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摘 要

　　越南战争和民权运动时期，是一个种族文化认同感提升的时期，亚裔美国人，他们有需要澄清并且建立他们独有的美国身份。像汤婷婷这样的年轻作家，利用文字写作通过描述在美国社会下的亚洲足根和文化想为亚裔美国人“占有美国”。在本文中，我阐述了书中存在于一代移民和二代移民之间的两大主题沉默和话语权，内容包含沉默(由于性别和种族产生的根源)、说话的必要性、对于话语权的发掘。论述了汤婷婷描绘亚裔美国人对于追寻身份、性别歧视及文化冲突做的艰苦斗争，分析亚裔美国人特别是亚裔美籍女性的沉默的根源与话语权的追寻。同时，探究汤婷婷作为亚裔美国女性对于女权主义的独到见解，为后代的压抑美籍华人了解中国文化，正视中国历史。

关键词: 女战士; 亚裔美国人; 沉默; 话语权; 移民

Contents

1. Introduction………………………………………………………………1
2. Literature Review…………………………………………………………2

3. Silence as the Production of Chinese Traditional Culture..........................3

3.1 Main Characters of Silence in the The Woman Warrior…………….........…3

3.2 The Root Causes of Silence among Early Chinese Female Immigrants....….5

4. Voice as the Necessity of American Open Civilization …………...….…....7

4.1 Role Models of Searching for Voice in The Woman Warrior………………8

4.2 Narration as a Way of Articulation…………………………..………...…..10

5. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..11

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………...13

1.Introduction

The development of Chinese Amercian literature is closely related to the immigration history between China and the United States. In the mid-19^th century, Chinese began to immigrated into the United States. At that time, there were several wars in China, for example the First Opium War in 1840. In addition, several severe natural disasters happened in China, like floods, plagues and droughts. All these factors pushed the Chinese people to immigrate to other countries even later. During 1960s and 1970s, a substantial body of ethnic minority literature emerged in the Unites States. She has contributed to the feminist movement with works such as her memoir The Woman Warrior, which discusses gender and ethnicity and how these concepts affect the lives of women in a new society- America.Written as a girl’s childhood experience, The Woman Warrior recounts the life experience of Maxine Hong Kingston, a Chinese American woman who was born in the United States and grew up in the Chinatown in Stockton, California. Like other children of immigrants, Kingston herself had adolescent turmoil and rebellion, vacillating between her inherited Chinese culture and traditions and modern American culture and values. Thus in her book, The Woman Warrior, Kingston recalls in the memories of her childhood the struggle to reconcile her Chinese and American identities as a second generation Chinese-American. Futhermore, through this book, Kingston also explores the lives and struggles of other Chinese women who were born and lived in China, or who immigrated to the United States, as well as the lives of their children. She vividly describes these Chinese-American women who confronted the dual diliemmas of gender and race; in particular, she presents their psychological development processes which are related to her own experience as a Chinese-American woman.

In this thesis, I will analyse the themes of The Woman Warrior that are silence and voice, especially women’s silence and voice. Silence, on one hand, illustrates the situation of Chinese women in the old Chinese cultural and also in the modern American society. Voice, on the other hand, represents the feminist awareness of Chinese American women, since Western feminism, as traditionally understood, is speaking up,demanding women’s identity and rights, refusing to be dimised, which is the oppsite of silence.

