Maxine Hong Kingston was born in California in 1940 to Chinese immigrants. The third of eight children, Hong Kingston became a passionate and prolific writer at an early age. She eventually majored in English at UC, Berkeley--the university at which she taught for many years after the publication of The Woman Warrior and various other novels and works of criticism.Maxine Hong Kingston published The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts in 1976. Like Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Hong Kingston's book introduced American readers to a never-before-witnessed topic: Chinese-American girlhood, and the unique marriage of gender and ethnicity present in growing up as a Chinese woman in America. Hong Kingston's book blends memoir, fiction, and biography together to create an unique document of the era and ethnic background in which she grew up. It also introduces a topic central to both her own literary project and that of Morrison--that of haunting. Are we all haunted by often silent and silenced familial pasts? Is the American story a narrative of erasures and the ghosts these erasures create?
Hong Kingston's work will allow us to ask many questions central, too, to our own project in Intro to English Studies. Using her book, we will discuss the ethics of representation. Does Hong Kingston have the right to represent her ancestors' stories? Is her hybrid text a response to the difficulties of representation? Is there something unethical or, rather, heroic about telling the stories that many think would be better off not told? The Woman Warrior will also help us to look at the place of the immigrant story in America and American mythology. How is the immigrant experience in America the ultimate American narrative, told over and over again in the many novels we will read this quarter?
In my reading of "White Tigers," what I thought to be a dull, irrelevant (to me) chapter about being a young Chinese girl actually turned out to be really fun to read. I was initially lost when Kingston all the sudden started talking about climbing the mountain to the top of the earth and living in a house with a removable top; however, the storyline really caught my eye and forced me to read on. I assume it's just because I like the "Kill Bill" movies and am fascinated by fantastic warrior stories like that, but I enjoyed reading the chapter. Again I was confused when Kingston jumped back to reality and started talking about grades and her mom, but as far as the middle section goes, it was fun.
ReplyDeleteFor me, reading The Woman Warrior was at times moving and enlightening and at other times tedious. In this way, it seems to reflect its narrative form: the memoir. While semi-autobiographical elements seem to exist in most fiction, this collection is transparently personal. I think that the piece is an interesting exploration of the troubles of cultural assimilation existing alongside the growing pains of first generation immigrant children. It is also caustic and personal.
ReplyDeleteWhether or not The Woman Warrior deserves to be at the heart of the new American canon is up in the air. If we define literature as something adhering to pre-existing genre conventions, then this is a tough question. Does autobiography/memoir fit into the tradition of American literature? I think so (the writings of Ben Franklin and John Smith were a large part of my early American lit survey). If we are evaluating the piece in terms of style and aesthetics, its structure seems loose and its themes scattered. Again, this can probably be attributed to the fact that The Woman Warrior is a memoir (or, at least, calls itself one).
Is the collection aesthetically superior and of historical importance? Maybe. Does it provide a forum for a marginalized form of experience? Definitely. Really, whether or not the piece should be at the center of the new American canon depends on what that canon values. Should we give the piece the test of time? Instant canonization seems dubious. I will leave the clear-cut yes/no answers about canonization to Harold Bloom. Personally, I'm not sure.
I thought that The Woman Warrior was interesting, and i liked the fact that it was several short stories rather than one long story. I especially liked A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe, because we got to learn the most about the authors youth and how the stories her mother told her affected her. The fact that it is a semi-autobiographical does change the we read it, or atleast the way I read it, because you know that these stories are either about our author or they told to her in her childhood and shaped who she became.
ReplyDeleteI feel that the Woman Warrior should be part of the canon because it is an interesting book that explores many different techniques and writing styles.