I sincerely hope I am not the only one who read this wonderful book. Prof. Hungerford thinks it is all about exploring Identity, but for me it was a book that had especial power because it was so absorbing and sympathetic. My own background is very far from Hong Kingston's, but her world became immediate and compelling for me. I particularly loved the actual "woman warrior" segment, which was like reading a beguiling and inspiring dream.

I was also pretty fascinated with Hong Kingston's play on imagination versus reality, and madness versus sanity. She linked those inquiries. And she strongly suggested that madness/imagination may be preferable to reality/sanity.

I've read The Woman Warrior several times since I was first introduced to it in college. Judging by the underlined passages and marginal notes, I first read it in one of my women's studies classes, which makes Prof. Hungerford's lecture about identity and authenticity interesting material - it seems that I was reading this for insight into the role of women in a particular culture. And I don't remember, the first time that I read it and discussed it in class, whether we discussed things that I've come to realize over years of deepening my own engagement with the story, like the unreliability of the narrator, which is highlighted by the way that the story doesn't mark its shifts between "fiction" and "reality," such that it's impossible to know what's truly "real." I love this dreamlike quality about the book -- it highlights that the reader is dependent on the author's interpretation of events. It puts the reader in the role Maxine (the character, borrowing Hungerford's distinction between the narrator and the author) occupies with respect to her mother's stories - fascinated, but frustrated.

A big part of the reason I enjoy this book, despite everything that dates it, is that it makes such a strong case for the importance of stories and storytelling. Another part is that the stories it tells are women's stories - and stories about women who might otherwise be judged insignificant or unimportant. And it's not a one-sided narrative - for all of the frustration and disappointment and difficulty Maxine feels about her relationship with her mother, she tells the story of her medical studies and her confrontation with a ghost in school with great respect, for instance. Hungerford talks about "making the case for fiction" and for me, by telling those stories and talking about the significance of storytelling, The Woman Warrior is significant to supporting that case.

Great comments, Eva.

Is it really dated? I know the book was written awhile ago but it felt very fresh and contemporary to me.

I also agree that the dichotomy between Maxine's mom's low view of girls versus her own groundbreaking history, the divide between the stories of weak and violated women versus stories of strong and powerful women, and the contrast between the two sisters at the end of the novel, were all powerful illustrations of the meaningfulness of stories in exploring women's place(s) and status in the world.

Bearwife, I thought identity was key to understanding what was happening. Not just self-identity, but the roles and identities we apply to others in our lives. We define ourselves in how we relate to others and the role we play in the world around us, yes?

I found the book incredibly sad, moreso as it progressed. The author comes across as damaged by her childhood, the balance between her two cultural identities and her ongoing relationship with her mother. Having dated a number of Chinese-American women in my teens and 20's who had similar difficulties finding their own way and figuring out their own roles in each, disparate American and Chinese world they were living in, I found it all too believable. Her mother's view of America and American culture, twisted a bit through mistrust, fear and misunderstanding also struck me as very authentic.

And yet... and yet. On my first read-through I didn't pick up on any of what Professor Hungerford had regarding Ms. Hong Kingston as an unreliable narrator. But after reading the lecture, I read the book again and started to realize that there were many places in the book where we were being told a version of events that was hearsay but not witnessed. Not only that, but now having read the lecture, I question whether Ms. Hong Kingston's interpretation of events was accurate, either. Very insidious. :)

I started the book but really am in the first major section still. I appreciate the comments but am going to wait on the lecture until I'm done reading. Some of the contents remind me of an interesting parallel to be found in Life of Pi.

It was written in 1975, I believe. Didn't feel dated to me but then again, I'm in my late 30's.

It probably feels dated to me because I've read so many books, stories and essays by or about women finally expressing their anger at their upbringing from the 1970s. I instinctually group The Woman Warrior among them, but it stands way out from the pack.

Eva, that makes sense. The book definitely fits into that theme.

Interestingly enough, when I first put together the FPP announcement on Metatalk for this chat, I came across a number of references to "antifeminist" backlash regarding the book. Frank Chin in particular has attacked Kingston for "putting down Asian men while implicitly begging for white acceptance." (He has quite a few gripes with Kingston and Amy Tan.)

