The Woman Warrior KINDLE MOBI by Maxine Hong Kingston H-A

[b]The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston was really the first of its genre, preceding Amy Tan's novels by at least a decade and went on to win several awards. Beyond the superficial similarity of both MHK and AT being Asian-American women, they have little in common. When first published in the 1970's, The Woman Warrior provoked a feminist backlash, and yet it is now a standard used in university level Women's Studies and Women's Literature. This memoir is intense, mystical, introspective, and full of marvelous and unexpected twists and turns. One of my very favourite books, The Woman Warrior is a rare novel in that it combines elements of myth, reality, fantasy, and imagination Listed as a book of fiction, it is, as its subtitle suggests, an imaginary memoir that only verges on fiction. The "talk-stories" of the narrator's mother and her own imaginary self as the legendary woman warrior, Fa Mu Lan (Mulan), work sub-textually to create a layered dialogue between the real world and the ways in which we, particularly as children, use factual, embellished, and extraordinary/marvellous storytelling to make sense of reality. In talk-stories women were warriors and her mother was still a doctor in China who could cure the sick and scare away ghosts, not a harried and frustrated woman running a stifling laundromat in California. But what is story and what is truth? In China, a ghost is a supernatural being; in America it is anyone who is not Chinese. In addition, underlying even the most exciting talk-stories of Chinese women warriors is the real oppression of Chinese women. While the themes are not supernatural, the tensive hybrid of genres creates a dreamlike sense of being that skirts the edges of magico-realism.

Feminist study and literature often focus upon the ways in which women use anecdote as a form of communication, painting a picture of their own or others lived experience to teach, empathize, and connect. Mothers speak to their daughters in this style of language much more than any other group -- while adult women use anecdote as a relational tool, it is perhaps the most common way women impart a sense of personal and family history that relies not so much on genealogy, time or place, but on discontiguous life stories to create a sense of women's inheritance that would otherwise be erased by the rules of ordered linear succession and the importance of place, time, and name that defines male lineage. The way in which daughters learn from and listen to the stories of their mothers creates a sense of belonging to "the body" of a wider female heritage that, while unrecorded and silent within patriarchal culture, acquires voice and meaning that is both abstract and physical, existing not in parallels or opposition, but as curving and circuitous, a place to return from and to throughout life.

While The Woman Warrior presents a memoir/fiction of growing up between the contrasting cultures of the East and the West, it goes beyond many similar kinds of books. Its non-linear structure and its melding of genres surpasses the expectations of a mother/daughter story and how a girl from a traditional, ethnic Chinese immigrant family in America manages to invents an identity. Kingston offers a glimpse into how language and imagination form the self as much as the events of life can, and in so doing she provides an understanding of how to straddle not only culture, but place and time and, to some extent, transend even gender.

I hope you find this novel as enjoyable as I have, and remember to be polite and reseed. (H-A)