Woman Warrior Essay: Sarah Taylor

The Translation of “Talk-story” to the Written Word: Finding a Self in The Woman Warrior

She was spinning. Round and round the room. Past the jelly cupboard, past the window, past the front door, another window, the side board, the keeping room door, the dry sink, the stove, back to the jelly cupboard. Paul D sat at the table watching her drift into view then disappear behind his back, turning like a slow but steady wheel. (Morrison 159)

As Sethe, the main character of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, circles Paul D, almost binding him to his chair, she grinds out a story by telling many smaller pieces that remain on the periphery, but add to the larger, more difficult narrative she is trying to express. She tells the complex and intense account of why she murdered her baby to save it from slavery. Sometimes, in Beloved, remembering the past and telling stories bonds the characters or creates happiness, but this central story that all the other smaller stories embellish, only causes pain. “It was not a story to pass on” (Morrison 274).

Although Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiography, The Woman Warrior may seem radically different from Beloved, Kingston also uses the act of story telling, or “talk-story,” to show the complexity, rewards, and hardships of life. Regardless of this similarity, the endings and the messages that each novel conveys, despite their similar emphasis on the impact of telling stories on people’s lives, go in incomparable directions. Kingston takes all of her stories, even those not “to be pass[ed] on,” and chooses which to tell to the world. She uses the revengeful and liberating act of telling to find her self and her voice. Young Maxine’s voice, a “crippled animal running on broken legs” (169), took awhile to develop into Kingston’s amazingly articulate and complicated writer’s voice. Despite Kingston’s initial trouble with pronouncing the word “I,” she writes an autobiography, a place where she can speak well, make all of her confessions, get her revenge, and attempt to create a symbol or piece of her self.

Surprising for an autobiography, Kingston devotes very little space to her actual individual voice, (perhaps related to her trouble with “I”). Instead, her autobiography consists of a conglomeration of external stories about the women who have had some sort of influence in her life: her no-name aunt, the woman warrior Fa Mu Lan, her mother, her aunt Moon Orchid, Maxine as a child, and the silent school girl. Although the majority of The Woman Warrior does not seem internal, Kingston reveals her first person voice in several places throughout her autobiography (the last chapter, the second halves of chapters one and three and periodically throughout the whole book). Kingston’s mode of story telling creates her autobiographical self. The stories she chooses to tell, ones that had an effect on her, and the people she tells stories about, combined with her manner of connecting these stories—humor and restraint—form a larger story, a story that attempts to reflect her self. When she follows the traditional, idealized legend about the woman warrior with the comment, “My American life has been such a disappointment” (45), she connects these events of the past or of myth with the present and her American reality and produces a new and changing picture. In the beginning of her autobiography, she directly asks:

Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies? (5)

This seems to be what Kingston wonders about her self throughout her entire autobiography. She struggles to understand herself and what in her background produced her self. In a sense, she meditates over which parts of her self are from where and over where she as an entity belongs, in order to understand who she is as a whole. Which parts of her self belong to China, or to the United States, or to a combination of the two seems very important to her identity. Jumping around from ancient stories to internal movie fantasies to ghost-world traumas, she does not come up with concrete solutions about why she is the way she is; instead she constructs a confusing, yet solid image that symbolizes part of her self. This self seems to be filled with many different pieces from the East and the West, from her mother and her ancestors, and from her classmates and ghosts, that are connected by small aspects of her own individuality. The sense of her self that I, as a reader, perceive seems quite similar not only to the content of her book, but also the structure.

The Woman Warrior seems structured not only by the creation of an autobiographical self, but also by talk-story, which feeds this autobiographical creation. The whole book is a long talk-story and this telling empowers Kingston. In a sense, this book creates revenge on all of those who silenced her: on her mother who cut her tongue, on Chinese culture that does not explain anything and demeans girls, on North American society that made silent an adjective for Chinese girls. From her mother, whose great power is talking-story, she learns the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. With this knowledge, she realizes that she will “have to grow up a warrior woman” (20). Despite this goal, as the story progresses and Kingston grows older, she accumulates so much guilt that she cannot contain it and loses the ability to tell the difference between right and wrong. She envies Catholic girls who have the release of a weekly ritualized confession. “I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat” (197). When she finally gets the courage to tell her mother the first confession on her mental list, her mother ignores her and then eventually says, “I don’t feel like hearing your craziness” (200). Kingston realizes that she will have no listener, but herself. Instead of resigning herself to holding in her list, she learns from her mother and disguises her confession list in a giant talk-story that millions of people will hear.

