Fragment of a Model Essay

In her autobiography, The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston uses the act of story telling, or “talk-story,” to show the complexity, rewards, and hardships of life. Kingston takes all of her fantasies, all of her family stories, and all of her experiences, even those not “to be pass[ed] on,” and chooses which to tell to the world. She uses the revengeful and liberating act of telling to find her self and her voice. Young Maxine’s voice, a “crippled animal running on broken legs” (169), takes awhile to develop into Kingston’s amazingly articulate and complicated writer’s voice. Despite Kingston’s initial trouble with pronouncing the word “I,” she writes an autobiography, a place where she can speak well, make all of her confessions, get her revenge, and attempt to create a symbol or piece of her self.

Surprising for an autobiography, Kingston devotes very little space to her actual individual voice, (perhaps related to her trouble with “I”). Instead, her autobiography consists of a conglomeration of external stories about the women who have had some sort of influence in her life: her no-name aunt, the woman warrior Fa Mu Lan, her mother, her aunt Moon Orchid, Maxine as a child, and the silent school girl. Although the majority of The Woman Warrior does not seem internal, Kingston reveals her first person voice in several places throughout her autobiography (the last chapter, the second halves of chapters one and three and periodically throughout the whole book). Kingston’s mode of story telling creates her autobiographical self. The stories she chooses to tell, ones that had an effect on her, and the people she tells stories about, combined with her manner of connecting these stories—humor and restraint—form a larger story, a story that attempts to reflect her self. When she follows the traditional, idealized legend about the woman warrior with the comment, “My American life has been such a disappointment” (45), she connects these events of the past or of myth with the present and her American reality and produces a new and changing picture. In the beginning of her autobiography, she directly asks:

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? (5)

This seems to be what Kingston wonders about her self throughout her entire autobiography. She struggles to understand herself and what in her background produced her self. In a sense, she meditates over which parts of her self are from where and over where she as an entity belongs, in order to understand who she is as a whole. Which parts of her self belong to China, or to the United States, or to a combination of the two seems very important to her identity. Jumping around from ancient stories to internal movie fantasies to ghost-world traumas, she does not come up with concrete solutions about why she is the way she is; instead she constructs a confusing, yet solid image that symbolizes part of her self. This self seems to be filled with many different pieces from the East and the West, from her mother and her ancestors, and from her classmates and ghosts, that are connected by small aspects of her own individuality. The sense of her self that the reader perceives seems quite similar not only to the content of her book, but also the structure.

The Woman Warrior seems structured not only by the creation of an autobiographical self, but also by talk-story, which feeds this autobiographical creation. The whole book is a long talk-story and this telling empowers Kingston. In a sense, this book creates revenge on all of those who silenced her: on her mother who cut her tongue, on Chinese culture that does not explain anything and demeans girls, on North American society that made silent an adjective for Chinese girls. From her mother, whose great power is talking-story, she learns the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. With this knowledge, she realizes that she will “have to grow up a warrior woman” (20). Despite this goal, as the story progresses and Kingston grows older, she accumulates so much guilt that she cannot contain it and loses the ability to tell the difference between right and wrong. She envies Catholic girls who have the release of a weekly ritualized confession. “I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat” (197). When she finally gets the courage to tell her mother the first confession on her mental list, her mother ignores her and then eventually says, “I don’t feel like hearing your craziness” (200). Kingston realizes that she will have no listener, but herself. Instead of resigning herself to holding in her list, she learns from her mother and disguises her confession list in a giant talk-story that millions of people will hear.

When she discusses her “no name aunt” and tells the story of her crime, she unfetters herself. As she explains that no one mentions her aunt or her name in order to kill her a second time, Kingston writes, “But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment. And I have” (16). The very writing of this chapter, however, gives her aunt a name, No Name Woman, and empowers both her aunt who gains a self and Kingston who can now write the truth. Finding the truth, which parallels finding her self and her voice, is very important to Kingston. After watching her mother ignore her difficult confessions and holding in her disgust of and anger over the “hulk,” Kingston finally bursts out and screams:

. . . And I don’t want to listen to anymore of your stories; they have no logic. They scramble me up. You lie with stories. . . You can’t stop me from talking. You tried to cut off my tongue, but it didn’t work. (202)

She does not want to hear anymore lies and no one can stop her from speaking and looking for the truth. Her autobiography is, in a way, looking for the truth. For Kingston the truth, her voice, her self and why she is the way that she is are closely intertwined.