Memory and Narration in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Women Warrior

The Woman Warrior (1976), by Maxine Hong Kingston, was published to great popular acclaim. To varied audiences, Kingston's work seemed to embody the views of Chinese-American women. However, to the playwright, author, and photographer Frank Chin, Kingston's writing embodied a particularly innacurate, inauthentic sensibility. In a 1991 article, he is critical of the popularity of Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior (450,000 copies sold since 1976); David Henry Hwang's F.O.B. (Obie, best off- Broadway play) and M. Butterfly (Tony, best Broadway play); and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. "These works are held up before us as icons of our pride, symbols of our freedom from the icky-gooey evil of . . . Chinese culture." (2)
Kingston, Hwang, and Tan are the first writers of Asian ancestry, "to so boldly fake the best-known works from the most universally known body of Asian American lore in history." (3) And finally, "Maxine Hong Kingston has defended her revision of Chinese history, culture, and childhood literature and myth by restating a white racist stereotype" (29).
One might question whether Chin's remarks were just a matter of professional jealousy; his own writings did not receive the popular acclaim of Kingston's. Today, in the Amazon.com paperback book rankings, The Woman Warrior (1975) is the #5,446 best seller, whereas Chin's Donald Duk: A Novel (1991), is #43,064. Though Kingston's books have had a few extra years to sell, presumably, the differential between the two rankings will not be bridged soon. Chin would differ; in the introduction to the 1991 anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American literature, The Big Aiiieeeee!, he, along with Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, writes:

Here, we offer a literary history of Chinese American and Japanese American writing concerning the real and the fake. We describe the real, from its sources in the Asian fairy tale and the Confucian heroic tradition, to make the work of these Asian American writers understandable in its own terms. We describe the fake- from its sources in Christian dogma and in Western philosophy, history, and literature- to make it clear why the more popularly known writers such as Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, Amy Tan, and Lin Yutang are not represented here. Their work is not hard to find. The writers of the real are very hard to find . . . (xv)

Chin questions the literary authenticity of Kingston's work, and in doing so, asks what an "authentic" Asian American is. It is easy to argue that Kingston represents but one of many different perspectives in the Asian American literary oeuvre, but Chin does not agree. First of all, his main complaint is that Kingston's writing in an autobiographical mode is sadly derivative of Christian brainwashing, and that furthermore, her viewpoint is more informed by racism than by race pride:

With Kingston's autobiographical Woman Warrior, we have given up even the pretense of reporting from the real world. Chinese culture is so cruel and she is so helpless against its overwhelming cruelty that she lives entirely in her imagination. It is an imagination informed only by the stereotype communicated to her through the Christian Chinese American autobiography. (26)

Yet Hong Kingston counters that "After all, I am not writing history or sociology but a 'memoir' like Proust" (Cheung 79). Still, there are critics like Chin who imply that Kingston's faulty knowledge of "true" history make her work a "false" work. It is interesting from a literary theory standpoint that since the Post-Structuralists (post 1970's), there has been a movement away from noting "truth" in works, preferring a non-value based system of analysis. Chin's criticism of Kingston is troubling for several reasons: it stands away from a "pan-Asian American identity" to separate some members of the Asian American community as being "sellouts"; and Chin also espouses a rather radical take on racial identity.
First of all, David Henry Hwang's look at the Chin/Kingston feud is interesting:

When I read The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, for instance, it was sort of a personal and artistic revelation to me because the juxtaposition of almost a hyper-realistic view of growing up Chinese- American in Stockton, California with the ghosts of some imagined or mythological past seemed to feel very real to me. After all, I'd run for student body president at the same time that my grandmother was telling me stories about her aunt casting out demons in Fukien.

At the same time I was also very drawn to Frank Chin's work. Now Frank really hates me right now and thinks I'm a white racist and all that, but tough, he gave birth to me too and his works really inspired me to think that. He was the first Chinese-American to be produced off-Broadway professionally, and he inspired me to think that this was possible. There's a character in one of his plays, Gwan Gung, who represents a sort of Chinese-American spirit, as it were, the spirit of the early immigrants. I began to think about the juxtaposition of Fa Mu Lan, the woman warrior character from Maxine's book and Gwan Gung, the character from Frank Chin's plays and I began to think what would happen if they met in a Chinese restaurant in Torrance. Was there a way to synthesize these two traditions?

