Maxine Hong Kingston

Helena Grice

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719064036
  9780719064029
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847795632
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: Literature

Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular -- and controversial -- writers in the Asian American literary tradition. In this volume Grice traces Kingston's development as a writer and cultural activist through both ethnic and feminist discourses, investigating her novels, occasional writings and her two-book 'life-writing project'.

The publication of The Woman Warrior not only propelled Kingston into the mainstream literary limelight, but also precipitated a vicious and ongoing controversy in Asian American letters over the authenticity -- or fakery -- of her cultural references. Grice traces the debates through the appearance of China Men (1981), as well as the novels, Tripmaster Monkey (1989) and her most recent work, The Fifth Book of Peace.

Maxine Hong Kingston will be of value to students and academics researching in the areas of diaspora writing, contemporary American and Asian- Amercianfiction, as well as feminist and postcolonial literature.

1

Contexts and intertexts

I want to change the world through artistic pacifist means. (Maxine Hong Kingston, 1991)

‘The beginning is hers’: the political and literary legacies of Maxine Hong Kingston

In 1989, Maxine Hong Kingston expressed her pleasure at the blossoming of Asian American literature: ‘Something wonderful is happening right at this moment … Amy Tan published The Joy Luck Club, and Hisaye Yamamoto published Seventeen Syllables, Frank Chin has a collection of short stories, and I think maybe Ruth-Anne Lumm McKunn just came out with her book on Chinese families. Jessica Hagedorn’s in the spring, and Bharati Mukherjee is in the fall. She won the National Book Circle Critics Award. Something great must be going on’.¹ In 1990 she acknowledged that ‘I do think I probably helped to inspire [this]’.² Some fourteen years later, her long awaited fifth book, appropriately entitled The Fifth Book of Peace, already promises to spawn as much critical debate, even controversy, as her earlier work. Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular – and controversial – writers in the Asian American literary tradition, who has been by turn celebrated and excoriated. Kingston’s development as a writer and cultural activist in relation to both ethnic and feminist traditions, occurs across the range of her expanding oeuvre: her two novels, her occasional writings and her two-book life-writing project. How do we account for the phenomenal success of The Woman Warrior – the most widely read title in American universities today – a success that not only propelled Kingston into the mainstream literary limelight, but also precipitated a vicious and ongoing controversy in Asian American letters over the authenticity, or fakery, of Kingston’s cultural references? Why is it that Kingston’s critics have so often solely concentrated on this dimension of her work? In this study, I will suggest that the debates over the veracity, or otherwise, of Kingston’s cultural sources, and the vast body of critical material on the feminism–mother/daughter nexus in The Woman Warrior, has simultaneously obscured other, perhaps more pertinent and abiding preoccupations in Kingston’s work. This book, then, will locate Kingston within two interconnected, specific cultural contexts: Chinese American history and politics; and the emergence of ethnic feminism in a post-civil rights era. It will contend that Kingston’s body of work not only raises important questions concerning cultural authenticity, the role of different interpretive communities and canon formation, but that increasingly her oeuvre offers her readers a manifesto of pacifism for a contemporary era.

Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan

The abiding critical focus on The Woman Warrior at the expense of the rest of Kingston’s work I mention above has also ultimately been suggestive of a closer literary relationship between Kingston and her literary successor, the Chinese American woman writer Amy Tan, than can actually be identified. The twinning of Kingston and Tan as the literary purveyors of Chinese American mother-and-daughterhood has long since been ossified in delineations of the development of Asian American women’s writing. The success of each writer on the basis of their contributions to and participations in American matrilineal discourse, though, is all the more remarkable when we consider that there is a gap of some thirteen years between the publication of their key narratives The Woman Warrior (1976) and The Joy Luck Club (1989) respectively. Yet, in 1989, when The Joy Luck Club was published, The Woman Warrior was still on the trade paperback bestseller list. Obviously, there are similarities between Kingston and Tan beyond their success as Chinese American women writers. For instance, both writers have suffered from the contradictory reception of their first books: both were largely lauded for their work by mainstream reviewers and critics but at the same time received far more cautious reactions – and in Kingston’s case some famously hostile ones (as I will later detail) – from Asian American writers and critics. In her seminal 1990 study, Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry, Amy Ling reads the first novels of the pair together, and describes The Joy Luck Club as ‘in parts an echo and a response and in parts a continuation and expansion’ of The Woman Warrior.³ The persistent focus upon mothers and daughters in both texts is clearly a similarity too tempting for many critics, who, like Wendy Ho, have noticed that ‘Tan’s book can fruitfully be compared to The Woman Warrior. As heroic paper daughters in quest of their mother’s stories, Tan and Kingston empower not only their mothers but also themselves and their racial/ethnic communities through a psychic and oral/literary birthing that keeps alive the intimate, ever-changing record of tragedies, resistances, and joy luck for all people’.⁴ Sau-ling Wong and Jeffery Santa-Ana write:

