Maxine Hong Kingston – The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior. Random House: New York: Random House, Inc.; Toronto: Random House of Canada Limited, 1976.

8/8/20 – 8/18/20. Transcribed 8/20/20

Imagining all the people her aunt could have been, a disappeared figure. Cut out. Told with a folklorish certainty. Matter-of-fact-ness. Interesting that the chapter literally about a woman warrior is not called that. Suggests they all are. These stories are all so multi-part. Even the “Shaman” story could have been just medical school. But goes and goes.

“No Name Woman”
(3) “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.
(4) “Their lanterns doubled in the disturbed black water, which drained away through the broken bunds.
(5) “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 fits in solid America.”
(6) “After the one carnival ride each, we paid in guilt; our tired father counted his change on the dark walk home.”
(7) “My mother spoke about the raid as if she had seen it.”
(8) “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.

The work of preservation demands that the feeling playing about in one’s guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms. But perhaps my aunt, my forerunner, caught in a slow life, let dreams grow and fade and after some months or years went toward what persisted. Fear at the enormities of the forbidden kept her desires delicate, wire and bone. She looked at a man because she liked the way the hair was tucked behind his ears, she liked the question-mark line of t along torso curving at the shoulder and straight at the hip. For warm eyes or soft voice or a slow walk — that’s all — a few hairs, a brightness, a sound, a pace, she gave up family. SHe offered us up for charm that vanished with tiredness, a pigtail that didn’t toss when the wind died. Why, the wrong lighting could erase the dearest thing about him.”

(9) depilatory
(9) “No nonsense. Neither style blew easily into heart-catching tangles.”
(11) “‘No, I haven’t,’ I would have said in real life, mad at the Chinese for lying so much. I’m starved. Do you have any cookies? I like chocolate chip cookies.’”)
(16) “My aunt haunts me — her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone vote pages of paper to her, though not origami into houses and clothing. I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in these drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a a substitute.”
“White Tigers”
The split pretty cool.
(29) “I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. Pearls are bone marrow; pearls com efrom oysters. The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium. “
(33) “But I had ended the panic about them already. I could feel a wooden door inside of me close. I had learned on the farm that I could stop loving animals raised for slaughter. ANd I could start loving them immediately when someone said, ‘This one is a pet,’ freeing me and opening the door.”
(35) “My mother caught the blood and wipes the cuts with a cold towel soaked in wine. It hurt terribly — the cuts sharp; the air burning; the alcohol cold, then hot — pain so vairous. I gripped my knees. I released them. Neither tension nor relaxation helped. I wanted to cry. If not for the fifteen years of training, I would have writhed on the floor…. If an enemy should flay me, the line would shine through my skin like lace.”
“My parents and I had waited for such a sign. We took the fine saddlebags off the horse and filled them with salves and herbs, blue grass for washing my hair, extra sweaters, dried peaches. They gave me a choice of ivory or silver chopsticks. I took the silver ones because they were lighter. It was like getting wedding presents. The cousins and the villagers came bearing bright orange jams, silk dresses, silver embroidery scissors. They brought blue and white porcelain bowls filled with water and carp — the bowls painted with carp, fins like orange fire.”
- I love lists like these. Thinking of starting a list…
(38) “But on a green ledge above the battlefield I saw the giant’s wives crying. They had climbed out of their palanquins to watch their husband fight me, and now they were holding each other weeping. They were two sisters, two tiny fairies against the sky, widows from now on. Their long undersleeves, which they had pulled out to wipe their tears, flew white pouring in the mountain wind. After a time they got back into their sedan chairs, and their servants carried them away.”
(39) “And there in the sunlight stood my own husband with arms full of wildflowers for me. ‘You are beautiful,’ he said, and meant it truly. ‘I have looked for you everywhere. I’ve been looking for you since the day that bird flew away with you.’ We were so pleased with each other, the childhood friend found at last, the childhood friend mysteriously grown up. ‘I followed you, but you skimmed over the rocks until I lost you.’
‘I’ve looked for you too,’ I said, the tent now snug around us like a secret house when we were kids.’”
(40) “I hid from battle only once, when I gave e birth to our baby. In dark and silver dreams I had seen him falling from the sky, each night closer to the earth, his soul a star. Just before labor began, the last rays sank into my belly.”
(46) “The good part about my brothers being born was that people stopped saying, ‘All girls,’ but I learned ew grievances.
