The Woman Warrior

Kingston recalls more stories her mother told her as a child, this time “talk-stories” of woman warriors. These folkloric fighters avenged injustices, founded martial arts disciplines, and defended their people. Being a warrior woman is presented as a great but impossible good that sharply contrasts with the woman’s traditional fate as “a wife and a slave” (24).

After recalling her mother’s stories about the heroic Fa Mu Lan, Kingston makes an excursion into a fantasy of her own. She imagines receiving a “call” as a child, in the form of “a bird that flew over our roof. In the brush drawings it looks like the ideograph for ‘human,’ two black wings” (24). She follows this bird up a mountain, where she meets a sage old man and woman. They offer her a choice: She can return to her family, or she can stay with them and train as a woman warrior. She chooses to stay.

Her training is long and arduous. Over many years she learns to sit perfectly still, to leap over buildings, and to hide and fight in imitation of animals. Every new year she looks in on her family through a magic water gourd, and the old couple gifts her a bead.

When she is 14 she makes a sacred journey through the mountains, alone and without food. This is the land of the white tigers; she hears them moving around her at night. She travels long and hard. At a critical moment, she meets a rabbit who jumps into her cooking fire, sacrificing itself for her.

At last her toil leads her to a mystical vision:

“I saw two people made of gold dancing the earth’s dances. They turned so perfectly that together they were the axis of the earth’s turning. They were light; they were molten, changing gold—Chinese lion dancers, African lion dancers in midstep. I heard high Javanese bells deepen in midring to Indian bells, Hindu Indian, American Indian. […] I am watching the centuries pass in moments because suddenly I understand time, which is spinning and fixed like the North Star” (32).

The dancers transform into the old man and the old woman, and take her back to the mountain, but she has seen something of the true nature of reality, and now, when hungry, has the power to “stare at ordinary people and see their light and gold” (33).

The sages then train her in “dragon ways,” a mystic discipline in which “[y]ou have to infer the whole dragon from the parts you can see and touch”(34). She learns from the natural world, seeing the mountains as a dragon’s forehead and wood grain as a dragon’s sinuous motions. This part of her training introduces her to what can’t be comprehended: “I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes” (34).

The woman warrior’s life takes a turn when, in looking in on her family (including a childhood friend who has married her in absentia) at the new year, she sees a greedy baron conscripting her husband and brother for his army. Enraged, Kingston asks to leave the mountain to rescue them, but the sages remind her that she is training to save many, not just her family. She agrees to complete her education.

When she finally returns home, her parents are delighted to see her, and before she departs to overthrow the corrupt baron and emperor, they carve a document of vengeance into her back. This list of names and grievances also records who she is and where she’s from, so that she may one day return.

A magical white horse arrives to carry Kingston away. Disguised as a man, she raises a heroic army and travels the countryside righting wrongs. Her battles are mythic: She kills a general who turns out to be a snake, and she fights with airborne swords she draws out of the sky.

During her adventures, her husband appears, and they have a secret son together. When the baby is one month old, they perform a ritual for him, and the husband carries him home to Kingston’s parents.

Lonely and distracted, Kingston loses a fight against a wicked prince, who steals the magic beads she received from the sages. As she pursues him, he flings the beads at her but nothing happens. He leads her to the capital, where she deposes the emperor and defeats the evil baron. At last, she rides back home to greet her family and reunite with her husband and child.

The mythic story ends, and we return to the struggles of Kingston’s actual life. She describes the sexism she encountered in her family and immigrant community, and the racism she experienced growing up in America. As a child, she is enraged by her family’s disdain for girls—her uncle takes her brothers out to buy toys and leaves her and her sister at home; she’s forced at school to bend to American ideas of femininity. More frustrating still, she finds that she can’t draw on her imagined warrior self to combat the worldly evils around her: “When urban renewal tore down my parents’ laundry and paved over the slum for a parking lot, I only made up gun and knife fantasies and did nothing useful” (57). She and her family also grieve their powerlessness to help their relatives in China who suffer under the communist regime.

