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Themes

In Woman Warrior, Kingston touches on several themes, scoping from the universal and cultural concepts. According to E.D. Huntley, several themes that arise in the novel include: “silence (both gendered and racially constituted); necessity for speech; the discovery of voice; the construction of identity and the search for self-realization; the mother-daughter relationship and the conflicts that it engenders; memory; acculturation and biculturalism; and cultural alienation.”^[15] Huntley compiles a list of scholar reviews on the themes and finds that they agree with his findings, particularly themes relating to immigrant communities and cross-cultural conflict. “Other reviewers reflect on Kingston’s handling of a theme that pervades the literature of diaspora and immigrant communities, the theme of cross-cultural conflict. Huntley also notes: "For reviewer Miriam Greenspan, Maxine Hong Kingston captures “the pain of an American-born child who inevitably reject the expectations and authority of her family in favor of the values of the new land” (Greenspan 108); Linda B. Hall describes the book as “remarkable in its insights into the plight of individuals pulled between two cultures” (Hall 191); and Susan Currier writes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that Woman Warrior is a personal narrative that represents Kingston’s effort “to reconcile American and Chinese female identities” (Currier 235)." ^[16] When asked about the cultural themes in her writing, Kingston responded, “I wonder if it just takes a lifetime or two to be an integrated person, so that you don’t have to think, at what point do I have to announce that I am a minority person or a woman or what? When I think back on when I was a young writer, I would wonder, ok now, when do I let everybody know that I’m Chinese American? Do I have to announce that?” ^[17]

The novel also employs several smaller themes that feature in one or two stories but support the overarching themes mentioned by Huntley.

No Name Woman

The first chapter of the novel ties together the themes of necessity and extravagance, silence and speech, and the reconciliation of Chinese and American culture. Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong writes about "the protagonist's struggle toward a balance between self-actualization and social responsibility... identified as 'Necessity' and 'Extravagance.'"^[18] The struggle between necessity and extravagance is embodied in the narrator’s mother’s sparse talk-story and the adultery of the narrator’s aunt: "My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by Necessity, a riverbank that guides her life.” ^[19] Wong writes that “The code of Necessity that Maxine's mother lives by is a legacy from her native land, where scarcity of resources has given rise to a rigid, family-centered social structure.”^[20] The aunt’s response to necessity-driven society is extravagance, embodied in her adultery:

Adultery is extravagance. Could people who hatch their own chicks and eat the embryos and the heads for delicacies and boil the feet in vinegar for party food, leaving only the gravel, eating even the gizzard lining - could such people engender a prodigal aunt? To be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was a waste enough.^[21]

As Wong points out, the parallels between the aunt’s predicament and the narrator’s own life in America are clear: “Whenever we did frivolous things, we used up energy; we flew high kites… After the one carnival ride each, we paid in guilt; our tired father counted his change on the dark walk home.”^[22]

The theme of silence is tied to the cross-cultural difficulties that the narrator faces throughout her own life. Kingston writes that “The Chinese I know hide their names; sojourners take new names when their lives change and guard their real names with silence.”^[23] The implication of silence goes beyond simply hiding names; it means the confusion of Chinese culture to first-generation Chinese Americans like the narrator. The narrator asks,

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?^[24]

But the silence of the narrator's family is also used as a curse against the adulterous aunt. The way in which the family is silent about her erases her from the family history and from life itself. It is this silence that creates a horrifying ghost out of the aunt that haunts the narrator: "My aunt haunts me--her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her"^[25]

