The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975) By Maxine Hong Kingston

 

The Woman Warrior is the title story of Maxine Hong Kingston’s first novel. The book is comprised of five short stories which are part-memoir, part-folktale, part-immigrant history, and explores the role of women in a Chinese culture that changes dramatically over a relative short-period of history. Organizationally it covers three generations of women through a century-plus of cultural change, from Old China to California.

The Old China generation is told as talk-stories, verbal family histories passed down from mother to daughter, and then retold to granddaughter. While not perfectly linear, it encompasses the waning years of the Manchu dynasty through the civil war and the Japanese invasion. The section of the novel dealing with this era is titled No Name Women, making the argument that many/most Chinese families did not acknowledge girls or women with names because they were of little value as individuals – merely slave labor and incubators for all practical purposes.

The most memorable section in the book is a modern telling of the fantasy folklore of a girl who escapes her destiny as a wife who must work as a servant to her mother-in-law. At the age of three she goes to the mountains and is trained to be a White Tiger, a super-heroine who when she becomes an adult, will avenge the wrongs inflicted on her sex, and lead the peasants against the War Lords who have oppressed them.

The next generation story most closely qualifies as a memoir. It is told through the perspective of a mother who has immigrated to California during/after the civil war between the western backed oligarchs & missionaries, and the peasant backed Communists. While the story is interesting and compelling, it is also standard immigrant history. As a history buff, I have read many immigrant stories, by far the best is Filipino-American Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart published in 1946.

The Woman Warrior concludes with stories told by a young Chinese American girl who was the first of her siblings born in the U.S. and the trials and tribulations she goes through being culturally an American kid, living in a Chinese neighborhood with an old world Chinese cultural home environment. One of her memories covers a topic I had never read or considered before, about when Japanese American kids returning from wartime internment camps start showing up in Chinese-majority classrooms.

The book edition I read was the Library of America collection of her three novels and other writings.  Her second novel is titled China Men which I understand to be a male perspective history of these topics and is now on my reading list.

Recommendation:  Yes, though it is not necessarily an easy read. It hops back and forth between decades frequently, as well as switching from fiction to non-fiction without warning.