The Woman Warrior

“Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She tested our strength to establish realities. Those in the emigrant generations who could not reassert brute survival died young and far from home. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fit in solid America.” 

Brave Orchid’s storytelling is a way of acculturating her children. In writing this book, Kingston uses the power of story both to preserve and critique her mother’s teachings. Storytelling is presented as a method of survival right from the start.

“In a commensal tradition, where food is precious, the powerful older people made wrongdoers eat alone. Instead of letting them start separate new lives like the Japanese, who could become samurais and geishas, the Chinese family, faces averted but eyes glowering sideways, hung on to the offenders and fed them leftovers.” 

Food and eating play a deeply symbolic role in The Woman Warrior. Food is not just nourishment but a way of drawing and maintaining social boundaries. Here, inclusion in food-sharing can even be a way of establishing exclusion.

“The heavy, deep-rooted women were to maintain the past against the flood, safe for returning. But the rare urge west had fixed upon our family, and so my aunt crossed boundaries not delineated in space.” 

Boundary-crossing is anathema to the traditional Chinese culture Kingston describes. In their role as vessels of tradition, women are under particular pressure not to step outside their societal roles. However, the trope of the woman warrior suggests a tension beneath the firm surface of these practices.

“I hope that the man my aunt loved appreciated a smooth brow, that he wasn’t just a tits-and-ass man.” 

In using a contemporary, even crass voice to imagine her nameless aunt’s life, Kingston establishes a narrative pattern. The quotidian and the mythic, the modern and the ancient, the past and the present will all interweave. Language, Kingston shows, is what makes these boundary-crossings possible.

“At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking-story. […] I remembered that as a child I had followed my mother about the house, the two of us singing about how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive from war […] I had forgotten this chant that was once mine, given me by my mother, who may not have known its power to remind. She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman.” 

Brave Orchid’s “talk-stories” are a conduit of her power. She can talk-story about mythic warriors and about events in her own past. To talk-story is not simply to tell fairy tales but to inhabit a specific kind of paradoxical reality—the reality that Kingston seeks to reclaim in this book.

“The call would come from a bird that flew over our roof. In the brush drawings it looks like the ideograph for ‘human,’ two black wings.” 

Kingston’s imagined mythic call to warriorhood appears in the form of writing brought magically to life. That the bird resembles the ideograph for “human” suggests the woman warrior’s transcendence of standard categories of gender. In following this word-bird, Kingston becomes a whole and unhampered person.

“When I could kneel all day without my legs cramping and my breathing became even, the squirrels would bury their hoardings at the hem of my shirt and then bend their tails in a celebration dance. At night, the mice and toads looked at me, their eyes quick stars and slow stars. Not once would I see a three-legged toad, though; you need strings of cash to bait them.”

Kingston’s mythic training allies her with the natural world. In becoming a fully human woman warrior, Kingston must learn lessons of motion and stillness from the animal kingdom. The animals around her have both earthy naturalness and magic power.

“Hunger also changes the world—when eating can’t be a habit, then neither can seeing. I saw two people made of gold dancing the earth’s dances. They turned so perfectly that together they were the axis of the earth’s turning. They were light; they were molten, changing gold—Chinese lion dancers, African lion dancers in midstep. I heard high Javanese bells deepen in midring to Indian bells, Hindu Indian, American Indian. […] I am watching the centuries pass in moments because suddenly I understand time, which is spinning and fixed like the North Star.” 

Kingston’s mystic hunger-trance shows her a vision of a world made of united differences. The two dancing figures are a man and a woman; the music around them comes from all over the world; they bring all of time together. Here Kingston presents another idea of what being fully human might mean: bringing many disparate pieces into one dance.

“‘We are going to carve revenge into your back,’ my father said. ‘We’ll write out oaths and names.’” 

Language is literally embodied as warrior-Kingston’s parents carve their wishes for vengeance into her skin. Language’s power to curse and preserve is on display here. The parents brand Kingston not just with their hit list but also her name and birthplace. Identity and grudge are interwoven in words.

“‘I’m not a bad girl,’ I would scream. ‘I’m not a bad girl. I’m not a bad girl.’ I might as well have said, ‘I’m not a girl.’”

In three neat sentences Kingston sums up her cultural dilemma. To be a girl, in her parents’ tradition, is to be inherently, proverbially worthless. Kingston’s rebellion against her devaluation is thus inescapably a rebellion against her gender.

“The locks on her suitcase opened with two satisfying clicks; she enjoyed how neatly her belongings fitted together, clean against the green lining.” 

Kingston vividly imagines her mother’s life experience in this chapter, right down to the pleasure of a well-packed suitcase. Kingston’s sensitivity to Brave Orchid’s pride in her independence and self-sufficiency demonstrates a link between the two women and an empathy for the experience of a parent who was also a repressive force in Kingston’s life.

“Which would you rather be? A ghost who is constantly wanting to be fed? Or nothing?” 

Brave Orchid is skeptical about the idea of the “hungry ghost,” whose messages are mostly about wanting more origami offerings. She presents a stark choice: To be a ghost or to be nothing, voiceless and without agency. It’s implied that being nothing is akin to being the ideal woman.

