Maxine Hong KingstonCritiques

Skillfully crafted but not my cup of tea. The beginning and the end were required for a writing class and I can see the value in looking at the techniques she used to insert imagination but I skimmed much of it and couldn't wait to get back to my own reading of [b:H is for Hawk|18803640|H is for Hawk|Helen Macdonald|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1394343876s/18803640.jpg|26732095]

A haunting story of a Chinese American trying to make sense of her heritage and confusing family history. She uncovers a story so powerful that finally allows her to accept her position in life.

Another one I remember reading some years ago, without now recalling its details. But I do remember it was enjoyable.

Kingston is a master at weaving first, second, and third voices into a memoir filled with anicient Chinese folklore and cautionary tales about womanhood. I felt a lot of sadness in Woman Warrior. The tragedy starts early in as Kingston describes her mother, a former Chinese doctor, telling a horrifying tale about an aunt giving birth to a sexless child in a pigsty and then committing suicide with that baby; drowning together in a well. There was such shame in this pregnancy, "To save her inseminator's name she gave a silent birth" (p 14). So much contradiction in culture! There is a crime to being born female and yet there is the story of the fierce woman warrior, the legend of the female avenger. My favorite parts were when Kingston addresses the difference between American-feminine and Chinese-feminine.

This is an extraordinary book. It is a memoir of Kingston's childhood and adolescence, interspersed with Chinese legends featuring women.

There is no question that it requires committed reading, especially at the beginning where the line is blurry between reality and "talk-stories", or cultural myths (including that of Mulan, of Disney fame). This confusion is further complicated by Kingston's use of the first, second and third person narrative voices. But the rewards are worth the effort, as we become part of her unique experience. “Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.”

There seem to have been two reactions to this book when it was first published. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, no small achievement. But it was also dissed by a number of Chinese-American critics who felt her interpretations of the Chinese-American experience lacked authenticity.

From what I've been able to determine by a quick internet search, those critics were primarily male, which brings us to a key element of this book: It is not simply an exploration of the overall first generation Chinese-American experience, it is a specific Chinese-American woman's experience.

I would posit that any memoir legitimately reflects the life of the person writing and no one else. This 2017 quote from a much younger Chinese-American author, Angela Chen, who avoided reading [b:The Woman Warrior|30852|The Woman Warrior|Maxine Hong Kingston|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1541333110l/30852._SY75_.jpg|1759] for many years expresses that opinion more elegantly than I can: "But taken off this pedestal, the innovations and craft of The Woman Warrior become more apparent. It is a complex account of what it was like to be Kingston, writing about experiences at a time that few others did. It is the personal and not the general. It is not template, not beginning or end."

This came to be my first read of 2021 by chance. I recently listened to a series of lectures about American best sellers through the centuries, and the only book that I hadn't already read that piqued my curiosity was [b:The Woman Warrior|30852|The Woman Warrior|Maxine Hong Kingston|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1541333110l/30852._SY75_.jpg|1759]. I'm so glad it did; it was a great way to begin the year.

This collection of Maxine Hong Kingston's writings is a treat for those familiar with her work and a great source for those unfamiliar. My familiarity is primarily with The Woman Warrior and China Men, having read each multiple times while in school decades ago. I had read but not studied her other fiction but what I loved here were some of her essays and other writings.

I loved reading her rebuke to American reviewers in Cultural Mis-Readings by American Reviewers. What in lesser hands would have sounded like just complaining, Kingston turns it into a detailed argument using reviews both positive and negative illustrating various issues with their ideas on culture and who is labeled as what. I wish more writers would speak up so eloquently about issues they encounter with reviewers (and also interviewers).

My preference would have been to include a critical introductory essay, but that is not a negative about the book, just something I would have liked. The Note on the Texts near the back serves as a bit of contextualization and the section after it, Notes, offers a lot of useful notes to specific passages in the texts. Both of these sections add to the book, especially for anyone new to her work.