It is not unusual to find readers who consider the two books practically synonymous with Asian American women’s literature (or even Asian American literature), unbeholden to any context. It is much more productive, not to mention intellectually defensible, however, to understand them within the framework of Asian American women’s writing, and their focus on mother–daughter relationships as part of a feminist agenda to preserve memory and establish a matrilineal tradition.⁵

Yet here are two writers who are less between worlds than of two separate ones. In terms of age, they are a generation apart: at 60-something, Maxine Hong Kingston could almost have literally as well as figuratively mothered the just-50 Amy Tan; whereas Kingston grew up in the post-war environment of Stockton, California, Tan was just a child in the sixties. Kingston’s academic life at Berkeley spanned the early to mid 1960s, and so her involvement and interest in ethnic, pacifist and feminist activism occurred at the same time as a period of especially vigorous political activity on the University of California, Berkeley campus. Each writer has also followed a different physical trajectory. Kingston is a California writer, and she has even been anthologised in collections of writing about California and the West Coast (despite heading for Hawai‘i at the height of Vietnam). Tan was born in Oakland, California, and grew up there, despite a sojourn in Switzerland with her family. Of the two, Tan is considerably better known in a commercial sense, and her novels have had more popular appeal than Kingston’s. Kingston has undoubtedly had more critical acclaim, and is more likely to appear on university and college curricula. It is now lore in Asian American circles that Kingston is the most widely taught living writer in US colleges today.

All that said, the phenomenal success of Amy Tan’s book The Joy Luck Club – and probably her later novels published in the 1990s and 2000s – must nevertheless partly be attributed to The Woman Warrior’s concern with feminist issues such as emerging womanhood, identity and self, which helped to create a market for mother–daughter writing. The coupling of The Woman Warrior and The Joy Luck Club in critical discourse also rests upon the perceived similarity of narrative perspective upon issues of inter-cultural (mis)understanding. This obscures a real difference in narrative approach and complexity though; what has been characterised elsewhere as The Woman Warrior’s sophisticated ‘interrogative modality’ versus The Joy Luck Club’s ‘declarative’, epistemologically less problematic, narrative mode. In fact, it is the formal complexity of The Woman Warrior, and the challenges it poses as a studied text, which largely account for its ubiquity in critical explorations of auto/biography, feminist self-inscription, women’s self-actualisation and maternality.⁶

The bind of the mother–daughter nexus, or, where it all began

The appearance of The Woman Warrior on the literary landscape in 1976 caused nothing less than a revolution in Asian American literary and feminist studies. It became an almost immediate crossover hit, winning several awards in its year of publication, and virtually guaranteeing Kingston a celebrated place as the undisputed sovereign of Asian American writing.⁷ But its impact did not end there. Since 1976, The Woman Warrior ‘has generated a veritable industry of critical analysis’;⁸ and has subsequently spawned a whole new sub-genre of Asian American fiction: the fiction of matrilineage.

The evolution of a tradition of writing about matrilineage within Asian American studies also coincided with a growth of interest in the mother–daughter dyad by mainstream feminist writers. It is important to note that the year which saw the publication of Kingston’s text was the same year that a series of seminal feminist publications appeared: Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and as Experience, Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur, and Jean Baker Miller’s Toward a New Psychology of Women. Years immediately preceding these witnessed Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique (1963), Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex and Anne Koedt’s The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm (all 1970). Within the realm of literature, feminist fiction such as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time was also published in 1976. So, The Woman Warrior emerged co-terminously with the emergence of feminist fiction, and at the height of feminist theorising, in America. But was this just coincidence?⁹