“Good people do not lose to ghosts.” 

Ghosts are intensely real to Brave Orchid, even though she has doubts about some of the traditional ideas about them. Her battles with ghosts mirror her daughter’s struggles with the past. Brave Orchid’s firmness here contrasts with Kingston’s ambivalence about the ghostliness of her own life.

“My mother could contend against the hairy beasts whether flesh or ghost because she could eat them, and she could not-eat them on the days when good people fast.” 

Successful ghost-fighting requires more than one skill. The capacity to digest ghosts has an obvious symbolic resonance here. This whole book could be imagined as a way of eating and processing the ghosts of Kingston’s past. But it is also important to be able to not eat ghosts “on the days when good people fast”: Brave Orchid’s balance of transgression and tradition is a part of her power.

“We used to pretend we were Newsboy Ghosts. We collected old Chinese newspapers (the Newsboy Ghost not giving us his ghost newspapers) and trekked about the house and yard. We waved them over our heads, chanting a chant: ‘Newspapers for sale. Buy a newspaper.’ But those who could hear the insides of words heard that we were selling a miracle salve made from boiled children.” 

The intensity of Kingston’s childhood and the American world’s unreality to her immigrant family here combine. Growing up, Kingston and her family perceive all the non-Chinese people around them as ghosts. The most quotidian American types become dangerously enchanted.

“Their hands reached out as if to touch the other’s face, then returned to their own, the fingers checking the grooves in the forehead and along the sides of the mouth. Moon Orchid, who never understood the gravity of things, started smiling and laughing, pointing at Brave Orchid.” 

Kingston’s use of free indirect discourse keeps us mostly confined to Brave Orchid’s consciousness, showing her quickness to judge but also her hopes and aspirations for her sister and her family. Again, Kingston’s inhabitation of her mother is both sympathetic and critical.

“Her sons and daughters mumbled and disappeared. […] One of them locked herself in the pantry-storeroom, where she had cleared off a shelf for a desk among the food. Brave Orchid’s children were antisocial and secretive. Ever since they were babies, they had burrowed little nests for themselves in closets and underneath stairs; they made tents under tables and behind doors.” 

The repressiveness of Kingston’s childhood is here seen as an ambivalent force, doing both good and ill. Kingston seems to trace her writing life to her need to escape from her family. Fleeing from the different pressures of her mother’s judgment and her aunt’s curiosity, she makes a private desk in a storeroom and emerges covered in ink.

“‘Why didn’t you write to tell her once and for all you weren’t coming back and you weren’t sending for her?’ Brave Orchid asked. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s as if I had turned into a different person. The new life around me was so complete; it pulled me away. You became people in a book I had read a long time ago.’” 

Moon Orchid’s faithless husband demonstrates his Americanization here. It is not only his irresponsibility that severs his link with his heritage, but also his disconnect from the past. To his wife, his sister-in-law, and his niece, who maintain links with their Chinese heritage, people in books and people in the past have a present, urgent reality.

“‘The difference between mad people and sane people,’ Brave Orchid explained to the children, ‘is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.’” 

Talk-story is revealed here as a means of making identity as well as measuring sanity. The ability to tell stories, and to be mobile, inventive, and varied in your storytelling, is the difference between madness and sanity. This idea chimes with Kingston’s interest in creating identity out of complexity.

“Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it any more. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.”

Kingston here compares storytelling to knot-making. In contrast with her mother’s idea of talk-story as a way of preserving sanity, Kingston considers that overly complex storytelling might be harmful. But the dangers of storytelling do not stop her; she is willing to be an outlaw to tell her tale in its full complexity.

“My silence was thickest—total—during the three years that I covered my school paintings with black paint. I painted layers of black over houses and flowers and suns, and when I drew on the blackboard, I put a layer of chalk on top. I was making a stage curtain, and it was the moment before the curtain parted or rose. […] I spread them out (so black and full of possibilities) and pretended the curtains were swinging open, flying up, one after another, sunlight underneath, mighty operas.”

Another paradox appears in Kingston’s desire to speak and to retain the possibilities of silence. Her blacking-out of her childhood paintings presents even richer possibilities than the paintings themselves. Her urge to tell stories is balanced and matched by her understanding that stories cannot be completely told, at least not by humans.

“Sometimes I hated the ghosts for not letting us talk; sometimes I hated the secrecy of the Chinese. ‘Don’t tell,’ said my parents, though we couldn’t tell if we wanted to because we didn’t know.”

The repressive force of unspeakability comes at the young Kingston from two directions. The American world is dangerous for those who misspeak, and frustrates with its language. The Chinese world demands a silencing of truth that could be fluently spoken.

“Even the good things are unspeakable, so how could I ask about the deformities? From the configuration of good my mother set out, we kids had to infer the holidays. She did not whip us up with holiday anticipation or explain. […] How can Chinese keep any traditions at all? […] If we had to depend on being told, we’d have no religion, no babies, no menstruation (sex, of course, unspeakable), no death.”

Kingston’s frustration with what goes unsaid in her family presents yet another paradox. Unspeakability hampers the preservation and understanding of tradition, but unspeakability is also itself a tradition.