When she discusses her “no name aunt” and tells the story of her crime, she unfetters herself. As she explains that no one mentions her aunt or her name in order to kill her a second time, Kingston writes, “But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment. And I have” (16). The very writing of this chapter, however, gives her aunt a name, No Name Woman, and empowers both her aunt who gains a self and Kingston who can now write the truth. Finding the truth, which parallels finding her self and her voice, is very important to Kingston. After watching her mother ignore her difficult confessions and holding in her disgust of and anger over the “hulk,” Kingston finally bursts out and screams:

. . . And I don’t want to listen to anymore of your stories; they have no logic. They scramble me up. You lie with stories. . . You can’t stop me from talking. You tried to cut off my tongue, but it didn’t work. (202)

She does not want to hear anymore lies and no one can stop her from speaking and looking for the truth. Her autobiography is, in a way, looking for the truth. For Kingston the truth, her voice, her self and why she is the way that she is are closely intertwined.Yet when she speaks in her novel, she (still) has trouble with the word “I”. To explain her self she uses others. Her remarkable way of expressing her self without directly speaking of it, or even really discussing herself, shows the anger and restraint in her self.

Kingston’s frustration with her mother’s combination of not telling enough and telling too often, forces her to start talking-story herself. Sometimes, the stories could be too overbearing and she would “overhear before [she] had a chance to protect [her]self” (91). After years of unexplained rules and negative reactions and mystery about this so important yet invisible village, Kingston can throw away her confusion. “But I think that if you don’t figure it out, it’s all right. Then you can grow up bothered by ‘neither ghosts nor deities’” (185). In order to make sense of herself and the world, she leaves home and there she begins to talk-story, too. Maybe this is merely the separation from our parents that we all experience, but the fact that talk- story is such a profound part of her life that it causes all her changes intrigues me.

Although her mother may not perceive it, Kingston has grown up a warrior woman.

The swordswoman and I 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. The idioms for revenge are “report a crime” and “report to five families.” The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words—”chink” words and “gook” words too—that they do not fit on my skin. (53)

This may seem obvious because she entitles her autobiography The Woman Warrior, but her urge to return to her Chinese culture adds another complication. She seems to want to do something for herself, something different, but that will be understood as important both to Chinese and to North Americans. Her mother is not impressed by straight As and perhaps Americans aren’t impressed by warrior women “myths,” but North Americans respect books and Chinese honor Warrior Women who avenge their families.

In addition to creating both a self and an autobiographical self, talking-story also tells a history, a history of China, a history of Chinese immigrants and obviously a history of Kingston. She chooses to tell the history that relates to her, but unlike many self-obsessed autobiographers, she surrounds herself in her environment; she tells more than her own history. Talk-story almost seems more honest than history because the listeners know not to believe everything they hear. Since the Chinese, as Kingston explains, try to do only the essential, these pieces of history have specific uses. Kingston begins her telling with, “You must not tell anyone” (3). She opens her talk-story opposing silence, opposing the power her mother’s talking-story has over her.

Kingston’s mother occasionally divulges a secret in order to teach a lesson, to tell a “story to grow up on”(5). Although Kingston’s mother forbade her to tell anyone, Kingston tells us all; she attempts to change the history and give her aunt a name. This book, since it seems almost a revenge, not only tells history, but also changes and creates history. Brave Orchid, Kingston’s mother, uses talk-story to show off and to teach lessons, and Kingston uses it to rectify wrongs. Most talk-story changes depending on the relationship and attitudes of the listener and the teller. Often each story seems greatly embellished, or sometimes the interesting, un-useful parts are left out. Brave Orchid’s description of the ghost battle changes with different audiences and with her different levels of realization. Each story seems to have infinite alternatives and changes a bit with each telling. This seems ideal for an autobiography because a self must constantly change. Since I describe the entire book as a talk-story, then it too has different levels for different readers and changes with re-readings. The reader has some control, although he is not involved in the original telling. Instead of the presence of listeners influencing the teller, the writer, alone, creates a story, and then each reader, alone, finds another story, and with discussion another story forms. Just as Kingston’s concluding story about the music of the barbarian reed pipe “translated well,” the complex layers of talk-story seem to translate well into the written word.