Highly recommended for both fans of Kingston as well as those new to her. Having these works collected in one volume allows me to quit using the well-worn copies on my shelf when I reread.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

A powerful collection of a few non-fiction pieces about being female and Chinese. Sons being revered while daughters could be given away. Much of it features Kingston's awesome mom Brave Orchid. As a fiction fan, I especially like the 'White Tigers' piece, as it imagines so vividly dreamlike a woman warrior's training. "I continue to sort out what's just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living." (pg 205) We need more books like this. Rich & full & real.½

My favorite chapters: White Tigers, Shaman.

The first two essays were pretty good, but I just couldn't get into the remainder.

Probably most intriguing about the structure of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, beginning with "No Name Woman” and ending in A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” is that it characterizes Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, told in the interesting format of non-sequential episodes, as one that begins in oppressed silence but ends in universal song.

When looking at the three woman warrior figures in the book – her aunt, the No Name Woman; the rewritten legendary warrior in “White Tigers” (based upon the Mulan legend); and the poet and barbarian captive, Ts’ai Yen – the characteristics that unite them all are their determined attempts at asserting their own kinds of power, femininity, and individuality in patriarchal Chinese society.

The methods through which they do so revolve around words written, spoken, or not spoken: from the silence practiced by No Name Woman, to the words written on the warrior’s back, to the songs created by Ts’ai Yen and, finally, to the stories that Kingston as the author uses to find the marks of the woman warrior within herself, and to do so in a way that allows the readers insight into a life that even the narrator is grappling to understand.

The words that open Woman Warrior, which begins with the story of No Name Woman, are quite interestingly an admonition of silence: “’You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you’” (3). This admonition signifies a promise, and a breaking of a promise: The narrator’s mother Brave Orchid is showing courage and confidence in her daughter by sharing something that should not be remembered, yet at the same time, her mother is breaking the silence surrounding her sister-in-law, the titled No Name Woman. This is one of the first of many of the narrator’s mother’s talk-stories, ones that were told with a purpose to aid her children in life events, while sealing the bond between child and mother.

The story of the woman warrior, who is the protagonist of “White Tigers,” is created in history and then transformed by the narrator into one of triumph through the breaking of silences. Inspired by Kingston’s childhood and the stories of Yue Fei and Mulan, the chapter becomes another way for the narrator to celebrate the breaking of silences, something that continues throughout the book.

This union between mother and daughter the novel can be seen as the compromise of generations, an idea carried out in Kingston’s appropriation of myths and stories seen in the retelling of these woman warriors. Her mother, in fact, is the narrator’s guide of the methods in which to appropriate talk-stories for her own purposes. Kingston’s retellings are part of the idea that a culture growing up in one country can appropriate the lessons of their parents, who grew up in another. It is the idea and the hope that stories created by a patriarchal culture can still make room for its daughters, ultimately one the most important ideas Kingston communicates in her beautifully rendered book.

Many people have criticized this book for being confusing, being too much of a mix between memoir, legend, and fiction - but that's what makes this book wonderful. Hong Kingston takes Chinese legend and mixes it with her mother's stories and her own childhood memories, and what's real and isn't real is often unclear. The qualities of magical realism convey beautifully the sense of growing up on the border between two cultures: Hong Kingston describes her and her fellow American Born Chinese as "half-ghosts," not quite an American, but not quite Chinese either. To Hong Kingston, China is very real in her family and the different crazy beliefs her mother has, but it's also a mystery, a legend far away on the other side of the world that she can taste in her mother's talk-stories but cannot quite understand.

As a Chinese American myself, this memoir hit me in all the right places in my own search for identity, while also giving insight on growing up as a 2nd generation Chinese American in the 40s and 50s. Many have also criticized the book for trying too hard to be representative of the Chinese American experience, or for perpetuating negative stereotypes, but that's only the case if you read it that way. In the end, this is Hong Kingston's experience, the environment she grew up in, and her personal beliefs and paradigm, and if the reader keeps that in mind then this book is a wonderfully written, engaging look into Hong Kingston's life.

Immersive, escapist, important. Chinese mothers talking-story.

My favourite quote:

Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

and this:

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

The book mixes autobiography with Chinese folklore, making it quite a fascinating read. The author wishes to be Fa Mu Lan, the heroine who went to war in place of her father. It signifies her wish to break away from the shackles of her family, full of Chinese families do-and-don'ts. I find it amazing that I could actually relate to some of the taboos her mother told her about when we are generations apart and separated by vast seas, especially those things that mothers tell you not to do but without giving any reason, and where there don't seem to be any good reason at all. You just have to accept or else you will be scolded.

