Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior"

            While reading The Woman Warrior, Hong Kingston’s word choice struck me. For example, in the recounting of “White Tigers,” after the woman warrior leads her army to Peiping and beheads the emperor, they attack Mongols “en route” to visit the Great Wall. This French expression inserted into a Chinese tale pulled me out of the narrative for a moment. My immediate reaction was to criticize such discordant language, but soon realized that this was the author’s attempt to reify the central theme of the novel: the anxiety induced by attempting to reconcile two distinct cultures. 

Specifically, Hong Kingston recounts the experience of immigrant children navigating the culture and language of their parents’ homeland and those of their surroundings. The wisdom supplied by their parents does not translate onto their new experience. For instance her incomprehension of her mother’s explanation for why she tastes sugar in her mouth when she has not eaten any (that her grandmother in China is sending her candy) emphasizes her disconnect with Chinese legends. This anecdote leads to the conclusion that to her parents, “home” meant China, a word that “suspended America." The inclusion of motherline symbols (umbilical cords, midwives, women storytellers, string, circles, loops and hoops) further emphasize the tragedy of a mother not able to teach her daughter how to live and survive. Instead of retelling the woman warrior stories to empower her daughter, she uses them to dismiss her victories. Therefore when Hong Kingston earns straight A’s, her mother retorts that it is nothing compared to a girl who saved her village. From the first line of the novel, she tells her daughter directly “you must not tell,” and symbolically has cut her tongue. In order to find her voice, Hong Kingston must break free from matriarchal control, beginning a new motherline that will provide strength to her daughters.