1995 Visions of the Self
De Paul University
Charles Strain
Grade: A
Analytical Essay
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior takes the reader on a “haunted” journey with a Chinese-American girl growing up in California, working in her family’s laundry. Her burgeoning sense of self struggles to make sense of family ghosts that torment the spirit. Metaphors and images serve not only to describe but to take the reader right along with her beneath the skin, offering a glimpse beyond the social mask that would normally hide her true self.
Frequently bombarded by messages that attempt to silence, forget, and deny violence against women, from both the Chinese and American cultures, she rises above refusing to be silent.
She shares her torturous girlhood, a girlhood where talk stories (oral history) from her mother about ghosts serve to brand frightening ideas into her emerging sense of self. In the very first words of her book, her mother speaks of silence about the violence, “You must not tell anyone, … what I am about to tell you” (Kingston 1989, p. 1).
Her mother then proceeds to tell her the gut-wrenching story about her forgotten and denied aunt in China who got pregnant by one of the villagers. Her fellow villagers destroyed her family’s home and livestock. ” … hands flattened across the panes, framed heads, and left red prints” (Kingston 1989, p. 4), red with chicken blood. The image of bloody hand prints on window panes is a descriptive visual metaphor for a fractured, hemorrhagic sense of self, resulting from hearing of her aunt’s anguish. Anguish to be continued even after death. Kingston expresses her outrage at the abhorrent event sarcastically with a common American slang phrase, she hopes the man who got her aunt pregnant “wasn’t just a tits-and-ass man” (Kingston 1989, p. 9).
Fa Mu Lan is an image of a swordswoman, the woman warrior empowered to rescue Chinese people; despite a Chinese woman’s disempowered status, there is still an expectation of being responsible and powerful in taking care of her family and community. “We are going to carve revenge on your back”, her father told Fa Mu Lan (Kingston 1989 p. 34). A metaphor for their culture’s taking its pain out on women. One wince at reading about them carving “oaths and names” (Kingston 1989 p. 34) in her back whether the carving was actually physical or metaphorical. The pained self, whatever part of the self, is still deeply carved. The image of the wounds and their horror is imprinted upon the reader’s mind through her eloquent verbiage. Her mother’s talk stories were, what we might describe as nightmare stories, stories ” … to grow up on” (Kingston 1989, p. 5).
Kingston’s (1989) mother told her that she, “… pushed my tongue up and sliced the frenum” (Kingston 1989, p. 164), so that she would not be tongue-tied. Despite this metaphorically curative procedure, Kingston (1989) describes, “A dumbness–a shame–still cracks my voice in two, even … to say `hello’ (165) and “A telephone call makes my throat bleed and takes up that days courage” (165). One gets a deep sense of how difficult it is for her to speak.
Kingston’s (1989) poignant images include other types of sensory violence. The following are descriptive of her auditory torture: “… a sound so high it could drive you crazy” (73), “… the sound tears the heart” (73), “…the sound of energy amassing” (73), “… tortured people screaming, and the cries of their relatives who had to watch” (73). She also combined the visual with the sense of smell, “… wood dripping with blood, … the stench was like corpse exhumed for its bones too soon” (Kingston 1989, p. 75).
Kingston (1989) provides visibility and understanding of Chinese-American women and of historic Chinese women whose names and existence were forgotten, denied, or silenced. Her artful words paint the violent, soul-abrading images of her mother’s talk stories and their profound complexity within her intimate selfhood’s development. The student of selfhood is offered the opportunity to develop a sensitivity toward a Chinese-American woman’s inner world. Her work provides a vision and a role model for other women struggling to speak despite societally imposed demands for silence. Kingston’s profoundly moving story is a triumphant refusal to be forgotten, denied, or silenced.
In her last chapter, she vividly portrays the main theme of her work through an ancient grandfather’s voice, “Maggots! Where are my grandsons? I want grandsons” said at every meal as he looked into six sisters’ faces (Kingston 1898, p. 191). “And here I was in the United States paying two hundred dollars for you” (Kingston 1989, p. 83). “I am useless, one more girl who couldn’t be sold” (Kingston 1989, p. 53). Kingston reveals the message imprinted on her spirit, first of all, feeling she wasn’t “good enough” to bring financial and the guilt her mother infringed on her mother told her about older girls being given away for free during the war in China.