50books_poc | "Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among the Ghosts" by Maxine Hong Kingston (Reply)

Title: Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among the Ghosts
Author: Maxine Hong Kingston (Maxine Hong Kingston @ Wikipedia)
Genre: Nonfiction
Page Count: 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage International (reprint)

Note: If any of part of my review is inappropriate for this community, I will delete it at the moderator's requestion. Thank you.

Basic Premise: In a series of loosely interconnected stories, Kingston explores her childhood growing up in Stockton, the child of Chinese immigrants, navigating a world where her parents do not consider her completely Chinese, because she was not born in China - and thus not completely trustworthy - and the ghosts (white people) surround her, from Garbage Ghost to Social Services Ghost. She narrates through her experiences in school, her mother blisteringly powerful but incomplete "talk-stories", and the clashing and clanging of cultures and family that shaped her childhood.

The Positives: Kingston's prose approaches lyrical, though her stores require patience and a discerning reader. There is a magical quality to her memoirs that does not immediately reveal it's purpose or place, but rather demands to be accept on it's own terms.

Kingston has not penned an ordinary memoir with soft, charming stories of childhood. She lays out the rough areas, the contradictions, the unpleasantness without reservation. She does not hold back sorrow, regret, confusion, hurt. Nor does she make apologies. Instead she forces the reader to live silently inside her childhood and to experience what she experienced without padding anything for our comfort or convenience. We are meant to feel the harsh realities of racial tensions and intergenerational strife, of the clash between the Americanized children and their parents, between tradition and adaptation. There is no softening the blow, and I appreciated this as a reader.

Kingston does not attempt to make Chinese culture and traditions palatable. She does not justify or apologize for anything, even the attack on her own aunt in China which lead her to commit suicide and take her newborn baby with her to the bottom of the family well.

This is a very real peek into a family and their traditions that I think may be strangely identifiable for many people, even if they are not Chinese or cross-cultural, or even immigrants. Not because of the surface, but because so many of the struggles and strains that Kingston feels are ones that we all feel in growing up, especially if you grow up in a household that does not resemble the widely accepted norms, and in trying to mediate between home and outside, between what is real there and what is real outside.

Sometimes the text feels fantastical, almost fictional, as Kingston describes her childhood thoughts and fantasies, the way she navigated the world of Stockton armed with half-finished "talk-stories" and traditions that no one will explain, only punish you for breaking.

It's a fascinating book and I found it an eye opening, heart searing experience that left me with a lot of questions, a lot of thoughts, and an oddly satisfying silence inside my head like the first moment of endorphins after a bad injury. As Fan Mu Lan had her back carved with her family's names, so does this book carve itself into the reader. It's painful, but it leaves some rather useful scars.

The Negatives: The amazon.com review of this book starts out by calling it "pungent, bitter", and I have to wonder if the pungency comes from the perceptions of a white reviewer. What is negative about this book is not necessarily a flaw or bad. It is not shaped to be convenient, especially not to someone who is mono-cultural and white in America.

If you are a white American person (as I am) approaching this book, you may have to go the extra mile to open yourself to the shifting and shaking of culture underneath your feet. I certainly did.

This book will require patience on the part of the reader. Kingston does not structure her memoirs in the typical way. She doesn't start by laying all the facts out in front of the reader very daintly with dates of birth and death. She doesn't give the audience an outside, factual, dated framework to base the stories around. Instead, she forces the audience to navigate back and forth in time, not sure what comes first and what comes last.

She also does not give a clearly directed narrative. There is no "and when I was five", there is no obviously forward motion or completed thesis in her works. It seems as though she starts and stops sometimes, going from one story to another without completing either.

The biggest hang up I had was in getting through the second part "White Tigers", because she began with a story based in her own reality and then wandered off into the myth of Fan Mu Lan (yes, the loose basis for the Disney movie, blech!), narrating as if she herself were that woman. I found myself as a reader becoming exasperated. I sighed "I thought this was about her childhood, not some fictional landscape. If I wanted to read mythology, I'd have done that!". I was tempted to put the book down as some messy, unnavigable disaster and move on to something more accessible.