Shaman

In “Shaman,” the focus shifts to the background of “Brave Orchid” and most explicitly addresses the topic of the Chinese immigrant in a nation of American spirits. From the “Sitting Ghost” at the To Keung School of Midwifery to the countless ghosts in America, Brave Orchid meets each and every one with a bold tenacity typical of her character. Kingston recalls a childhood filled with unusual food, and equates her mother’s strength with her ability to eat anything: “My mother could contend against the hairy beasts whether flesh or ghost because she could eat them.”^[26] After recoiling at even the mention of a Chinese monkey brain delicacy, Kingston swears that she will “live on plastic” despite the Chinese notion that “Big eaters win.”^[27] However, after the mother moves from China to the US, the number of ghosts seems to grow and her influence over them appears to wane. Because the mother refers to all Americans as ghosts (Urban Renewal Ghosts, Jesus Ghosts, Hobo Ghosts, Burglar Ghosts, etc), it can be inferred that she sees her stay in the foreign land as temporary, despite the time she and her family have actually resided there. China remains the one true reality in the mother’s mind, and she describes America as a “terrible ghost country, where a human being works her life away.”^[28] The mother’s struggle to live amongst ghosts, or people of a culture so alien to her, contrasts with the distance she feels in her relationship with her daughter.

At The Western Palace

In “At the Western Palace,” the “Western Palace” refers both to the far West, the Americas where Moon Orchid’s husband resides in a sort of regal peace, and to a story Brave Orchid tells about ancient Earth emperors who had four wives, one for each cardinal direction. The Empress of the West is said to be greedy and conniving, while the Empress of the East (Moon Orchid, according to Brave) is “good and kind and full of light” and must overthrow her opposite. The recurring theme of Asian vs. American culture comes up, and is crystallized in Moon Orchid’s inability to cope with Western practices of living and moving on. It also reintroduces the motif of the crazy woman, seen briefly in "Shaman" and to be explored in greater detail in "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe." In "Western Palace," the "crazy woman"--a title that is strictly and pointedly feminine--is Moon Orchid, who shut her windows and doors from letting in light and keeping "her spirit from leaking away," up until the day she dies.

Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe

In “A Song for A Barbarian Reed Pipe,” Kingston discusses the generational and cultural conflicts of an “American-Chinese [trying to become] American-feminine.”^[29] Raised in the ghost land of another nation, she imagines that Americans hear the noisy dialect of Chinese as “chingchong ugly” and instead whispers to her peers at school.^[30] However, Kingston soon rebels against her inability to communicate and comes to value verbal expression as a sign of sanity and normalcy. As she encounters more instances of madness in her neighborhood, she concludes that “...talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn’t explain themselves” (186). Kingston soon fears that she herself is crazy, and projects her hatred of own inability to speak onto her shy classmate. By physically abusing and threatening the mute Chinese girl, she symbolically rejects the binds of silence and spends the rest of the story pursuing her own form of articulation. Along with her newly found speech Kingston appears to simultaneously question Chinese tradition and the indirect way in which the Chinese speak, hiding both rituals from their children and truths from the American ghosts: “Lie to Americans. Tell them you were born during the San Francisco earthquake... Give a new name each time you get arrested; the ghosts won’t recognize you.”^[31] It is thus interesting to note that Kingston’s Woman Warrior is a collection of Kingston’s personal background, fact, and fiction, all presented as one memoir. As Kingston slowly discovers her voice, she must continually reconcile with gender issues, the restrictions of her Chinese culture, and the presentation of these lies and truths. It is clear that she is ashamed of her “pressed-duck voice”, and oppressed stereotypes of women constantly bombard her and her young female relatives. ^[32] Her grandfather screams “Maggots!” when he deems it necessary to acknowledge the women, and her father reminds her that “A husband may kill a wife who disobeys him.”^[33] Kingston resists putting herself into a state of submission by purposely presenting herself poorly to her “FOB” suitors. In a final look at her past, Kingston tells the story of Ts’ai Yen to represent the possibilities of two cultures coming together and “translating well.”^[34] Kingston as a writer identifies with the poetess Ts’ai Yen over the strength they find in expression. The women warriors can symbolically bridge the cultural gap between the barbarian (American/ghost) culture and their own with the power found in their unique voices.