Hwang ends that same 1994 speech at MIT with the words:

. . . authenticity to me is a debate over the quest to validate the humanity of various peoples, of all the people in this country. I know a couple who's- gosh - he's Irish and Jewish and Japanese and she's Haitian and Filipino and something else. Anyway, they had a child and someone whose business it is to know such things informed them that their child had never existed before. I began to wonder if this child grows up and becomes a writer -let's say it's a woman - what do we call her? Is she an African- American writer or all Asian-American writer, European-American or is she basically a woman's writer or etc? And I think that when the day comes that we can simply call her an American writer, then we will have gone a long way to claiming the humanity and the authenticity of all our experiences as Americans.

While Hwang sort of glosses over his speech with an appeal to a non-racist society, the really interesting part of his speech was his questioning what would happen if a radical Asian American sat down with an older Asian American. In many ways the clash of ideologies is generational there. But that Chin criticized Kingston in his own generation is even more interesting. That bias within a race can be so pronounced is somewhat disturbing to me. It just goes to show that all people can have biases and subtle race issues to deal with, and that as individuals, it is important to explore and eradicate biases. The debate over autheniticity is an interesting one, but even more interesting is the formation of race biases in people. What makes a race bias stay in place in an individual and what makes one so critical of the very race he is trying to embrace?
The Chin/Kingston debate somewhat reflects the complexity of issues currently central in ethnic studies. The present paper addresses the issue of authenticity through a literary point of view: memory and narration. I argue that ethnic authenticity in Asian American literature is often complicated by autobiographical form in which cultural experience and tradition is recollected. The question of authenticity, fiction or non-fiction has become a very political debate. Some minority critics have elevated the novel as the highest form. They say that autobiography is a lesser form because you are not using imagination. Since both The Woman Warrior and China Men were called nonfiction, Kingston has had attacks from that point of view. Kingston's answer is simple enough: "I am writing biography and autobiography of imaginative people. I am writing about real people, all of whom have minds that love to invent fictions. I am writing the biography of their imaginations" (1998).
The function of memory in the narrative reconfiguration of cultural authenticity in literary representation has largely escaped critical attention. The whole issue of memory and authenticity in Asian American literary texts requires careful examination in the context of cultural differences and in relation to subject positions. In this paper, I explore the memory and narration by inquiring into the semiotics of "China experiences" in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men.
The "China experiences" presented by Kingston and Tan emerge as narratives of recollection-- they have reconstructed narratives of experiences in China against the background of American society and within the context of American culture. Their China narratives emerge in the "other" cultural context informed by a complex process of translation, translocation, and transfiguration of the original experiences in China. In fact, China experiences are generally transfigured into "China narratives" only after they have lost their reference to China; thus they are related more to the present American situation than to their original context in Chinese society. The present American context provides meaning and determines the content of the China narrative. Only under such circumstances as loss of origin can China experiences emerge as a China narrative--a text reconfigured within other contexts. "China narrative," therefore, differs from China experiences and signifies a specific kind of self-reflexive discourse that is reinscribed within another cultural context to serve specific purposes: self-affirmation or self-negation, remembrance or repression. Eventually, in the novels of both Kingston and Tan, China as a geographical location is transliterated into a semiotic space of memory; China as personal experiences is translated into a cultural repository for reproduction; and, as a text, China is reconfigured into a variety of discourses: myth, legend, history, fantasy, films, and talk-stories.

I argue that in Kingston and Tan China becomes less a geographical location than a cultural extra-territory that the mothers have created in order to construct the subjectivity of their "American-made" daughters. Kingston's use of China narrative transcends its original contexts. Her translocation of Chinese mythology signifies cultural replacement and re-position that help her form a distinctive identity of her own. She creates her own mythology within the myth of Fa Mu Lan. That paradoxical borrowing emerges as a border issue of bridging instead of separating. She has to separate herself from her ancestral village and its traditions and enter the complex multicultural reality of her American experiences. Paradoxically, her fantasy of China has saved her from a totally depressing fate in America. The Chinese mythology functions as a semiotic empowerment in the process of identity formation.
Both Kingston and Tan write to reconstitute the American experience through the strategy of difference, highlighting the importance of difference within American cultures by challenging the status quo of American identity. Both argue for participating in cultural construction instead of remaining in a stereotypical position as temporary sojourners--alienated and displaced personalities. I believe that gesture challenges the very constitution of the Americanness of American culture and identity.
The China narrative in both Kingston and Tan serves as an undercurrent but central text that structures the present relationship between mothers and daughters because of the specific position it occupies in their lives. Therefore, the cross-cultural hermeneutics of China is conducted within that domestic space, between two generations in general and between the Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters in specific. As products of different cultures and histories, mothers and daughters abide by different cultural values and possess different modes of interpretation. In fact, they speak entirely different languages whenever they talk about China. "My mother and I spoke two different languages, which we did," Jing-Mei Woo says in The Joy Luck Club, "I talked to her in English, she answered back in Chinese" (23). The bilingual conversation turns into a game of translation; and in that translation, meaning is transfigured, displaced, and occasionally, lost. As Jing-Mei Woo says: "We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more" (27).
Both mothers and daughters constantly have to re-evaluate their respective China narratives that are grounded in entirely different cultural contexts, with different historical references and subject positions. For the mothers, China narratives inform a process of recollection (history or loss of it) whereas for the daughters, who have never been there, China narratives become a text of culture. In other words, China experiences as semiotic texts are reconstituted through a choice of two modes of discourse: history or culture. Eventually, China becomes a semiotic site where culture and identity are fought over, negotiated, displaced, and transformed. Instead of being a static ontological presence of a unitary category, China becomes a hermeneutic space for articulating identity and difference, a process that governs the cultural and historical reconstitution of the subjects.