I think a lot of readers will be thrown by the lack of clear, accessible structure. She does not build a memoir that is meant for the easy enjoyment of Reader Ghosts, I would urge my fellow Ghosts to keep reading and read the entire thing.

I think Kingston is smarter than I gave her credit for in this, because in giving us this laid out, nearly cinematic experience of Fan Mu Lan, the woman warrior, she lets us inside the power of the "talk-story" that has shaped her life so powerfully. It is not until you understand that in a very real way, this story did happen to her, that it was much a part of her as the laundry or the Chinese School or the girl she bullied, that you realize that you have to read that story. You have to feel the fantastic heights of it, and then come back down to earth with the narrator, to a depressing, dull, confusing, unclear, unstructured reality.

This is not a pleasure book. Some books are meant to be read just for fun. This book is not about fun, and in a way, it's not even about the reader, especially a non-Chinese reader. This book is about the author, about her own "talk-stories", about putting endings on the stories that were begun for her by her mother. If you want to try to read this book for enjoyment, it's going to thwart you and well it should.

Read this book when you are prepared to listen, when you're prepared for it to hurt, for it to burn away old notions and sear away ignorant bliss.

CoC Score: 9.5 Usually I would give a book like this a 10. It is a book by a CoC about their experiences, and focuses a great deal on how race and racial interactions played a part in her life.

I withhold a half point for two reasons. One, for the use of the word "negro" in the book. I checked the original date of publication, and it said 1970. I'm not sure how acceptable that word was in 1970, I imagine it was beginning to fall out of use and terms such as "black" and "African-American" were considered more polite. I also imagine some of that is highly regional.

While I don't know that Kingston was even being prejudiced at all in the term or that I would even ask the memoir be edited in further editions, I do know that the word can hurt deeply. More than that, the author mentions once or twice, in passing, "how the negro kids were" and describes them as loud and tough with the kind of distanced scorn and fascination with which she describes Ghosts (white people).

I realize she's going off childhood perception, and not all readers may find this offensive. Some may find it easy to forgive a little girl internalizing the racism around her for not just her own group but others, but I feel I can't in good conscience assign a ten for this and for the following reason.

The other reason is the incident where Kingston's aunt become paranoidly afraid of Mexicans and convinced that they are out to get her and evil. Of course, this is part of her own mental break down, but it is a form of prejudice by one group against the other, and it might be hard for readers to digest, because there are plenty of people even in 2009 who think that Mexicans are violent and dangerous. That also might be hurtful - in a bad way - to readers of this book.

I will note that these are both minor things, said in passing in one or two sentences or in brief paragraphs. They are not main themes or even underlying subtext in the book, hence only half a point being taken.

GLBT Score: 0. No GLBT characters in this book. Fan Mu Lan does crossdress as a male soldier, but I don't know if I feel that counts as it is not an expression of sexuality as a practical matter. I certainly don't think it encompasses the sort of continuum the term "GLBT" is meant to describe. All mentions of sex and romance in the book are heterosexual, but they are minimal. Sex itself is a very mysterious, scarely discussed topic in this book, heterosexual or otherwise. There are no overtly anti-GLBT themes, subtexts, or passages in this book, however. As a queer-identifying person myself, I had no problem with this book from that stance.

Gender Score: 10. The author is female and she focuses greatly on women and women's issues from China to Stockton. Everything from sexual repression to the devaluing of daughters to the old legends of female heroines is discussed. There is a lot of talk about how Chinese tradition is not always fair to women, and even some discussion of the changes that Communism brought for women during the Cultural Revolution. A great feminist text, certainly, and well done, including the parts about the words for "I" and "slave" for women being the same in Chinese. I would recommend this book as much as feminist study (or some form thereof) as a cultural one.