I'm halfway through the book, and I love it so very much. It really does seem to me like a classic identity quest, like the narrator is trying to talk-story her way to herself and what it means to be herself in the here and now of the novel. The fact that it's a girl on the quest (instead of the typical orphaned or near orphaned princely male of most fairy tales) makes the journey all the more difficult, treacherous, and worthwhile.

I've always loved unreliable narrators, and the fact that this narrator is retelling stories (told with obvious biases) and shifting between story and *her* story with no real distinction makes her much more believable and real to me. I'm also really enjoying the descriptive details - the sound of turtles banging in the pot, the smell of skunk not covered up by a bag of candy, the heat of the laundry, her mother's voice shouting out the ghost stories and the way the chills would move on her skin. This is a book that engages all the senses. With that said, I'm going to get back to reading...

Yes, I read the Chin critiques, and I wondered if he can be serious? Sexism is still alive and well in the US, as all of us know, but I have to say, from spending a fair amount of time at Asian cultural and social events, that it is particularly alive and well for Asian American women. I'm struck yet again every time I go, for example, to a Seattle Asian Chamber of Commerce event, at the shameless way women are presented as vapid dolls, or simply ignored in favor of men. I think Tan -- who is not the writer Hong Kingston is, imho -- and Hong Kingston really hit the mark on how hard it is to be an Asian American woman and balance these strongly conflicting and very contradictory messages from the two cultures.

I do see what you mean about the 1970s, Eva. I read your comment and thought immediately of The Women's Room. Though again, I'm more wowed by Kingston's writing ability.

Zarq, I think the unreliability is so deliberate in this book, so much a part of Kingston's interest in stories and how they affect us and move us . . . true or not. I suspect she would argue that fiction is more powerful than truth, in fact. (Maybe that's why this book reminds you of Life of Pi, Miko, which in many ways got its power from persuading us to buy into the likely fictional tale.) Just think about the contrast between the "real" story of what happened when the Chinese wife went to confront her American husband and what the book initially tells us happened.

Sadly, I didn't have time to read the book (surprise, surprise), but I just wanted to pop in and say that after reading what you all wrote here (unreliable narrator, check; authenticity, check; identity, check = themes I love!), I'm definitely going to prioritise it for my non-textbook reading, as it sounds like just the sort of thing I'd enjoy. So thanks, and sorry I can't participate in a more well, read, capacity.

I truly hope you get a chance to join us as well for the next thread, iamkimam. These books have been very worthwhile thus far. And the Hungerford lectures range from interesting to truly illuminating.

I wanted to ask everyone about something I wondered about while reading this book and again when I was reading lriG rorriM's excellent comment -- so textual! -- how do some authors conjure up this level of detail about sounds, smells, touch, and sight? I don't have vivid memories like this from my childhood, and in any event many of these details are so minute they tend to be hard to describe even if they just happened. Is it all just expert story telling, or exceptional recall, or a combination of both? Note, also, that we don't get this kind of expressive and memorable detail in the explicitly fantastic parts of the book about the woman warrior.

I definitely agree that The Woman Warrior stands out among the books I group it with, bearwife. Hong Kingston's metaphors and use of detail are skillful, and blurring the boundaries between "story" and "reality" the way she does isn't easy to pull off. I love your question about how she conjures up the detail - some of my childhood memories extremely sensate and clear, but very few. I think it's a combination of vivid imagination (based, but not entirely reliant, on memory) and a lot of work choosing the right words to evoke the full experience as economically as possible.

Thanks for the links to some of the Chin conflict. I looked into that a little bit after I read the lecture, as I hadn't heard about it before. And my (admittedly, shallowly informed) opinion is that I don't find Chin's criticism that strong. It put me in mind of some of the critiques leveled against Deepa Mehta's films, which boil down to "it's a betrayal of your culture to air its dirty laundry in public." I would find the argument stronger if it was criticizing people who read or teach the book as a critique of Chinese culture - I think the culture that Hong Kingston is reacting to is more particular: the culture of American children of Chinese immigrants in the mid-20th century. I don't see a yearning toward or an idealization of white American culture in the book, either - she doesn't seem very happy with American notions of femininity, though her response to them doesn't carry the emotional weight of her reactions to expectations of Chinese women.

