The Woman Warrior

In a series of stories from her childhood, Kingston tells of her developing relationship with different forms of communication. Her mother cuts her frenum (the strip of skin under the tongue) when she’s a baby to make her a good speaker, but she struggles to speak, not only as a child but as an adult: “A dumbness—a shame—still cracks my voice in two” (191). She makes images silent as well, covering all her school art with a thick coat of black paint, which she imagines as a theater curtain about to rise on a magical scene.

Her silence is most pronounced at her American school; at the Chinese school she attends after-hours, she can speak more easily, if not without struggle. A clash between Chinese and American contexts often interferes with her voice, but she can often clearly perceive what she can’t say. For instance, when her mother tells her to go demand retribution from a druggist who accidentally sent their family a box of pills (which mistake, Brave Orchid believes, will put a curse on the children if unatoned for), she knows that the candy the pharmacist ends up giving them represents not his comprehension but his incomprehension of their culture.

Her frustration with her speech difficulties emerges most strongly in her hatred for another Chinese girl at her American school. This girl is completely silent and, in Kingston’s opinion, weak and pathetic. After school one day, Kingston corners her in a bathroom and torments her, pinching her and pulling her hair to try to get her to speak. The girl refuses, and Kingston becomes more desperate to provoke her. Soon they’re both crying, but the girl never speaks.

Kingston notes that the world can be unjust, as in the aftermath of this incident she develops a mysterious illness and spends 18 months in bed. She embraces this time of peace. When she emerges, she finds the girl she tormented hasn’t changed at all and now seems even more inappropriately little-girlish. Kingston tells us that this girl never really grew up but stayed home her whole life, cared for by her sister and her parents, as would have been the custom in China.

Kingston discusses unspeakability and silence both in her family and in Chinese culture more generally. Both taboo subjects and dearly held traditions went unspoken in her household, where the children watched their mother perform holiday rituals without context or warning.

Growing up Kingston thought sanity and insanity were distinguished by talking and not talking, and she perceived much insanity in her immediate surroundings, mostly among women. She describes several women she knew, differently mad, from the woman next door who emitted the “silver heat” of silent insanity to Crazy Mary, whose parents left her in China as an infant and brought her to America, mad, at 20. There is also Pee-ah-Nah, a homeless madwoman who would chase the town’s children.

Because of her illness, her silence, and her vivid imagination, Kingston believes that she is destined to be among these madwomen. She stores up a catalog of everything she wants to say but can’t, and bit by bit tries to tell her mother some of these fears and fantasies. Her mother mostly rejects these offerings.

It is not until Kingston believes that her parents are trying to marry her to a mentally retarded boy in her class that she finally finds the will to speak. She stands up at the dinner table one evening and launches into a tirade, refusing marriage and announcing her plans to go to college. Unimpressed, her mother counters some of Kingston’s more melodramatic assumptions: They had no intention of marrying her to the boy, and they don’t wish to prevent her from getting an education. But the rift is real. Kingston leaves home and in the process loses something vital: the particular kind of truth her mother presents in her talk-stories. Kingston writes, “I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation” (235).

Kingston ends her memoir with the legend of another woman warrior, Ts’ai Yen, who was kidnapped by barbarians, fought alongside them, and raised children among them. One evening, hearing the barbarians singing, Ts’ai Yen began singing her own song. Twelve years after her kidnapping, “Ts’ai Yen was ransomed. […] She brought her songs back from the savage lands, and one of the three that has been passed down to us is ‘Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe’ […] It translated well” (243). Brave Orchid’s talk-story way of seeing is not altogether lost to Kingston.