2. Literature Review

During the past thirty years, a great number of articles and books have been written on Kingston and The Woman Warrior. Most of the critics praise Kingston’s contributions to the formation of a new Chinese American identity for women who were long oppressed by Chinese patriarchal tradition. In addition, her skills of storytelling is said to continue the Chinese arts of “talk story”, which actually advances the oral traditions of literature into a written treasure. And The Woman Warrior won the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction. For scholars of autobiography, Kingston"s story represents an important break from past writings; her complex, multi-layered and quasi- fictional narrative flies in the face of traditional autobiographies, which tend to follow a linear-chronological pattern and maintain a stable narrator—an “I”—throughout(Wikipedia). Kingston"s memoir, on the other hand, is a blending of voices and styles, often contradictory, that use many of the techniques of postmodernism: ambiguity, incoherence, pluralism, and irony. Many critics point out Kingston"s literary strategy of articulating silences by exploding the stock image of the quiet Oriental damsel. One of Kingston"s major concerns is the way gender roles and femininity are redefined in Asian American culture. The space occupied by the modern woman warrior is thus between the two poles of different cultures. Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, is a unique and successful literary work of the 1970s in the United States. Among the many features of the book, one which made it popular is the ethnic identity of the author who tells the stories of female Chinese Americans. As The Woman Warrior is a narrative of a feminist who has an ethnic background, therefore, by narrating their silences and voices she expresses the oppression of Chinese American women and also represents their feminist awareness as minority Americans. Because of the differences in ethnic, social, historical and cultural backgrounds, the development of Asian American feminism differs greatly from the white mainstream feminist movement in the United States. From my point of view, The Woman Warrior is about women, but it is primarily about the Chinese American’s attempt to sort fact from reality in order to come to terms with the paradoxes that shape fact from her life as a member of a racial minority group in America. Kingston uses traditonal Chinese stories and combined with Amercian language, which creates this marvellous art work.

1. Silence as the Production of Chinese Traditional Culture

From the beginning of the book, Kingston describes the story with her mother’s remark on being silent: “You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you(Kingston,1977:9). Indeed, silence is a constant theme in The Woman Warrior and it appears throughout every chapter of the book. In addition, by analyzing Kingston’s narrative we can see that silences have multiple layers of implications. On one hand, Kingston describes the silences of the individuals in her family, for example, the no-name woman, her aunt Moon Orchid, the silence of her own childhood and other Chinese girls, her friends and playmates in school. On the other hand, in the setting of the book, Kingston also narrates the majority of Chinese immigrants as mute. These individuals’ silences reflect the silence of the whole Chinese American community, particularly the early Chinese immigrants in the United States. Hence, silence in a way symbolizes the life of early Chinese immigrants in the America as well as the life of their descendents.

3.1 Main Characters of Silence in the The Woman Warrior

As a Chinese American feminist, Kingston has focused specific emphasis on Chinese women’s lives in The Woman Warrior. As Cheung points it out in “Don’t Tell”: Imposed Silence in The Woman Warrior(Cheung,1988:163), “Women authors and feminist critics have been unusually vocal on the theme of silence” where silence is used as an “artistic tool”, as “imposed invisibility”, and as the “reticence enjoyed upon women”. Moreover, the theme of silence runs even deeper in the work of minority women writers. From her no-name aunt, who is forbidden to be talked by her family, to her aunt Moon Orchid, who is forgotten by her husband and voiceless in suffering, to Kingston herself, who was silent during her adolescence. Kingston also describes many other Chinese women’s tragic lives. This is becaues silence is related to the victimization of women, in terms of the anti-female prejudice in Chinese culture and traditon. Kingston’s aunt the no-name woman, and her other aunt Moon Orchid are two of the most important silent female in The Woman Warrior, who possess similar silent characteristic and miserable destinies, although their miseries are caused by different reasons. But in the end the roots come down to the misogyny and sexist in Chinese culture.

In The Woman Warrior, Kingston firstly narratives the tragedy of no-name woman, the aunt of her father’s side, who is deliberately forgotten by the family as a humiliation. The no-name woman’s tragic life is the result of her marriage. In fact, her family found the husband for her, and her wedding night is the first time that she meet her husband. However, her husband leaves for America so soon after the marriage so that she has almost forgotten what he looks like. As a result, she has an affair, which is not because of lust, according to Kinsgston: “to be a woman…in starvation time was a waste enough My aunt could not have been the lone romantic who gave up everything for sex” (Kingston, 1977:11). But in a patriarchal society, a woman’s virtue is everything above her life, and adultry is forbidden. So the price for it is to die and to be forgotten. However, the real punishment is not the raid or hatred of the villagers, but her own family chooses to deliberately forget her. The no-name woman’s tragedy is caused by the negative effect of traditional Chinese culture and is also the result of a particular history because she could not travel with her husband to America.

