1940 She sold her first prose at the age of fifteen. It was called ‘I am an American’, and it appeared in The American Girl, the official Girl Scout magazine. She got $15 for it. ‘I worked out the idea that you don’t have to be white to be an American’, she told Michael Martin of National Public Radio 57 years later, after she had become the cynosure of gender and ethnic studies: Maxine Hong Kingston. ‘But all the time I was aware that both my parents were illegals and I had to be very careful to write in such a way that I can insist on our being American without giving away their illegal status.’1
Status is woven into better recognised themes of gender, migration and the succession of generations in Kingston’s first and best-known book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1977). The ‘ghosts’ are figures in Chinese folk tales, but also the white Americans around them, whose habits and manners the older Chinese find so difficult to fathom.
A challenging read, The Woman Warrior rewards close attention. Composed of five sections, written in styles ranging from ‘magical’ to conventional realism, it explores aspects of ethnicity, gender and the relationship between generations through the recurrent image of voice. ‘No Name Woman’ and ‘White Tigers’ are ‘talking stories’ – about a disgraced aunt of whom the family never speaks and the mythical woman warrior of the title. By taking on the personae of both characters, Kingston’s narrator restores the aunt’s voice and internalises the heroic role of the female avenger.
The last three parts develop the relationship between the narrator and her mother. ‘Shaman’ shows that her mother has had her own cultural struggles, fighting village convention in training as a midwife. From a limited-consciousness point of view (because she still knows very little of her mother’s past) the narrator in ‘At the Western Palace’ explores the stresses and dislocations of emigration. In ‘A song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe’ the narrative breaks out into the American demotic, importing a modern scepticism along with the accent.
Now the issue of voice becomes explicit, even literal. Her mother tells her that she cut her fraenum (the little vertical membrane under the tongue) when she was a child.
‘Why did you do that to me, Mother?’
‘I told you.’
‘Tell me again.’
‘I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language …’
‘But isn’t “a ready tongue an evil”?’
‘Things are different in this ghost country.’
Now the narrator is caught on the knife-edge between the two communities. ‘Sometimes I hated the ghosts [Americans] for not letting us talk’, she comments; ‘sometimes I hated the secrecy of the Chinese’. As for Chinese ‘tradition’, ‘even the good things are unspeakable’. Keeping silent about their culture:
the adults get mad, evasive, and shut you up if you ask. You get no warning that you shouldn’t wear a white ribbon in your hair until they hit you … They hit you if you wave brooms around or drop chopsticks or drum them.
It’s a brilliant demystification, leaving both narrator and reader mystified. ‘I don’t see how they kept up a continuous culture for five thousand years. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe everyone makes it up as they go along.’
1 ‘Maxine Hong Kingston Takes Pride in Mixed Heritage’, Tell me More, National Public Radio, 4 july 2007.