Although the development of Asian American feminism shares a genealogy with mainstream feminism, at the same time it both lags behind and departs from it. Contemporaneous with the consolidation of feminist agendas both within and beyond academia, women of colour were engaged in a project to both dismantle patriarchal paradigms and to question white feminism’s race blindness.¹⁰ As Nellie Wong paradigmatically asked, ‘How can we separate our race from our sex, our sex from our race?’ Maxine Hong Kingston’s writing occupies an especially important place in the recent history of feminist thought, in particular the watershed period of the late 1970s and early 1980s when many mainstream feminist thinkers were becoming aware (or at least were being made aware) of the insularity of some of their traditional frames of reference, acknowledging that issues of gender cannot be separated from those of ethnicity, class and culture. In many ways, Kingston’s work is symptomatic of a feminist understanding of all identities as mobile and continually open to re-negotiation. For instance, the treatment of gender identity in Kingston’s writing encompasses a whole series of boundary crossings: the contradictory and conflicting definitions of womanhood that a Chinese American woman is forced to confront and the complexities of gender identity for Chinese American women, given their exoticisation by WASP culture. As woman of colour feminist movements began to challenge mainstream feminism in this period, so ethnic feminist texts like Kingston’s began to gain prominence and attention from white feminist readers too, and something of a two-way exchange began to occur.¹¹ Much of this early feminist work centred upon issues of maternity, as an integral part of female identity and as a metaphor of feminism itself. For example, the Asian American contributions to the major 1981 ethnic feminist anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, often included a focus upon issues of motherhood, such as: Nellie Wong’s essay on growing up; Genny Lim’s piece on versions of womanhood; Mitsuye Yamada’s pieces on the hardships of her mother’s life and the connections between motherhood and stereotyping; and Merle Woo’s ‘Letter to Ma’, in which she explicitly addressed the complexities of the mother–daughter relationship.

The impact of The Woman Warrior undoubtedly helped to create a new commercial market for Asian American books about maternality, and since 1976 many Asian American texts have been published which to a greater or lesser extent, focus upon mothering and daughtering. In addition to Amy Tan’s novels, these include: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981); SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café (1990); Gail Tsukiyama’s Women of the Silk (1991); Julie Shigekuni’s A Bridge Between Us (1995) and Anita Rau Badami’s Tamarind Mem (1996). Other texts have taken mother loss as their theme, such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982); Adeline Yen Mah’s Falling Leaves: The Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter (1997); Patti Kim’s A Cab Called Reliable (1997) and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging (1997). Nevertheless, Kingston cannot be said to have single-handedly spawned a revival in Asian American women’s writing; nor, as Sau-ling Wong reminds us, can the invention of Chinese American matrilineal discourse be solely attributed to The Woman Warrior. As Wong writes, although The Joy Luck Club is ‘something of an accessible “Woman Warrior without tears”’, Tan is ‘not so much revisiting Kingston territory as sharing a concern long of interest to many other Chinese American women writers’.¹² Wong cites several antecedents to Kingston, including Helena Kuo’s I’ve Come a Long Way (1942) and Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945). Elsewhere, in an article aptly entitled ‘Chinese American Women Writers: The Tradition Behind Maxine Hong Kingston’ (1990), Amy Ling also refers to works by Han Suyin, Lin Tai-yi, the Eaton sisters, Mai-mai Sze, the Lin sisters, Janet Lim, Virginia Lee, Diana Chang and Anna Chennault, and wryly comments that ‘Kingston is not an isolated Athena’.¹³

If this seems an overly schematic way to approach the theoretical and creative impact of The Woman Warrior (or, perhaps more accurately, to dispute it), then this is due to the tendency both within Asian American feminist criticism and in feminist literary criticism of Kingston’s work more generally, to characterise the evolution of Asian American matrilineal discourse as ‘pre- and post-Woman Warrior’, as Sau-ling Wong puts it.¹⁴ Indeed, delineations of Asian American feminist writing almost always pinpoint the publication of Kingston’s text as the pivotal moment in its maturation, from Shirley Lim’s seminal essay, ‘Asian American Daughters Rewriting Asian Maternal Texts’ (1991) onwards.¹⁵ This is partly, of course, a political imperative; as Wong puts it: ‘Identifyi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series editor’s foreword
• Chronology
• 1 Contexts and intertexts
• 2 The Woman Warrior (1976)
• 3 China Men (1980)
• 4 Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989)
• 5 Writing place – the politics of locality: Hawai’i One Summer (1987/1998)
• 6 The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) and To Be the Poet (2002)
• 7 Critical overview
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index