Hong-Kingston

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. NY: Vintage, 1989.

HK won the National Book Critics CIrcle Award for Nonfiction for this, but it appears about as fictional as Henry Miller, LF Celine, or Notes from the Underground. HK narrates 1st-person, but maintains narrative irony most of the time.

The narrator is not reliable. She lapses into various sentimentalisms, but it's difficult to weed out what one's intended to discard. As she eventually complains to her mother, "And I don't want to listen to any more of your stories; they have no logic. Ey 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 Ha! You can't stop me from talking. You tried to cut off my tongue, but it didn't work" (202).

Many, many of the sentimentalisms involve severely defensive attitudes towards men. These seem naturally part of of the extreme misogyny attributed to the males in the story, a misogyny that appears. But then, the rather absurd racial observations and mythic observations are repeated verbatim the same way, and by the end one gets an overall impressoin that HK has an extreme commitment to the kind of Truth she was impressed with in anglo-american schools or from yanqui people. She seems to equate that with her escape from the woman-slave continuum. At the same time, that seems to have some relation to the earlier Woman Warrior fantasy that descends from mamma's bedtime stories.

One does feel for the characters in this book, although I find my sympathies often cut short by their bizarre ideation -- or the spooky mixture of hallucination and habitual casual lying. This is very much the point, though -- the combination of the lying and the whole "warrior woman" thing, an MO for responding to the terror of what must have amounted to an ongoing rejection. In some ways I felt that the rigor of the story and its commentary on the cultures suffered for HK's own unwillingness to call a line between truth and fiction.

HK seems fairly aware of all this, BTW, though this reads in many ways like an early work. If the list of things about which the narrator wishes to confront her mother is autobiographical, it may also have been an early outline for this book