A Girlhood among Ghosts

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston released this combination of memoir and Chinese magical realism in 1975, when she was 35 years old. The writing feels like material that was simmering inside her for a long time before she finally got it out in the way she wanted to, in a way that could say something clear and real to a reader like mixed-race me, who grew up nowhere near Asian-American families of first- and second-generation immigrants.

The unnamed female narrator’s family owns not a restaurant but a laundry in which all members work in hot uncomfortable conditions.  Life for Chinese immigrants is confining, with the weight of unexplained traditions and family secrets and the restricted place of girls and women. Talk about mixed messages: her educated mother told her, “You can’t eat straight A’s.”

The author and her brother and sister are caught at the meeting point of clashes between the Chinese family way of doing things and American daily life at school and in stores, the different meanings of silence at home and abroad, the clashes with Chinese fresh off the boat and traumatized Japanese-Americans just released from concentration camps, and the unknowing perceptions that oblivious Euro-Americans have of anybody that’s different. And then there are the “Who Am I” questions readers of mixed races will connect with:

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?

How to separate, indeed? Trust me, these are questions to make your chest tighten with frustration. It is exhausting to wrestle with these questions and natural to set them aside, wondering if they are unanswerable, too complex, with too much information just missing or liable to be charged with too much emotion to come up with a rational answer. 

The writing is powerful. The first chapter starts very intense, about rape, suicide and family abandonment. The following chapters deal have sad episodes and painful themes. The author makes no claim the book is how to find your own place in the midst of all this heritage, all this obscure tradition, murky “national characteristics versus your own life.

I enjoyed reading this, but it was not always easy. The story is mixed with old tales from Chinese culture and uses odd and unexpected metaphors that bring depth to the story. Critics will complain she is appropriating tales from Chinese traditional culture or getting facts wrong. Facts, schmax, I think artists can extract whatever nuggets they want from whatever mines they have the guts to take a pick to.