While her mythic self is a full person, able to complete and redeem her feminine side through masculine valor, Kingston considers her American life “a disappointment” (54)—both to her and her family, in different ways. But, she concludes, “the swordswoman and myself 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” (62-63).

Kingston now branches into a telling of her mother’s life. At the age of 37, with her husband away in America and her first two children dead, Kingston’s mother, Brave Orchid, goes to Canton to study medicine and become a doctor. Even pretending to be a decade younger, she is the oldest of her classmates, and she works hard to reach the top of her class. Kingston recounts her mother’s pleasure at having private space, an innovation for a rural woman used to sharing sleeping quarters: “The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own” (73).

As a student, Brave Orchid has a run-in with a “Sitting Ghost.” A bedroom in her dormitory is reputed to be haunted, and she sleeps there one night to prove her bravery. A great hairy shapeless being sits on her chest and paralyses her. But she taunts it, and in the morning exorcises it with the help of her friends. Her friends soothe her by calling her spirit back into her body, using the traditional practice of reciting a person’s line of descent when they’re upset or ill. But they modify this ritual, not wishing to summon Brave Orchid’s spirit back to her home village instead of the medical school. “Maybe that,” Kingston speculates, “is why she lost her home village and did not reach her husband for fifteen years” (89).

Upon her graduation, Brave Orchid returns to her home village and is greeted with great respect. She becomes an honored doctor with a reputation for amazing healing powers. In her new role she has a number of adventures, from an encounter with a strange half-man, half-ape creature in the forest to the purchase of a slave girl to be her assistant. Young girls, even infants, are often sold as slaves; Kingston recalls that she and her sister were jealous of the esteem in which Brave Orchid held her former slave.

Brave Orchid also works as a midwife. In this capacity she encounters some tragedies, notably a baby born without an anus who is left in a shed to die. This story traumatizes the young Kingston, who even as an adult fears bathroom apparitions of weeping babies struggling to defecate: “To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance” (102). Brave Orchid never mentions killing baby girls, but Kingston notes that this was a not uncommon practice, as girls were sometimes suffocated at birth in boxes of ash.

Brave Orchid details another encounter with ghosts called Sit Dom Kuei, twin columns of smoke that rose up and almost knocked her off a footbridge. This story provides the segue to other tales of ghost encounters: the ability to eat well, it seems, gives one power over ghosts. She next tells the story of several legendary figures who defeated ghosts by eating them—once by eating a ghost repeatedly, as it turned up night after night in the form of multitudinous frogs.

Brave Orchid also recalls the story of the “crazy lady” who was stoned to death before she could depart for America. As a refugee hiding in the mountains, Brave Orchid tried to rescue an eccentric old lady who her fellow refugees suspected of signaling Japanese planes, but she could not save her from a brutal death. This is her last major memory of her life in China.

Kingston follows her mother’s immigration with stories of her own childhood in California, which was full of both ghosts and improbable foods. She remembers her aunt giving her a bag of candy to cover the smell of her mother chopping up a skunk in the kitchen, and a pickled paw that her mother said was a bear’s, whose fluids her family used to treat bruises.

She also remembers ghostliness pervading her life. As a child she and her family perceived all the non-Chinese people around them as ghosts: “Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree-Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts” (113).

In the last part of the chapter, Kingston describes a visit she made to her mother as an adult. While Kingston sleeps, her mother sits by her and stares until she wakes up. They then have a long conversation about their shared dependence on work and their differing senses of home. Kingston’s mother tells her that the communist government has taken away the last of their familial land in China. Though Kingston wishes to think of herself—and everyone—as a citizen of the world, she feels the pressure of her mother’s roots: “She pries open my head and my fists and crams into them responsibility for time, responsibility for intervening oceans” (126).