Another female victim related to silence is narrator’s other aunt, her mother’s sister Moon Orchid. Moon Orchid moves to America from Hong Kong to look for her husband, who left China thirty years ago. He is not a totally irresonsible husband because she had been receiving money from him from America, but he has no intention to take her to America. While, Moon Orchid is silent about everything. She has never revealed to him her wish to come to the America, as she is waiting for him to say that, but he never did. When her sisiter Brave Orchid, Kingston’s mother, takes Moon Orchid to visit her husband to claim her rights as the true first wife. Her husband refuses to admit Moon Orchid because he has remarried and already has a new family. Instead, he questions her intention: “What are you doing here?, Why are you here?, What do you want?” Confronted with his stare, Moon Orchid does not continue to question her husband and claim her rights as a wife. Facing this situation, Moon Orchid can only “open and shut her month without any words coming out”(Kingston, 1977:134). It is her weakness that ruins her. She dares not say a word or claim the right as the first wife when facing such a husband as that who has made her a widow. Moon Orchid smothers her crying, just like a little child who is pushed into threathening of silence after her wrong-doing. She becomes insane at last. The main reason for her tragedy is her characteristic: she has no power or strength to defend herself, no voice to fight back, and no courage to claim the rights which is belonging to her. These result from the yoke of the fedudal ethical code on Chinese women during a long period history.

From her two aunt’s tragic lives, Kingston is aware that a woman is doomed to be victim if she is dependent. Only by bringing her fate under her own control can she manage to claim her rights and lives in dignity. The tragedies of no-name woman and Moon Orchid consists of their blind obedience, they are unable to caused by sexism and misogyny in Chinese traditional culture.

3.2 The Root Causes of Silence among Early Chinese Female Immigrants

At ancient time, the old feudal China was dominated by Confucianism that advocates male superiority and female inferiority. Although the Confucianism has its huge advantages, it also has the most important factor contributing to Chinese patriarchal tradition.As we all known, the “three obediences and four virtues”: three obediences are a woman must obey her father before marriage, and her husband after marrying, then her sons after her husband’s death, and then , the four virtues are the woman must know her position and behave according to the natural law of things, she should pay attention to her words and not speak too much, she should be dress-well and cleanly to please men, and finally she must shoulder her family duties. Living in a patriarchal and misogynist culture, women are in a position of being discriminated against and unfairly treated, just as Kingston said, if anything happens or even nothing happens but just gossip, the blame always fallls women.Although discrimination is nolonger found in official documents, which always refer to men and women are as equal, dismise for women is still in people’s minds even today.

Furthermore, secrecy among the Chinese in America has been needed necessarily by harsh and racially discriminatory immigration policies. Chinese immigrants changed their names and lied about their ages and ports of entry, sometimes making their lives unintelligible to their American-born children—the second-generation immigrants. In many Asian immigrant families, culture is live, but not explained or told. Practices become confusing when customs are observed outside their original context, in a new social environment where they may seem inappropriate. In The Woman Warrior, the Chinese immigrant parents, the first-generation immigrants, do not explain their behaviors and practices to their children, the second-generation immigrants, who find themselves forced to learn about Chinese village practices by trial and error. “Those of us in the first American generation have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America” (Kingston,1977: 11) .A jumbled collage of contradictory mental pictures of China results from the parents’ not explaining enough on the one hand and funneling vivid stories of Chinese village life into their consciousness on the other. As Cheung points out, “Chinese American silences….were reinforced by anti-Asian immigrants laws”(Cheung,1988:163). Indeed, the Chinese immigrants’ lives were hard and depressing in America because of the effects of “The Chinese Exclusion Act”. This Act made Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from US citizenship (Gordon,1944:58). There were secrets never to be said in front of the ghosts, immigration secrets whose telling could get us sent back to China(Kingston,1977:161).

Meanwhile, the tough work and hard working conditions are other factors which result in the silence of early immigrants.The description of the workload and the working conditions of the laundry business of Brave Orchid and her family is that they rise at six a.m. to begin a day’s work; their children are taking shifts in the laundry desides going to the school; they even sleep on the ironing tables in the laundry during the busy time, and so forth. As historian Ronald Takaki writes in Strangers from a Different Shore, “The Chinese were located in a different sector of the labor market from whites. By 1920s, 58 percent of the Chinese were in services, most of them in restaurant and laundry work, compared to only 5 percent for native whites and 10 percent for foreign whites”(Ronald Takaki,1989:240). A heavy and tough workload makes people silent, especially under the poor working conditions, like the hot air from the ironing machine, the danger of work injuries, and the insecurity of the future. However, when comes to the business works, female and male are equal in shouldering the hardness and toughness. Or in other words, women share the responsibilities of work even more. Thus, as Cheung points out, “silence runs even deeper in the work of minority women”(Cheung,1988:163). Brave Orchid is quite a suitable example, who proudly claims that “Even the ghosts work, no time for acrobatics. I have not stopped working since the day the ship landed. I was on my feet the babies were out”(Kingston,1977:94). It is obvious that her silence when she is at work in the laundry work is a truly contrast with her loud voice when she was in China.