GREAT choice of text! This is my favourite book. I read it every year and dream of meeting Kingston.

I think the bicultural/identity politics that Hungerford discusses are aspects of the text that reinforce how necessary it is to understand our parents' songs, but learn to sing our own. The story of T'sai Yen and the last words of the book ["It translated well"] show how all filial journeys require a kind of translation process. Julia Kristeva said something like "it is only by translating the mother that we live: orphans but creators, creators but abandoned" and I reckon this is a book that really takes that line. Maxine has to leave home after finding her voice and yelling out all her anguish to her mother. She finds a way to translate her mother at the end of the book. Actually this happens from the first chapter, and throughout the book. There's a reconfiguring of the matrilineal stories into Kingston's own versions is part of the "translation" - there are dialogic interventions, metafictional questionings, doubt, re-telling throughout. It is only in the final chapter that the mother and daughter join up their stories "the beginning is hers, the ending mine" - to me this is the way of adult life. The beginning is the mother, the ending is our own.

We tend to see texts with women as protagonists as speaking very much towards representations of female experiences; just as we tend towards seeing 'minority' protagonists as representations of marginalised experiences. Hungerford emphasises the exploration of cultural identity in TWW and she does a good job of exploring this way of reading the text. I think it's a good departure point as it is the most obvious way of perceiving Maxine's journey, especially given the context of its production in the 1970s. But it is a remnant "ghettoised" position that ignores possibilities afforded to other texts which can be whatever they are about if they are by white men. That's why I think Frank Chin is so frustrating. He wants there to be authority in Kingston's Chinese-ness, something that we wouldn't interrogate about Eurocentric figures to the same, if any, degree. Kingston has also been criticised for exoticisation of China by various critics. I think that she "others" both legendary China from filial memories supplied by her relatives, and the America of concrete and plastic, a 'terrible ghost country, where a human being works her life away.' In a way, it makes sense that she lived for many years in Hawaii - between the two monoliths of her imagination and experience.

[I've read a lot of Chin's stuff and yes, I agree with EvaDestruction that he's about the 'airing of dirty laundry in public' which happened a great deal amongst minorities during civil rights activist years.* Black women were also criticised for the same thing. His criticisms of Kingston's use of mythology illustrate, as Hungerford points out, his lack of understanding of both the genre of the work [autobiography] and the underpinning investigation of convergence of culture/stories/ identity formation that the text addresses as a central project. Perhaps he also does not understand the growing currents of post modernism which I think deeply inform Kingston's work. She doesn't even accept her own constructs of story either: "His version of the story may be better than mine because of its bareness, not twisted into designs..." and she uses a symbol of an outlawed knot to describe her storytelling.]

But - I wanted to come into say that the major thing I get from this book is about the growth of an artistic sensibility. The adult identity upon which Maxine rests at the end of the book is that of artist. It is conceived through texts, through a self that is textually inscribed. My perception of Metafilter is that it has a lot of writers and creators converging across the grey, blue n green. I wonder, metachatters, does this book speak to you in this way?

For me, every chapter of the book has a logic in that it processes from a perceived 'silence' to 'voice' - time after time, Maxine describes her desire to take up the Woman Warrior's sword, symbolically imagined as a pen, writing, utterance. [Hungerford points out with links to Joyce.] Sidonie Smith wrote a great essay about the journey of the writer in TWW in "Filiality and Woman's Autobiographical Storytelling" that I read recently. I'm glad that Hungerford lingered on this idea - the artistic self and its development and takes the text out of the realm of identity politics and readings.

