Notes on Reading, Maxine Hong Kingston - "Woman Warrior"

 Close reading family memoir - Culture and trauma

In this blog series, I want to share a few writings from my time at university. For the module, Telling Lives, we read selected family memoirs and wrote short blogs on our interpretations. Each piece was written along a certain theme, with the aim of highlighting a unique viewing lens for the text.

First up, a text exploring Chinese American existence through a captivating mesh of reality and myth, with a loving focus on the version of womanhood that it grows.

Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior (London: Picador, 2015)

    Woman Warrior demonstrates a struggle with separating Chinese culture and inherited family trauma. Kingston questions, ‘how do you separate [...] your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese?’ (p. 6). Both ‘No Name Woman’ and the ‘child born without an anus’ (p. 102) are inherited, traumatic ‘talk-stories’. Kingston writes, ‘My mother has given me [...] nightmare babies that recur’ (p. 102). These are associated with Chinese culture: ‘I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese’ (p. 103). Empowering ‘talk-stories’, however, alter this association. For instance, ‘Fa Mu Lan’, ‘given’ (p. 24) to her by her mother, allows Kingston to embrace Chinese culture without inherited trauma.