‘Did you roll an eg on my face like that when I was born?’
‘Did you have a full-month party for me?’
‘Did you turn on all the lights?’
‘Did you send my picture to Grandmother?’
‘Why not? Because I’m a girl, is that why not?’
‘Why didn’t you teach me English?’ ‘You like having me beat up at school, don’t you?’
‘She is very mean, isn’t she?’ the emigrant villagers would say.”
- I think the villager thing is soo funny
(47) “There is a Chinese word for the female I — which is ‘slave.’ Break the women with their own tongues!”
(47) “I refused to cook. When I had to wash dishes, I would crack one or two. ‘Bad girl,’ my mother yelled, and sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn’t a bad girl almost a boy.’”
(48) “Do the women’s work; then do more work, which will become ours too. No husband of mine will say, ‘I could have ben a drummer, but I had to think about the wife and kids. You know how it is.’ Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure. Then I get bitter: no one supports me; I am not loved enough to be supported. That I am not a burden has to compensate for the sad envy when I look at women loved enough to be supported. Even now China wraps double binds around my feet.”
“‘I don’t like that word,’ I had to say in my bad, small person’s voice that makes no impact. The boss never deigned to answer.”
(49) “If I took the sword, which my hate must surely have forged out of the air, and gutted him, I would put color and wrinkles into his shirt.”
“To avenge my family, I’d have to storm across China to take back our farm from the Communists; I’d have to rage across the united States to take back the laundry in New York and the one in California. Nobody in history has conquered and united both North America and Asia.”
“I’ve looked for the bird. I’ve seen clouds make pointed angel wings that stream past the sunset, but they shred into clouds. Once at a beach after a long hike I saw a seagull, tiny as an insect. But when I jumped up to tell what miracle I saw, before I could get the words out I understood that the birds insect-size because it was far away. My brain had momentarily lost its depth perception. I was that eager to find an unusual bird.”
(50) “When I dream that I am wire without flesh, there is a letter on blue airmail paper that floats above the night ocean between here and China. It must arrive safely or else my grandmohtehr and I will lose each other.”
- Night ocean — takes a night to cross it.
(51) “She left him standing by himself and afraid to return empty-handed to her. He sat under a tree to think, when he spotted a pair of nesting doves. Dumping his bag of yams, eh climbed up and caught the birds. That was where the Communists trapped him, in the tree. They criticized him for selfishly taking for for his own family and killed him, leaving his body in the tree as an example. They took the birds to a commune kitchen to be shared.
It is confusing that my family y was not the poor to be championed. They were executed like the barons int he stories, when they were not barons. I tis confusing that the birds tricked us.”
(53) “The swordsman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people understand the resemblance soon so that I can return to them. What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms for revenge are ‘report a crime’ and ‘report to five families.’ The reporting is the vengeance — not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And i have so many words — ‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words too – that they do not fit on my skin.’”
Shaman
A better version of my short story on ghosts. The creepiness of it, army ghosts, white ghosts, etc. Fear is a ghost. It doesn’t exist but it does real things so it does exist. The desperation and infighting of the lowly.
(58) “She stares straight ahead as if she could see me and past me to her grandchildren and grandchildren’s grandchildren. She has spacey eyes, as all people recently from Asia have. Here else do not focus on the camera.”
(74) “This Sitting Ghost has many wide black mouths. It is dangerous. It is real. Most ghosts make such brief and gauzy appearances that eyewitnesses doubt their own sightings. This one can conjure up enough substance to sit solidly throughout a night . It is a serious ghost, not at all playful. It does not twirl incesnse sticks or throw shoes and dishes. It does not play peekaboo or wear fright masks. It does not bother with tricks. It wants lives. I am sure it is surfeited with babies and is now coming after adults. It grows. It is mysterious, not merely a copy of ourselves as, after all, the hanged men and seaweed women are. It could be hiding right now in a piece of wood or inside one of your dollars.”
(77) “She may have been either a daughter or a slave.”
“When my mother had gone to Canton market to shop, her wallet had unfolded like wings. She had received her diploma, and it was time to celebrate. She had hunted out the seed shops to taste their lichees, various as wines, and bought a sack that was taller than a child to bedazzle the nieces and nephews. A merchant had given her one nut fresh on its sprig of narrow leaves. My mother popped the thin wood shell into her curled palm. The white fruit, an eye without an iris, ran juices like spring rivers inside my mother’s mouth. She spit out the brown seed, iris after all.”