*A side note on the misogyny revealed by Kingston, that so pisses Frank Chin off: it is interesting to consider the father figure in TWW. Kingston allows us to see that Tom Hong gave up his family inheritance (“three of the brothers took land, and the youngest, my father, chose an education” p15) to become “the thin scholar” (p110) who provides his writing desk for his children to explore and use: “pen trays and little drawers, enough so that the children could each have one or two for their very own” (p113). His acceptance and encouragement of Brave Orchid's individuality and creativity (“everywhere there were owls with great hunched shoulders and yellow scowls. They were a surprise for my mother from my father…” p85) reveals a mode of conjugal life that encourages female creativity and individuality of expression.

Wow, honey-barbara, what a wonderful comment. You just illuminated several parts of this book that I simply had missed. Reading your comment felt like pulling the cords on light bulbs and seeing details where there had only been shadow. I had highlighted the text of "His version of the story may be better than mine because of its bareness, not twisted into designs..." and the motif of the outlawed knot, thinking it was a reference to the real/unreal and sane/insane themes in the book. I did not spot the post modernist overtones. And I totally missed the references to song and translation as discussions of artistry and inheritance, as well as the reference to both parent's legacy to Kingston via, e.g., the writing desk and pen as well as the common parental heritage of education.

No wonder you like this book so much. It is beautifully written but there is even more there.

Aw thanks Bearwife. I was really excited to see it included in the book club. It's a book that withstands many readings and gives something new each time.

I love this line: "Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear" [82]. There's so many beautifully written descriptions - probably what Hungerford notes in the theatricality of Maxine's black drawings that represent a stage curtain. There's such deft use of language - changing points of view, great use of humour, skillful decentring of the narrator [in "At the Western Palace" for example] and her characterisation of Brave Orchid in particular is fantastic. Hats off to writers and their craft!

Gah, there's so much to say on this book. I wrote about it for my post grad studies, and did a few lectures on it - taking up the idea of differentiation and the formation of an adult identity - especially as a woman.

Please keep going if you would, honey-barbara. What a treat to get such deeply considered comments. The joy of a book like this is the ability to keep unpacking it (to borrow from your quoted Kingston line.)

I've been thinking about EvaDestruction's comment about the dated-ness she [?] experiences. Postmodernism has gifted us with narratives that problematise and unpick dominating discourses of patriarchy, colonialism, hegemony, identity - this is one of them. It's also apparent that the growth of popular psychology manuals informed by Jung in California in the 70s is reflected in TWW. Again, this is getting to be old hat for us now - we've heard about it, read about it, got therapy ourselves without real stigma, and words like 'archetypes' 'separation anxiety' 'mirroring' 'differentiation' 'individuation' 'shadow' the language of dream analysis, etc are increasingly available. So, thanks ED for making me ponder that.

Some random thoughts:

I probably read a lot into her dedication of this book to her parents. In No Name Woman she mentions 'ancestral help' and TWW strikes me as very much concerned with filial identity and how our families inscribe us [like the tattooing on Fa Mulan's body in White Tigers.] As you said Bearwife, I agree that there are dual inheritances from Maxine's parents who both institute a world view that, while problematic, privileges education and expression. Education is so important in TWW and I've noticed how much stories are presented, like in No Name Woman, to have a didactic, educating function - even if they are resisted, revoked, scrambled or denounced.

In terms of my feeling about the book representing a process of adult differentiation and individuation, I guess I am taken by the way TWW starts with a teen who, at menarche, is taken into adult conspiracy with her mother about sex, blood, maternity, community, secret knowledge. The 'problem' of sex/desire in No Name Woman is one we all face during adolescence. The use or misuse of sexual energy is symptomatic of competing desires to be an individual and to conform, and thus be protected by, a strictly codified/yet muting, community.

Menarche is reconfigured in White Tigers, as a biological detail that chiefly signals a new ability, not one that has to be controlled or feared [p35]. I like the Taoist [emphasis on balance, mental and bodily control, meditation, oneness with nature] and Jungian elements of White Tigers too. The anima and animus principles of guidance in adult life. Gender does not demarcate social life as both man and woman cook, hunt, train, teach and guide. [Although not so later, when in resuming daily life, the girl must efface her gender] They train her for a life long dedication and discipline of mindfulness, which is harnessed to bring about the villagers' revenge. There's lots of Buddhist detail there too [again, Frank Chin, think harder about her use of mythopoesis - Kingston isn't writing historiography!] The

The really poignant thing about White Tigers [hell, the whole book] is the desperation Maxine feels to find the way to be accepted and loved for who she is, a girl, a woman, a child who has value - who won't be sold, or enslaved, or hostage. Gender is a key area obviously, but the anxiety to be loved, to find approval and delight in our parental influence is something that really stands out. When she imagines her parents in White Tigers they are delighted, proud, respectful of her - this is such an archaic need.