MOTHER'S LOSS NARRATIVE: RECOLLECTING AND REPOSITIONING

In Tan's The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, loss functions as the dominant metaphor for the mothers' China narratives and the central code to decipher their existence. Each mother's story of her China experiences eventually develops into a semiotics of loss. Hence, moving to America means to them loss of identity and the reality of existence-being reduced to ghosts in alien territory. Even though mothers and daughters interpret China with different codes and from different positions, they are all overshadowed by a prevalent sense of loss. To quote Ying-Ying St. Clair in The Joy Luck Club: "We are lost" (64). The daughters seem to be lost between cultures whereas the mothers appear to have lost everything. Later in the same novel, Jing-Mei Woo says of her mother:

She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. (141)

In The Kitchen God's Wife, the China narrative is based on Winnie's painful experiences in China. In fact, the pain and suffering that are central to Winnie's recollection invite repression rather than recall. Her China narrative is subject to constant postponement and erasure to conceal the unspeakable experience and repressed memory. As Winnie says: "Now I can forget my tragedies, put all my secrets behind a door that will never be opened, never seen by American eyes" (81). Memory for Winnie embodies loss or pain; her China narrative essentially requires concealing instead of unfolding. Remembering inevitably entails pain and, eventually, desire for repression transforms into a necessity of repression. Winnie's experience of China is transfigured into a discourse of repression and her recollection of China experiences is translated into a loss narrative.
Within the American context, mothers' recollections of China experiences demonstrate more loss of memory than recall of the past. Forgetting, paradoxically, becomes the key to recollection. In The Joy Luck Club, Jing-Mei Woo complained of her mother's repeating the same Kweilin story to her in various versions. She said: "I never thought my mother's Kweilin story was anything but a Chinese fairy tale. The endings always changed. ... The story always grew and grew" (12). In The Kitchen God's Wife, Winnie, failing to recall her mother, provides us contradictory versions of her mother's image, believing her to be pretty, strong, educated, and coming from a good family. But later she admits that "maybe my mother was not pretty at all, and I only want to believe that she was" (120). That is why Winnie keeps repeating to herself: "Now I no longer know which story is the truth, what was the real reason why she left. They are all the same, all true, all false. So much pain in everyone. I tried to tell myself, The past is gone, nothing to be done, just forget it. That's what I tried to believe" (130).
Because of memory loss, there is simply no prior text present to initiate recollection in the first place. Hence, recollection radically alters itself in a creative process. "Loss narrative" becomes the central feature that characterizes the mother's China narrative. In short, China lies at an absolute distance from present remembrance, irretrievably lost beyond recall, made present only through a narrative that invites forgetting instead of remembering.
Ironically, China, lost or otherwise, functions as the locus that defines the mother's sense of reality. American experience, on the other hand, only characterizes her marginal existence and alien position. Mothers tend to have their home and identity centered elsewhere-in China. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston writes: "Whenever my parents said 'home, they suspended America" (99). Life in America, for her mother, is too disappointing to be real. The China experience, at least, can be transliterated into a body of ideas and vocabulary that gives her a unique sense of reality and presence. Hence, China narrative, which is both defining and defined by the mothers, becomes an imaginary text of China with a displaced mentality and exile consciousness, conditioned by both repression and nostalgia. Therefore, recollection reveals a process of negotiation with the past, constantly translating and revising the past into a narrative that grants reality to present situations. In a displaced context, the mothers have constructed China narratives for themselves and for each other.
Kingston's books often seem very American, even though they are about "China Men" or "Warrior Women" in China. Kingston acknowledged her books being more American than they are Chinese: "I felt that I was building, creating, myself and these people as American people, to make everyone realize that these are American people. Even though they have strange Chinese memories, they are American people. Also, I am creating part of American literature, and I was very aware of doing that, of adding to American liteature. The critics haven't recognized my work enough as another tradition of American literature" (1998: 72).
Lacking ontological stability and lost in constant recollection, China narrative is fabricated and manipulated in various forms. Ironically, the power of China narrative resides precisely in its "loss of reality." China becomes less a geographical location than a cultural extra-territory that the mothers have created in order to construct the subjectivity of their "American-made" daughters.
What is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?" (5-6). Kingston confronts the perplexing issue of China narrative within the context of her mother's talk-stories and her own fantasy, forbidden tales and her own dreams. About "a great power, my mother talking-story" (19-20), Kingston observes: "I couldn't tell where the stories left off and the dreams began, her voice and the voice of the heroines in my sleep" (19). "Real" China seems to lie at the distance of the inevitable loss.
China narrative in The Woman Warrior is, first of all, translated from personal experience into a narrative of recollection. Her mother's China narrative, based on the recollection of her direct experience of China, is transfigured into a "historical" text. That text is further reconfigured in the American context into her daughter's bicultural text that consists of recapitulation of her mother's talk-stories. Evidently, Kingston's knowledge of China is based on her (m)other's narratives and, eventually, Kingston's China narrative becomes a translation of a translation--in fact, a cultural reconstruction. That accounts for Kingston's reconstitution of her dead aunt's sexual identity according to Western code and American culture. In that instance, historical and cultural reconstruction of China is divided along bicultural views and bifocal perspectives through the power of memory and imagination.
In the 1986 interview with Paula Rabinowitz, Kingston talks about her experience of visiting China.