4. Voice as the Necessity of American Open Civilization

Opposite to silence, voice is another important theme of the book. Although there is a taboo of not telling, Kingston breaks the silence, narrate her experience and reveal the truth into words. Apart from the silent female figures, like No-name Women and Moon Orchid. Kingston also described women who do have voices in this book. In addition, the voices take various forms: they do not only appear as the real sounds and articulation, but refer to abstract forms, for example, oral literature and writing, which represent deeper meanings. As a second-generation Chinese American, Kingston “is afraid of losing her identity, of being erased or unhinged- through silence” (Cheung ,1988:164). This pushes Kingston to find the exigency of expression. Then, Kingston as representative of newly emerging voice of the Asian American minority who are searching for their unique identity and establish their place in a new society-America.

4.1 Role Models of Searching for Voice in The Woman Warrior

The most obvious and significant form of voice is speaking. Kingston herself realizes the importance of articulation from her own experience. Kingston is regraded as a retard by her American teachers, because she is unable to express herself in English in class, in speech or on paper. She notes, “when I went to kindergarten and had to speak English for the first time, I became silent… My silence was thickest-total-during the three years that I covered my school painting with black paint”(Kingston,1977:146). As Kingston also writes,

My sister also said nothing for three years, silent in the playground and silent at lunch. There were other quiet Chinese girls not of our family, but most of them got over with it sonner than we did. (Kingston,1977:146).

Realizing the importance of breaking silence and being able to deliver voice, Brave Orchid sliced the fraeum of Kingston’s tongue in order to make her talk. However, the difficulties of speaking is not due to physical reasons, but to the inner reason, the confusion of their identity. This confusion is the root cause of Chinese-Americans’ silence. Just as Kingston says: “reading out loud was easier than speaking because we di not have to make up what to say…”(Kingston,1977:147). As Kingston is aware of the importance of women’s voice and articulation, she describes many women characters who are brave to have a voice and dare to express their thoughts. Kingston’s mother-Brave Orchid represents the strongest voice. Brave Orchid is an intimidating, tradition-bound mother who in many ways displays the strong determination, energy and power of the woman warrior. In fact, it is her mother Brave Orchid plays a crucial role in stirring and building Kingston’s determination to seeking for her own identity and voices. It is obvious that Brave Orchid, is not a common Chinese female name which reveals her powerful will and characteristic. After she keeps her original name:

Nor did she change her name, Brave Orchid. Professional women have the right to use their maiden names if they like. Even when she emigrated, my mother kept Brave Orchid, adding no American name nor holding one in reserve for American emergencies(Kingston ,1977:71).

In addition, she does not act like a traditional Chinese woman: she disobeys her husband’s order about not telling the prohibited stories to her daughter; she processes her own career and works hard; she has no fearof men and Western “ghosts”; and she knows how to defend herself and protect others. For example, when she accompanies her sister Moon Orchid to visit her husband, in answering her question ‘What if he hits me?”, she replies: ‘I’ll hit him. I ‘ll protect you, I’ll hit him back”(Kingston,1977:128). Her own life story represents a strong voice as well, a voice that reveals a real brave and respected, strong Chinese woman.

In fact, her own life has been heroic. Her husband emigrated to America fifteen years before her, leaving her aline in China. In that period of time, her two young children died. Unlike the ordinary Chinese women who are mostly iliterate housewives, Brave Orchid invests the money which received form her husband working in the United States into education. She gained addimission to a Chinese medical school after she lying about her age. She finally earns a diploma about medicine with two years of intensive study and hospital practice. She becomes a respected doctor in her hometown, a truly heroine in Chinese culture that insisted women could only be wives or slaves. But when she moves to America, the life of Brave Orchid takes a sharp down turn. This sharp trasition is the result of her lack of professional training in a new country and language skills, so that she is unable to practice medicine. Instead of giving up, she works in the family’s laundry , from six thrity a.m. to midnight. She even dyed her hair in order to compete with young larborers so that the farmers would hire her. She also supports her relatives in China by the money she earned from hard work.