"How do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese?"

Kingston artistically illuminates how difficult it is to tease apart your pieces in an attempt to make sense of the whole. Impactful and educational memoir -

"The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods." *cheekysmirk*

It was interesting which parts of this book I remembered from when I read it in high school. I could turn it into a strange kind of character study, seeing what I remembered, what I brought with me all these years later.

I decided to re-read this because I watched Disney's "Mulan" and remembered having read a story about the Chinese version of her (as compared with the Disney version).

It was nice to reconnect with my high-school-English-class self and with my Chinese half of the family, though a couple generations removed. I wonder how my grandparents behaved at Chinese school. I wonder if their parents made them translate things they were embarrassed about.

This is a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, and the line between the two is so skillfully blurred that you won't know when you crossed it.

''I inspired my army, and I fed them. At night I sang to them glorious songs that came out of the sky and into my head. When I opened my mouth, the songs poured out and were loud enough for the whole encampment to hear, my army stretched out for a mile.''

A young girl lives among ghosts, standing at the crossroads. Her mother is a formidable woman, a doctor and a shaman, who tries to communicate with her children through the myths of their homeland. But the child is confused, she doesn't know where she belongs, if she belongs at all. Chinese traditions seem to teach and suffocate her at the same time and the American way does not speak to her heart. Tradition isn't always the answer and change is necessary. And the mother uses myths as a warning and reminder of a past that is now lost. But the young girl has questions. Why is that a woman is always the one to blame? Why can't she love and live in peace? Why must we always be the victims of prejudices and regimes? Why is a woman warrior obliged to disguise herself as a man to protect her life? Do we not have the right to defend ourselves and decide our future? In many parts of the world, the answer is still a firm ''NO''.

''I've found some places in this country that are ghost-free.''

In a superbly beautiful memoir, Kingston presents a community whose memories have disappeared. Families are broken, husbands abandon their wives, children are at a loss and everyone becomes ''people one read about in a book.'' Assimilation seems impossible in a land that is faced with the Second World War and then, tries hard to recover. Kingston brilliantly blends Chinese folklore with autobiographical episodes and doesn't shy away from demonstrating her own cruelty as a teenager who was confused, enraged and exhausted by the rules, the codes, the lack of communication and the pressure of following in her mother's footsteps. The only refuge is ''talking-story''. In stories, in imagination and in creating distance between her and her family lies the chance for independence.

Divided into five episodes, Kingston's memoir is a deeply personal commentary on womanhood, culture, folklore and the struggle of breaking free from what keeps you chained and gagged.

No Name Woman: In one of the most haunting, terrifying chapters I've ever read, Kingston narrates the story of her aunt, the woman without a name, the sinner who must be forgotten, who never existed.

White Tigers: Kingston gives voice to the legendary heroine Fa Mu Lan whose presence permeates the memoir, walking side-by-side with the countless ghosts.

Shaman: The writer takes us back to her mother's youth, her decision to follow her inclination and become a doctor. However, her most important gift is the ability to stand up to ghosts and exorcise them...

At the Western Palace: In an episode that is both tender and bitter, the mother's sister arrives in the USA to confront her husband. There is an elegant sense of humor at the beginning of the chapter that becomes darker and darker until the shocking end.

A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe: The winter goes back to her teenage years, her awful days at schools, her rage that led to unacceptable behaviour towards a classmate, the presence of witches and hags in the community. I was astonished by the candour and vehement rage of this chapter.

If you choose to read one memoir in your life, let this be the one.

''Always hungry, always needing, she would have to beg food from other ghosts, snatch and steal it from those whose living descendants give them gifts. She would have to fight the ghosts massed at the crossroads for the buns a few thoughtful citizens leave to decoy her away from village and home so that the ancestral spirits could feast unharassed.
[...] My aunt remains forever hungry. Goods are not distributed evenly among the dead.''

''We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.''

