Joan Henriksen in a clipping without the newspaper's name: 'Chinese-Americans always "looked"- at least to this WASP observer- as if they exactly fit the stereotypes I heard as I was growing up. They were "inscrutable.'' They were serene, withdrawn, neat, clean and hard-workers. The Woman Warrior, because of this stereotyping, is a double delight to read.' She goes on to say how nicely the book diverges from the stereotype. How dare they call their ignorance our inscrutability!
Going through these reviews creates a strong impression of how the reactions to an author's work can be even more influential, as these reviews likely reached more people than those who actually read The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. The responsibility of a writer becomes even more urgent yet can be paralyzing, as when the stereotypical reviews continue and outnumber the more accurate ones. Kingston's reactions to each review is as revealing and edifying as the stories making up her novel, emphasizing her Americanness, which has often been historically denied to people such as Asian Americans whose appearance can evoke connotations of foreignness, even within positive reviews:
Kate Herriges in an ecstatically complimentary review in The Boston Phoenix: 'Subtle, delicate yet sturdy, it [The Woman Warrior] is ineffably Chinese.' No. No. No. Don't you hear the American slang? Don't you see the American settings? Don't you see the way the Chinese myths have been transmuted by America? No wonder the young Asian American writers are so relentlessly hip and slangy. (How I do like Jane Howard's phrase in her Mademoiselle review: 'Irrevocably Californian.' I hope the thirty per cent of reviewers who wrote sensible pieces accept my apologies for not praising them sufficiently here.)
The Woman Warrior is now a classic book that I read in my high school curriculum, and the reason why Kingston is yearning for Americanness seems very clear as with personal experience came assumptions of my own identity by other people. The struggles Kingston lists with every review resonates with me, as sometimes, it is difficult for people of other races to see past my race when approaching me for friendship or camaraderie, and I often leave encounters with a sense they wanted something specific from me, something that is rarely descriptive of who I really am. An undergraduate looking to include me in a white-majority classroom might target me to befriend and begin by asking me my Chinese name, without any mention of my personal interests, sounding friendly might mean having people freely approach to touch my hair, and canvassing at a neighborhood event during an internship at a senator's office might mean being approached by a woman from a nearby church looking to commiserate about the negatives of legalizing prostitution, which immediately put into my mind assumptions about being conservative as a light-skinned Asian American. Kingston touches upon the power of appearance to influence real-life treatment as she states:
Pridefully enough, I believed that I had written with such power that the reality and humanity of my characters would bust through any stereotypes of them. Simplemindedly, I wore a sweat-shirt for the dust-jacket photo, to deny the exotic. I had not calculated how blinding stereotyping is, how stupefying...
Why must I 'represent' anyone besides myself? Why should I be denied an individual artistic vision? And I do not think I wrote a 'negative' book, as the Chinese American reviewer said; but suppose I had? Suppose I had been so wonderfully talented that I wrote a tragedy? Are we Chinese Americans to deny ourselves tragedy? If we give up tragedy in order to make a good impression on Caucasians, we have lost a battle. Oh, well, I'm certain that some day when a great body of Chinese American writing becomes published and known, then readers will no longer have to put such a burden on each book that comes out. Readers can see the variety of ways for Chinese Americans to be...
Maxine Hong Kingston makes a compelling argument for the importance of freedom of artistic expression, and that it might be necessary to weather criticism on all sides, even from one's own ethnic community. Her thoughts inspire me to write anything I want, which is motivational and helps boost self-esteem, even as her experience, from the 1982 edition of the book this essay is included in, involves extensive criticism and confusing reviews. The sheer time and effort put into resisting stereotyping does shear off the seconds and minutes of her own life as with myself, and one might ask, why can't she just care less about what other people think? An answer might be that she hopes to advance the perception of Chinese Americans as a whole which deeply affects our real-life treatment, even as she is torn between that and writing as a source of pure freedom. She does highlight the positives of releasing her book, such as the support from "thirty-percent of reviewers" and fan letters from Chinese American women on the basis of childhood relatability or a simple eagerness to tell stories about themselves, spurred on by Kingston's lead.
Rereading a few of the stories this week from The Woman Warrior meant that they became richer and even better than they were in my memory, as both documentation and entertainment that speaks true to personal experience of myself and others. The concept of voice and silence in the Chinese American experience is something that reoccurs in multiple forms, and they bring evocative historical and mythological concepts to life that I haven't thought about in a while as that cultural heritage becomes more distant especially for busy students in isolation. As The Woman Warrior originally came out in 1972, and the essay "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers" is published in a book from 1982, the vehemence of Kingston's concerns may seem dated, as immigrant diaspora in these days are often willing to embrace their heritage in America or even prefer it to American culture (potentially the influence of growing up near enclaves within and outside school). But much of the struggles of Woman Warrior's narrator are the same today, as Kingston's autofiction, a term coined in 1977 a couple years after the novel's publication that seems to describe what critics may have relegated to a purgatory between fiction and nonfiction previously, seamlessly mirrors my life and others'. Her ability to transcend the mundane processes of daily life with incandescent moments such as when her narrator brutally bullies a silent girl in the bathroom before falling sick mysteriously for a year and a half, and frequent striking descriptions of legends, community, and family mark her writing with a bracing truth and light that affirms a common Chinese American tale throughout. For me, Maxine Hong Kingston is one of the best at balancing this relatable longing for creative freedom and crafting an accurate and beautiful narrative that has found the audience who truly needed it. Wading through a timesink of ignorant reviews such as those she lists in her essay that overlook the truth of her experience means that those reviewers don't get to stay ignorant.
A recent article in the New Yorker documenting Maxine Hong Kingston's life and times goes into depth about the vast influence The Woman Warrior has had on American culture, inspiring everyone from Barack Obama's and Ocean Vuong's writing to her war veterans' writing group, even if her work itself has become low-profile in colleges and bookstores. I found myself happy that she is still around (nursing the very unlikely hope we might cross paths), retiring in Hawaii in the molten gateway of Honolulu and its lush ecological landscape, having taught her lessons in this novel and essay about the complexities of written race relations and how easily we misinterpret one another -- reaching, still, across a vast ocean of possibilities.
Citations:
Kingston, Maxine Hong. "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers." Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities. London and Basinstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1982.
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