(79) “They would try to keep you talking to find out what kind of mistress you were to your slaves. If they could just hear from the buyer’s own mouth about a chair in the kitchen, they could tell each other in the years to come that their daughter was even now resting in the kitchen chair. It was merciful to give these parents a few details both the garden, a sweet feeble grandmother, food.”
- 🙁
(82) “The unsold slaves must have watched them with envy. I watched them with envy.”
(83) “We have to build horns on our roofs so that the nagging once-people can sidle up them and perhaps ascend to the stars, the source of garden and love.
(84) “My mother saw int eh dark a denser dark, and she knew she was being followed.”
(85) “One boy appeared perfect, so round int he cool opal dawn.”
(86) “My mother has given me pictures to dream — nightmare babies that recur, shrinking again and again to fit in my palm. I curl my fingers to make a cradle for the baby, my other hand an awning. I would protect the dream baby, not let it suffer, not let it out of my sight. But in a blink of inattention, I would mislay the baby, I would have to stop moving, afraid of stepping on it. Or before my very eyes, it slips between my fingers because my fingers cannot grow webs fast enough. Or bathing git, I carefully turn the righthand faucet, but it spouts hot water, scalding the baby until its skin tautness and its face becomes nothing but a red hole of a scream. The hole turns into a pinprick as the baby recedes from em.
To make my waking life American-normal, I turn not he lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.”
(88)”… river, which looked like a bright scratch at the bottom of the canyon, as if the Queen of Heaven had swept her great silver hairpin across the earth as well as the sky.”
(92) “‘Have you eaten yet?’ the Chinese greet one another.
‘Yes, I have,’ they answer whether they have or not. ‘And you?’
I would live on plastic.”
(93) “The Japanese, though ‘little,’ were not ghosts, the only foreigners considered not ghosts by the Chinese. They may have been descended for mt he Chiense explorers that the First Emperor of Ch’in (221-210 BC) had deployed to find logetvity medicine. They were to look for an island beyond the Eastern Ocean, beyond the impassable wind and mist. On this island lived phoenixes, unicorns, black apes, and white stags. Magic orchids, strange trees, and plants of jasper grew on Penglai, a fairy mountain, which may have been Mount Fuji. The emperor would saw off the explorers’ heads if they returned without the herbs of immortality.”
(94) “One afternoon peace and summer rested on the mountains. Babies napped in the tall grass, their blankets covering the wildflowers with embroidered flowers. It was so quiet; the bees hummed and the river water played with the pebbles, the rocks, and the hollows. Cows under the trees whisked their tails; goats and ducks followed the children here and there; and the chickens scratched in the dirt. The villagers stood about in the sunshine. They smiled at one another. Here they all were together, idle above their fields, nobody hoeing, godlike; nobody weeding, New Year’s in summer. “
(99) “They would give food to their own children and rocks to us. I did not want to go where the ghosts took shapes nothing like our own.”
“As a child I feared the size of the world. The farther away the sound of howling dogs, the farther away the sound of the trains, the tighter I curled myself under the quilt. The trains sounded deeper and deeper into the night. They had not reached the end of the world before I stopped hearing them, the last long moan diminishing toward China. How large the world must be to make my grandmother only a taste by the time she reaches me.”
(105) “In the midnight unsteadiness we were back at the laundry, and my other was sitting on an orange rate sorting dirty clothes into mountains — a sheet mountain, a white shirt mountain, a dark shirt mountain, a work-pants mountain, a long underwear mountain, a short underwear mountain, a little hill of socks pinned together in pairs, a little hill of handkerchiefs pinned to tags. Surrounding her were candles she burned in daylight, clean yellow diamonds, footlights that ringers her, mysterious masked mother, nose and mouth veiled with a cowboy handkerchief. Before undoing the bundles, my mother would light a tall new candle, which was a luxury, ad the pie pans full of old wax and wicks that sometimes sputtered blue, a noise I thought was the germs getting seared.”
(106) “Time was different in China. One year lasted as long as my total time here; one evening so long, you could visit your women friends, drink tea, and play cards ate each house, and it would still be twilight. It even got boring, nothing to do but fan ourselves. Here midnight comes and the floor’s not swept, the ironing’s not ready, the money’s not made. I would still be young if we lived in China.”