*I would like to dedicate this review to my amazing colleague and dear friend, Eva, who is always full of bookish surprises and glorious ideas!! Thank you for everything!*

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/

This was the August PBS/NYT Now Read This selection. It’s been hailed for 40 years as a classic of Chinese-American memoir literature. It’s also been highly criticized.

It’s a different sort of memoir. The author combines the story of her childhood in a Chinese-American neighborhood with her mother’s stories of China and Chinese folktales.

Kingston was never quite sure which of her mother’s stories were true and which were merely supposed to be morally instructive. And so, it’s memoir with a strong dose of what her mother called ‘talk-story’: and combines fiction with non-fiction.

It’s a story of strong women in a world not always kind to women. She relates the tale of Fa Mu Lan, the Chinese folk heroine who donned men’s clothes and fought in battle. She tells the story of her mother, a medical doctor in China, who having joined her husband in the United States, slaved night and day in the family Chinese laundry. Not all the women warriors win; some lose; some give up and settle in the place they have arrived.

But it’s a story of how author Maxine Hong Kinston became the person she is. And that’s the best kind of memoir.½

The first book in the PBS book club that I am reading. First read 40 some odd years ago. Don't know if I truly liked it or just read it yo be in the know/cool.

I doubt I finished this in '76/'77. I had to plow my way through parts of it. The mother, Brave Orcard, story was too disjointed. Parts of it cruel, parts very funny, parts too screwy, parts too much the bully. I felt squeamish at times.

I've read tons books focusing on Chinese culture. Since this was a memoir verses fiction, though as memoir thus is in a league of its own, I prefer the fiction.½

Ghosts abound in Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir-in-novellas, The Woman Warrior. The term is used not only the supernatural embodiments of the unhappy dead, but also for foreigners of all kinds. There are white ghosts, black ghosts and Mexican ghosts, also teacher ghosts and delivery ghosts. There are even wino ghosts. Against this haunted backdrop, Chinese immigrants in California, most notably the author's indomitable mother Brave Orchid, struggle to come to terms with a new land with its strange language and incomprehensible customs.

I had read this book as an undergraduate for a class and didn't really understand it at that time, even though some of its vivid imagery has lingered in my mind (I now know where Ocean Vuong, author of the recent book On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous, may have gotten some of his ideas). I thought that now I would be better equipped to enjoy this book, but I found it difficult upon a second reading as well. This book is not straightforward reading, and I was disappointed that I didn't like it more than I did.

I read this on the recommendation of my dear cousin Wally when I was 9 months pregant and sitting in a large, empty, silent house in Kumasi, Ghana, waiting to deliver. I started the opening chapter and put it away until AFTER the baby was born. I loved the book and the richness it added to my perception of what it means to be immigrant and to be a woman. Its images have stayed with me all these years.

Read this in college. It was interesting book but not one I would reread.

Interesting. I just read my Goodreads friend Chelsea's review of this book and she says there is a story in here that didn't convince her to go vegetarian but brought her closer to giving up meat than anything else had.

I read this book in 1976 and became a vegetarian in January 1977. It was something I'd been considering for a while, and had been reading all sorts of things from 1973 on, but now I'm wondering if this book had some influence on my decision.

I still have a copy of my book somewhere. I'm curious about what the story said.

Vegan in spring 1988 after continuing to read and it was a book that got me to go vegan. Back then there were no vegan promoting films, no internet, etc. but even so books have such an influence on me. When I went vegan I knew no other vegans personally and when I went vegetarian I knew only one at the time.

Fabulous writing. Really enjoyed the mix of Chinese folklore with biography. Learned a LOT about life in a totally foreign (to me) and fascinating culture.

The Woman Warrior
3 Stars

Read this for a class on women's fiction.

Ostensibly a memoir, this collection of tales reads more like fiction. Through storytelling, the author explores the problems of being female from a patriarchal culture and of being a first generation Chinese American.

Although the book contains some very interesting and educational elements regarding the Chinese culture, it has a disjointed feel to it and it is difficult to become immersed in characters and plots.

A sequence of short stories that display the Chinese folklore Kingston grew up with. I would definitely use some of the short stories for a close read/practice for standardized testing; also a great read for International Women's Day.