los Angeles. She was however never invited to join him. Brave Orchid managed to find a husband for Moon Orchid’s daughter, a rich though tyrannous Chinese-American with citizenship. Then she could transport Moon Orchid to America, too. She urges her sister to claim her rights as the First Wife, because her husband remarried in America. His second wife gave him two sons and a daughter, the same as the first wife. Brave Orchid, used to a comfortable life in Hong Kong, hesitates to act, so meanwhile she remains in the household of Brave Orchid.

Moon Orchid tries to get friendly with her nieces and nephews, but is largely unsuccessful. She stalks the children and bothers them: ‘‘She’s driving me nuts!’ the children told each other in English’ (141). Any attempts to make her help with work in the laundry fail, Moon Orchid is slow, clumsy, and cannot stand the heat. Moon Orchid’s daughter must finally return to her family in Los Angels. Brave Orchid decides that Moon Orchid will go, too, and confront her husband. They find that the husband has become a successful doctor. His second young wife helps him as his nurse; she hardly speaks Chinese. Moon Orchid realizes that she has grown old, whereas her husband looks still youthful and very American: ‘Her husband looked like one of the ghosts passing the car windows, and she must look like a ghost from China’ (153). The husband refuses to acknowledge his first wife because it would destroy his new life, he is however ready to keep on supporting her.

Moon Orchid’s mental health deteriorates. She believes that she is being pursued by Mexican ghosts. Brave Orchid takes her sister to her home and does her best to help her. The stay of Moon Orchid negatively affects the whole of the household, including the lives of the children. ‘Chinese people are very weird,’ the children conclude from the behaviour of Moon Orchid (158). Despite all her attempts, Brave Orchid fails to cure her sister. She is moved to a mental home, where she seems to be happy, and where she finally dies in her sleep. Brave Orchid tells her children that they must keep their father from marrying a second wife, because she doubts she would take it any better than her sister did.

‘A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe’

The narrator’s tongue was cut when she was a baby to ensure that she will be proficient in any speech. The narrator did learn English but she was too ashamed of her unsteady voice to use it. It took her three years of silence before she started to talk both in her American and her Chinese schools. There was a Chinese girl in the school who could read aloud but never dared to talk on her own. The narrator hated the frail and weak creature. Once when they were alone, she tortured the girl, trying to make her talk. She failed. The girl never spoke and kept on living under the protection of her family. Only the narrator was punished for hurting the girl by an eighteen-month long mysterious illness. She however enjoyed the period because she felt no pain and could stay at home.

Silence also marks the narrator’s family. The parents have their immigration secrets and teach their children to give Americans invented answers to any question. The children are never told anything important: ‘They would not tell us children because we had been born among ghosts, were taught by ghosts, and were ourselves ghost-like’ (183). The parents never answer their children’s questions. They never explain the Chinese traditions that they keep. The narrator thinks: ‘If we had to depend on being told, we’d have no religion, no babies, no menstruation (sex, of course, unspeakable), no death’ (185).

The situation in China in not improving, so that return is unthinkable. The parents worry about what to do with their daughters, whom they could sell in China. The narrator suspects her parents from planning to get rid of her by marrying her to someone. Young male immigrants keep on appearing in the laundry and disappearing again. The narrator pretends a limp and deliberately behaves clumsily so that none of the men would think her suitable for a wife. She is pursued by a mentally retarded boy and she fears that her parents might wish to marry her to him.

The narrator makes a list of over two hundred evil things that she did and wants to confess to her mother before she grows old and dies. The mother at first does not respond in any way, as if she could not hear or understand. Then she loses patience and sends the narrator away: ‘Go away and work. […] I don’t feel like hearing your craziness’ (200). The narrator gains courage and starts screaming at her parents. She wants them to send the retarded man from the laundry where he started to sit and watch the narrator, to stop thinking about marrying her, and to stop lying to her: ‘And I don’t want to listen to any more of your stories; they have no logic. […] You lie with stories. […] I don’t even know what your real names are. I can’t tell what’s real and what you make up’ (202). The narrator starts yelling out her lists of things to confess and so does the mother, reproaching her for all her bad behaviour.

Eventually the mother admits that she likes her daughter, but the tradition orders her not to show it. The mother seems to be too Chinese and the daughter too American to be able to understand each other. The adult narrator is still somewhat confused about her being a Chinese-American: ‘I continue to sort out what’s just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living’ (205). She concludes by a story whose beginning she was told recently by her mother and who ending she invented. It tells about the Chinese poetess Ts’ai Yen who was captured by barbarians. When she was ransomed, she taught the Chinese a powerful barbarian song, ‘Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe’, which the Chinese now sing to their own instruments.

Analysis

The book consists of five different stories which are related by the same narrator and background. The narrator is an adult woman, but the stories she presents were told to her mostly by her mother when she was a child, therefore her attitude to the stories often alternates the child’s ignorance and the adult’s knowingness. The stories deal either with the old China or with the new lives of Chinese immigrants to America.

An important aspect are the ever-present Chinese traditions and customs, which to the narrator often seem as exotic and strange as to the reader. The narrator’s attitude to China is ambiguous: she seeks to adapt herself to the American way of life, but she cannot escape the Chinese heritage of her ancestors. The narrator perceives China most often as a ghost drawn to her by her mother’s stories, which keep on haunting her even in her adult life.

The narrator struggles with establishing her identity not only as a Chinese but also as a woman. The stories are preoccupied with female characters, mostly in one sense or another ‘woman warriors’. The struggle of women may be presented in the literary meaning (‘White Tigers’) or the figurative one (‘Shaman’). The narrator herself fights in both ways: she imagines herself as the legendary woman warrior and at the same time she uses her words for fight.