The Woman Warrior

hen it was published in the 70’s, The Woman Warrior caused an explosion in the Chinese American literary field. According to one of my professors, an editor for the New York Times selected the book at random as something to read on his ride home on the train when it first came out and was floored. He ran a front page review of the book, which gave it a kind of Oprah’s Book Club popularity and the rest is history.

Since its first printing, The Woman Warrior has been relatively controversial. The author is writing about something that, until this book was printed, didn’t really have a genre or a precedent. This book is the first to explore what life is like for a Chinese American born to immigrant parents. Many say that the book is too drenched in mythology, and sets up too strong of a dichotomy between East and West. The book does rely heavily on fantasy at times. The second chapter is a retelling of the Ballad of Mu Lan (the same story that was later turned into Disney’s Mulan). Kingston alters the plot of this fairytale (as popular and well known in China as the story of Cinderella is in the US) somewhat drastically, and many are frustrated with how to read this. Many Chinese readers are insulted that Kingston is mis-telling their stories to American readers. Others, particularly feminist authors, want to know why she altered the story and to what end. Kingston herself insists that she wrote the book simply for herself, as a kind of diary, not as an attempt to represent any group of people to anybody.

Any author that takes on a loaded topic, which Kingston does in this book, is opening themselves up to criticism. Personally, I think that in many ways Kingston achieves a great deal with this novel that many critics don’t give her credit for. I believe this book is exploring the ways in which the stories we hear affect how we live our lives. The book opens with the story of Kingston’s late aunt, who took her own life when she became pregnant from some form of adultery. Kingston doesn’t provide a whole lot of analysis of this story. She wonders about her aunts life. She wonders if the child was the product of rape or of an illicit love affair. She wonders what her aunt might have been like. She doesn’t, however, tell us what to do with this information. Throughout the book she rarely does, except in a few explicit moments. In many ways, the book presents stories as if they are burdens to bear, and in writing this novel Kingston is attempting to share the burden of understanding the stories she carries both from her immigrant parents, and from her own childhood in America. In my opinion, this creates a beautiful and multifaceted memoir that cannot be boiled down to a simple moral or meaning.

The question of genre in this book is also highly contested. The edition I have, in fact, lists the book as fiction on the back cover, but notes that the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction on the front cover. The book also cites itself as a memoir. The troubling fact about this is that there are clearly elements that are fictional in the narrative. Many feminist critics argue that female memoirs are, many times, more multifaceted than male memoirs simply because women’s lives are often defined more heavily by their relationships, and thus might at times require a different style of telling. This argument perhaps holds some water, as after reading the memoir I do have to say that I feel as though I’ve learned a great deal about the way Kingston perceived her life. I also think that a blending of genres can lead to a much richer story.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. There were a few moments when I felt that the syntax and diction was a bit strange, but overall it was well written and well thought out. It presents a complex web of ideas woven together with beautiful stories and imagery. I think it makes a profound statement about identity, both in terms of gender and race. For this I give it an 8|10.

The book also inspired a few thoughts of mine that weren’t necessarily related to this review, which you can find after the break.

Here’s a little blurb I wrote just after finishing the book.

I recently read Maxine Hong Kingston’s book The Woman Warrior and mostly what it’s left me thinking about, obsessively even, is the practice of foot binding. The book barely mentions it aside from a few vivid sentences, but I found these sentences so disturbing that I had to do a little research. The wikipedia article on the subject left me feeling unsettled.

I find it almost too impossible to imagine how such a practice existed for hundreds of years. I used to think it wasn’t that big of a deal, couldn’t have been, as most of us probably do. I thought that in order for something like this to have survived as such a long-lived tradition, it had to have been humane in some way. Yet the actual act of binding the feet of a seven-year-old girl is positively mind boggling. Imagine a seven-year-old girl. Imagine breaking every one of her toes, bending them down onto the ball of her foot and strapping them there. Imagine wrapping tight bindings around the rest of her feet, so tight as to restrict blood flow and normal growth. The goal of foot binding is to break the arch of the foot, and x-rays of bound feet once fully formed (if you could call them that) show the arch of the foot curving sharply upward, creating a shape like the peak of a tent. The foot is supposed to measure about three to four inches long when it is fully formed. Every night servants of mothers (because mother’s often couldn’t bear to actually do this to their children(and also probably didn’t have to considering that it was mostly the wealthy who did this)) would unwrap the bindings, allowing blood to flow through the veins for a few excruciating moments before re-wrapping them.

The girls often had to walk long distances just after getting their toes broken and strapped down in order to cement the process.

I have no words, yet I’m writing words, for this. I don’t think that there’s anything more to say than that this shocks, horrifies, and frightens me. How could people experience this when they were children, then inflict it upon their own children? Can you imagine the boredom and pain such a life must have enforced? They could hardly walk during this process, and I’m sure they never did unless they were forced to. Can you imagine never being able to walk normally or run again just to be considered beautiful? Can you imagine having to go to the bathroom, and limping, maybe crawling to the chamber pot? I’m sure these girls spent the entirety of their days sewing or performing some other menial task because what else, in all honesty, could they do?

What was I doing when I was seven? I was in the second grade. I spent most of my time running erratically around my school’s playground or wishing that I was running around my school’s playground. I wanted to be a WNBA star back then.

But this is not to say that the Chinese are in some way to blame. Think of all the horrible things that women inflict upon themselves, or upon their daughters, in the search of beauty. Foot binding is only a reminder of females getting their genitals sliced away in the search of purity, and misshapen ribs from the tightening of corsets. In our modern, enlightened society, we still cut ourselves open and insert plastic into our breasts to be beautiful. I can’t understand this.

I understand the choice to wear high heeled shoes on occasion, which can be uncomfortable. That is my choice, and it won’t leave my feet misshapen. I can understand how these things are beautiful. High heels extenuate the length of women’s legs. High heels make your butt look perky. This makes sense as something men would find attractive and sexy to me, especially since they come off at the end of the day to reveal normal, healthy feet.

But I do not understand how any kind of mutilation, be it the breaking of young girls feet, or the insertion of globs of silicon into women’s chests, could be considered attractive. The body is a beautiful thing because of its precision, because of how well it works, because of how capable it is. To make that body sick or even ruined for the sake of beauty, even to just manipulate its shape artificially in an exaggerated way, is repulsive to me. The most beautiful thing one can be possessed of is a healthy, able body.

History tells us that many cultures didn’t think this way. The wikipedia article on foot binding says that in adulthood women with bound feet had to walk with their knees bent and swayed in a certain way because of their restricted movement. This was supposedly considered highly attractive, and poorer women, or women in cultures that did not practice foot binding, would wear special shoes that would force them to walk this way too.

I’m glad I can’t understand this swaying walk as attractive, and never could. Perhaps I’m lucky for that.