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”.
I. Introduction of the writer and The Woman Warrior
The Woman Warrior is an influential book in twentieth century making a thunder of voice in the world to accuse the stereotype of patriarchy and racism, which also shows the Chinese Americans’ difficlty of being edged to the cultural cilff. It is obvious that the writer embodies the self-supporting, self-respect and independence feminist standpoint by subverting phallocentrism, arousing the female “mainstay” awareness.
1.1 Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston was born on October 27, 1940 in Stockton, California. She was the first of six American-born children; her parents, Tom and Ying Lan Hong, had had two children in China before they came to America. Her mother trained as a midwife in To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton. Her father had been brought up a scholar and taught in his village of Sun Woi, near Canton. Tom left China for America in 1924, but finding no work for a poet or calligrapher, he took a job in a laundry. Tom was swindled out of his share of the laundry, but Ying Lan joined him in 1939 in New York City, and they then moved to Stockton where Tom had been offered a job in a gambling house. Maxine was named after a lucky blond gambler who frequented his work.
Kingston’s first language was Say Yup, a dialect of Cantonese. She grew up surrounded by other immigrants from her father’s village, and the storytelling she heard as a child influenced her later writing. By the age of nine, her progress in English enabled her to write poems in her new language, and though she was a gifted storyteller like her mother, she preferred the solitary task of writing. An extremely bright student, she won eleven scholarships that allowed her to attend the University of California at Berkeley. Kingston began as an engineering major, but she soon switched to English literature. She received her B.A. degree in 1962 and her teaching certificate in 1965. In 1962, she married Earll Kingston, an actor, and they moved to Hawaii where they both taught for the next ten years.
In 1976, while Kingston was teaching creative writing at the Mid-Pacific Institute, a private school, she published her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. One reviewer, Michael T. Malloy, described the book as having an exotic setting but dealing with the same subjects as mainstream American feminist literature, specifically the “Me and Mom” genre. Other reviewers were surprised by its fresh subject matter and style, and they sang the praises of this poetic, fierce, delicate, original novel/memoir. Kingston strove for a Chinese rhythm to her voice, a typical Chinese-American speech, and rich imagery; her first book was a great success. In the end of Woman Warrior, her shy character finds resolution as she breaks female silence and inherits an oral tradition that she carries on as a written tradition.
Kingston’s second book, China Men, published in 1980, was a companion to Warrior Woman and received more controversial reviews. The book, steeped in historic detail and set in early California and Hawaii, details the male influences of her life and describes the lives of the men in her family who came to America—“Gold Mountain.” China Men includes a chronological list of discriminatory laws regarding Chinese immigrants and celebrates the strengths and achievements of the first Chinese men in America as well as the exploitat
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