Wednesday, 27th November 2002, 9:49pm
An opinion by: Rascal

 

The Woman Warrior - memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

Aptly subtitled "memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts", Hong Kingston has accomplished something really effective in her approach to her material - somehow walking a line between memory and fiction. This is appropriate in relating a miasma of unspoken rules and metaphorical explanations that governs much in Chinese culture and language (Excuse my enormous generalization, I'm speaking from my own 4 year experience in parts of South East Asia). The author grows up among the "ghosts", her mother's term for white Americans, as well as the ghosts of her culture of origin. I was impressed with the way she captured something so elementally different between her parents' culture and her school culture. An example is given in the final chapter "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe":

"From the configurations of food my mother set out, we kids had to infer the holidays. She did not whip us up with holiday anticipation or explain. You only remembered that perhaps a year ago you had eaten monk's food, or that there was meat, and it was a meat holiday...How can Chinese keep any traditions at all? They don't even make you pay attention, slipping in a ceremony and clearing the table before the children notice specialness. The adults get mad, evasive, and shut you up if you ask. You get no warning you shouldn't wear a white ribbon in your hair until they hit you and give you a sideways glare for the rest of the day... But I think that if you don't figure it out, it's all right. Then you can grow up bothered by neither 'ghosts nor deities.' 'Gods you avoid won't hurt you.' I don't see how they kept up a continuous culture for five thousand years."

It really is so like that!

The book is organized in five long chapters. Other chapter-stories are about the perished, shameful, un-name-able aunt back in China; the tale of the Woman Warrior, folk-hero and long-ago liberator of the Han people of China; "Shaman", about her mother's medical career in China, before she joined her husband in the U.S.; and the reunion of another aunt with her americanized husband, after 20 years separation. Good stuff.

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