摘要:Kingston represents those women who are at the “double marginality”(常芳,郭海霞,2001:3) of racism and patriarchy. She is a woman and she is not a white in America. It is bound for her to suffer the racial and sex prejudice. The oriental woman is always a myth to the west, and her image is created as somehow called “little eastern woman”.
ion and prejudice they faced. Several sinologists complained that Kingston reconstructed myths that are only remotely connected to original Chinese legends and that her pieces don’t accurately portray high culture. Kingston responded to this criticism by explaining that she is not trying to represent Chinese culture, she is simply trying to portray her own experiences. She points to William Carlos Williams as one of the influences of China Men.
In 1987, Kingston published a collection of twelve prose selections, Hawaii One Summer. After the success of her first books, she was financially able to give up teaching as an occupation and continued to write, but she continued to teach on and off as a visiting professor in Hawaii, Michigan, and California. In 1988, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, a picaresque novel set in the San Francisco area during the 1960s, was published. The protagonist of this novel, Wittman Ah Sing, is a fifth-generation Chinese-American, and like many of Kingston’s characters, he struggles to escape racism as he grows and questions the world around him. Reviews of this novel again were mixed, but critics seem to have had stronger reactions against this book than against China Men.
For Maxine Hong Kingston, writing has been central in her life. “My writing is an ongoing function, like breathing or eating,” she explains. “I have this habit of writing things down. Anything. And then some of it falls into place as in these two books (China Men and Woman Warrior). She admires the changes a storyteller can implement when he or she tells the same tale many times, and in her work, she tries to retain this freedom to change a story’s interpretation by guarding ambiguity in the static writing. Doubt is a part every story, not certainty, and that is part of what makes her writing unique.
1.2 The Woman Warrior
As early as the 1840s, Chinese immigrants had been arriving in America in search of better lives, driven from their home country by widespread poverty and attracted by possibilities in the new American West. However, like many other ethnic groups entering America at the time, the immigrants faced social, economic, and legal discrimination that limited their rights and opportunities, keeping most of them living together in pockets of Chinese communities such as the area in Stockton where Kingston grew up. Women such as Brave Orchid, who had once been a doctor in her own country, were forced to toil in sweatshops or become laundry workers-some of the few jobs available to Chinese-Americans well into the twentieth century. Kingston’s memoir finds its way onto the syllabi of many women’s studies courses for the gender issues it raises, especially regarding the role of women in traditional Chinese society.
The Woman Warrior focuses on the stories of five women—Kingston’s long-dead aunt, “No-Name Woman”; a mythical female warrior, Fa Mu Lan; Kingston’s mother, Brave Orchid; Kingston’s aunt, Moon Orchid; and finally Kingston herself—told in five chapters. The chapters integrate Kingston’s living experience with a series of talk-stories—spoken stories that combine Chinese
history, myths, and beliefs—her mother tells her.
The first chapter, No-Name Woman, begins with one such talk-story, about an aunt Kingston never knew she had. Because this aunt had brought disgrace upon her family by having an illegitimate child, she killed herself and her baby by jumping
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