The trip made me see another use of memory or imagination or talk-story. Toward the end of The Woman Wariior, I wrote about the savage barbarians shooting off arrows with whistles on them. I wrote that, and then, not very much later, I saw one of those whistling arrows in a museum. I felt that I created it. I wrote it; and therefore, it appeared. (71)

The daughter's China narrative, based on the primary text of her mother's recollection, by way of myths, legends, talk-stories, informs the operation of a second order linguistic system. That is to say, the daughter's cognition of China seems always to be structured, mediated, and overdetermined by the semiotics of the (m)other tongue that serves as the first order symbolic signification. Therefore, the daughter's reconstruction of the China narrative is based on the signifier of the first linguistic order (her mother's narrative) that assumes a historical reference to China. The mother's narrative functions as the ultimate interpretative frame of the daughter's reconceptualization of China, actually, the absolute horizon of the daughter's cognition of China. Put more precisely, her mother's China narrative itself constitutes the absolute horizon of Kingston's recognition of China experiences.
Both mother and daughter develop multiple discourses to encode their existences. Both attempt to carve out a personal space in an alien culture that has limited and marginalized their lives, their heritage, and their language. Kingston, however, living on the edges of two communities, has to choose between her mother's home culture and the alien culture. The Woman Warrior dramatizes Kingston's growing up among contradictions and confusions between cultures and languages. Wendy Ho remarks: "Like her mother, the daughter negotiates the preservation and the subversion of aspects of traditional Chinese culture against the pressures of the mainstream of Western society. However, she is in a precarious position of her own: she is not Chinese enough for her mother, father and ethnic community and not American-feminine enough to find a home among the white 'ghost " (227).
Kingston's use of China narrative transcends its original contexts. Her translocation of Chinese mythology signifies cultural replacement and re-position that help her form a distinctive identity of her own. She creates her own mythology within the myth of Fa Mu Lan. That paradoxical borrowing emerges as a border issue of bridging instead of separating. She has to separate herself from her ancestral village and its traditions and enter the complex multicultural reality of her American experiences. Paradoxically, her fantasy of China has saved her from a totally depressing fate in America. The Chinese mythology functions as a semiotic empowerment in the process of identity formation.
Both Kingston and Tan write to reconstitute the American experience through the strategy of difference, highlighting the importance of difference within American cultures by challenging the status quo of American identity. Both argue for participating in cultural construction instead of remaining in a stereotypical position as temporary sojourners--alienated and displaced personalities. I believe that gesture challenges the very constitution of the Americanness of American culture and identity.
I wish to conclude with Kingston's comments on power of memory and imagination in creating Chinese American tradition:

I think that I found that China over there because I wrote it. It was accessible to me before I saw it, because I wrote it. The power of imagination leads us to what's real. We don't imagine fairylands. I've begun lately to realize that if I were to know you, as my friend, the best way is for me to imagine you at life so well that I sympathize with you. Well, that means that imagination is reaching toward a real person. Now, if I imagine something about you that is totally off the wall, that's not you, then my imagination is off. To have a right imagination is very powerful, because it'a bridge toward reality. (1998: 71)

Sources Cited