Discarded women are a special anxiety for Brave Orchid who fears her husband taking up a new wife, and for Maxine. She desires independence, but constantly fears abandonment - a la the slave girls left or sold by their families which she fears will be her fate if they go back to China. The fixation with what can happen if you do follow social constrictions [Moon Orchid: mad, dead in an asylum] and if you don't [No Name Woman: suicided, or, unstated, probably murdered by her family] is a tension. Brave Orchid, even with her formidable, flawed, eccentric and often inscrutable presence, is a viable model for Maxine. The Shaman chapter is the most illustrative of the journey towards adult differentiation when Maxine acknowledges her matrilineage: "I am really a Dragon, as she is a Dragon, both of us born in the dragon years. I am practically a first daughter of a first daughter." "my totem, your totem". The mother also acknowledges that her daughter must live at a distance from her and lets her go.

I found these two quotes in my copy of TWW, that I must have scribbled down along the way:

"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately. And I must also consider her - this unknown woman - as a descendent of all those women whose circumstances I have been glancing at and see what she inherits of their characteristics and restriction..."
(Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 80)

"Femaleness, not ethnicity, is at the heart of the story"
(Sharon Ott, Berkeley Repertory artistic director of the theatre production of The Woman Warrior in 1994)

I'm all for a feminist reading of this text, it's a great way of seeing the novel/autobiography. I just happen to like the Jungian/psychoanalytic one more as I continue to re-read TWW.

Another thought:

Do you think that Brave Orchid is conflated with Fa Mulan? I got a bit preoccupied in a recent re-reading with details such as the sea bird painted on the boat [and the ideographs in Brave Orchid's text book "lifted their feet, stretched out their wings, and flew like blackbirds"], and the bird that leads Fa Mu-Lan to her destiny; "she had been pared down like this before"; the quilt with "tiny satin triangle, a red heart to protect my mother at the neck" and "tiny quilted triangle, red at its centre" that Fa Mu-Lan had sewn for her baby. The exorcism of ghosts; the journey back to family after spiritual and intellectual growth period, to be celebrated by the family: "she rode home carried an a sedan chair, she had gone away ordinary and come back miraculous, like the ancient magicians who came down from the mountains"

In a similar vein, Maxine goes on her own journey to Berkeley, comes home "I wrap my American success around me like a private shawl" and takes up the swordswoman, and therefore symbolically her mother's, legacy in her writing: What we have in common are the words at our backs." It is also tangentially hinted that she has a husband and child in At the Western Palace, but she doesn't linger at all on this maternal adult identity.

Sorry, I have rambled a bit :/

The really poignant thing about White Tigers [hell, the whole book] is the desperation Maxine feels to find the way to be accepted and loved for who she is, a girl, a woman, a child who has value - who won't be sold, or enslaved, or hostage. Gender is a key area obviously, but the anxiety to be loved, to find approval and delight in our parental influence is something that really stands out.

Yes, quoted for truth. This is one of the most resonant aspects of this book. And in my view one mark of a great book is the sense of connection across all boundaries between the author and reader. This particular theme also echoes the struggle to find an equilibrium between individualism and family/community in many of the other books in this course's syllabus. It is in some ways a particularly American problem. America celebrates individuality, and is in fact built on it, but also has a culture strongly dependent on conformity, community, and family.

And yes, I absolutely think that birds -- and whether they are caged or free -- are deliberately woven into Kingston's stories of the women (and, I think, her dad) who break away from the usual social constraints. Most certainly I think Brave Orchid -- so well named! -- mirrors Fa Mu-Lan. And Kingston herself mirrors these women who fly free, at least for a time, of the narrow life path laid out before them at birth.