(107) “There’s only one thing that I really want anymore. I want you here, not wandering like a ghost from Romany. I wan every one of you living here together. When you’re all home, all six of you with your children and husbands and wives, there are twenty or thirty people in this house. Then I’m happy. And your father is happy. Whichever room I walk into overflows with my relatives, grandsons, sons-in-law. I can’t turn around without touching somebody. That’s the way a house should be.” Her eyes are big, inconsolable. A spider headache spreads out in fine branches over my skull. She is etching spider legs into the icy bone. She pries open my head and my fists and crams into them responsibility for time, responsibility for intervening oceans.”
The mom is under some sad spell then lifts and it is okay. I know this so well.
Secret spell: little dog: name to foo gods. First daughter of first daughter. I have been called this too. Sigh.
At the Western Palace
(118) “And at last Moon Orchid looked at her — two old women with faces like mirrors.”
(120) “Through the spaces you could see light and the room and each other. ‘Oh, there’s more. There’s more,’ said Moon Orchid happily. She picked up another paper cutout and blew on it. It was the scholar who always carries a fan; her breath shook its blue feathers….” ahhh this glee at showing all the little trinkets. Ah.
(133) “They must have many interesting savage things to say, raised as they’d been in the wildernss. They made rough movements, and their accents were not American exactly, but peasant like their mother’s, as if they had come from a village deep inside China.”
(148) “She could tell by their eagerness for change that this was a waiting room.”
(153) “Moon Orchid was so ashamed, she held her hands over her face. She wished she ould also hide her dappled hands. Her husband looked like one of the ghosts passing the car windows, and she must look like a ghost from China. They had indeed entered the land of ghosts, and they had become ghosts.”
(154) Brave Orchid asks why he didn’t tell her he wasn’t sending for her or coming back. “‘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.’”
- Why did he keep paying then? A tax. Something he owed to buy — to continue to have — this nw life. Monetary or not I fucking get it.
(155) (“‘Long ago,’ she explained to her children, ‘when the emperors had four wives, the wife who lost in battle was sent to the Northern Palace. Her feet would sink little prints into the snow.’)”
End of census day; began int he middle I believe.
A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe
Mother cut tongue.
(163) “In fact, it wasn’t me my brother told about going to Los Angeles; one of my sisters told me what he’d told her. His version fo the story may be better than mine because of its bareness, not twisted into designs. The hearer can carry it tucked away without it taking up much room.”
“Long ago in China, knot-makers tied strings into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlaws this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.”
(164) “Sometimes I felt very proud that my mother committed such a powerful act upon me. At other times I was terrified — the first thing my mother did when she saw me was to cut my tongue.”
(166) “The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl.”
(171) “My father asks, ‘Why is it I can hear Chinese from blocks away? Is i that I understand the language? Or is it they talk loud?’”
(172) “Normal Chinese women’s voices are strong and bossy. We American-Chinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American-feminine. Apparently we whispered even more softly than the eAmericans. Once a year the teachers referred my sister and me to speech therapy, but our voices would straighten out, unpredictably normal, for the therapists.”
(176) “She stood still, and I did not want to look at her face anymore; I hated fragility.”
(179) “QUarts of tears but no words. I grabbed her by the shoulder. I could feel bones. The light was coming in queerly through the frosted glass with the chicken wire embedded in it.”
*184) “‘NO, they won’t. THey’re promising that nobody is going to go to jail or get deported. They’ll give you citizenship as a reward for turning yourself in, for your honesty.’”
…
‘Where can they send us now? Hong KOng? Taiwan? I’ve never been to Hong Kong or Taiwan. The Big Six? Where?’ We don’t belong answers since the Revolution. THe old China has disappeared while we’ve been away.”
(189) “Sometimes when a bunch of tules and reeds and grasses mixd and blew and waves, I was terrified that it was she, that she was carrying them or parting them.”
(189) “I had invented a quill pen out of a peacock feather, but stopped writing with it when I saw that it waved like a one-eyed slough plant.”
(202) “ANd I don’t want to listen to any more of your stories; they avhave no logic. They scramble me up. You lie with stories. You won’t tell me a story and then say, ‘THis is a true story,’ or, ‘This is just a story.’ I can’t tell the difference. I don’t even know what your real names are. I can’t tell what’s real and what you make up.”
(204) “And suddenly I got very confused and lonely because I was at that moment telling her my list, and in the telling, it grew. No higher listened. No listener but myself.
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