As a mother, Brave Orchid does not act like a traditional mother figure, whose role is not only to pass the traditional culture to her children but also to defend the traditions and doctrines. She is not the traditional Chinese woman and mother. She pursuits education, which is a challenge to the traditional idea that a woman’s ignorance is virtue. In school, she moves alone to the ghost’s room and drives them away; in America, she breaks her husband’s order on the silencing of the No-name Woman and she encourages her sister Moon Orchid to claims her rights as a wife and blame her husband; she tells her daughters that a woman grows up to be wife and slave, but she also tells them the legend of woman warrior Fa Mulan. If the story of Fa Mulan is legendary and fantastic, Brave Orchid’s life is real and true, she is the incarnation of Fa Mulan. Armed with unyielding spirit, Brave Orchid proves herself a brave and independent woman, a woman warrior in reality, and a role model for her children.

Besides Brave Orchid, there are also many strong and powerful people narrator wrote: Fa Mu Lan, Yue Fei, and another national hero, and poetess Ts’ai Yen, who fight for their own identity and personality and unique voice.

4.2 Narration as a Way of Articulation

Writing, as an alternative to speech, is another kind of voice.Indeed, Kingston uses literature as an effective voice to break the prohibition of “not tell” and express her won thoughts. She once said in an interview with Shelley Fisher Fishkin: “My mother says, ‘don’t tell what I am about to tell you,’”, and I think, ‘well, I’m not going to ‘tell’, I’m just going to write.’ And she tells it in Chinese. But what if I told it in English?” (Fishkin,1991:785). Kingston believes that, for a Chinese American, writing is a kind of right , a power, and a new way to be a warrior in a new society. This power is based on the understanding of her ancestral nation and its history, and the acceptance of the traditions and arts, myths, stories and songs. (Cui,2001). In the final chapter- “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”, Kingston employs a first-person narrative to concentrate on the stories of her own life in different phases: from a silent little girl who is hard to expressing herself and talking to others to a rebellious young lady who accuses her mother of attempting to make her a wife and a slave, then finally to an adult who is embracing her past and finally make use of writing as a way of finding a voice. In the end, Kingston uses the story of Ts’ai Yen- an ancient Chinese poetess- as a representative metaphor to her own precess of finding her own voice and identity. Just like Ts’ai Yen teaches Chinese and sings Chinese to her children after being captured by a chieftain during a raid by the Southern Hsiung-nu. Just like Ts’ai Yen uses potery as a weapon to fight with barbarians, Kingston uses words and stories to rebel against the old patriarchal society and discrimination of women. Like Ts’ai Yen translates the barbarians’ songs to her own Chinese people after she comes back to her home country, Kingston finally combines American values and traditional Chinese cultural heritages with the assistance of American language- English to create a new version of the second-generation immigrants Chinese American lives with destroy the oriental stereotypes. Besides, Kingston also expresses a new voice through the rewriting of classic Chinese literature. The second chapter, “White Tigar”, is the most poetic in the book, and there she creates the impressive heroine Fa Mulan, who is different from the Fa Mulan in old Chinese culture. Kingston created a new Mulan: being a Chinese American, she will not only be a wife and slave when she grows up, but a heroine, a sword woman, a woman warrior.

Furthermore, Kingston combines the stories of two Chinese legends, Yue Fei, a male general in ancient China, and Fa Mulan. In traditional Chinese story, it is Yue Fei, whose backe is tattooed with four Chinese words: Jing Zhong Bao Guo, which means “by loyal and devote yourself to motherland”. Kingston transfers this ordeal to the woman warrior in order to empower Chinese females. This is not misusing the Chinese literature, by narration, Kingston uses her mother’s stories and her own thoughts as a loud voice of Chinese girl growling out the depression, humiliation sufferings and antifemale prejudice which are deeply rooted in Chinese traditional culture.

In summary, Kingston uses different forms of voice, which include articulation, talk-story and oral literature, and writing and rewriting of classical Chinese folktell. The multiple voices used in the book give the readers a glimpse of the story from several different angles. She combines legend with truth and past with present. By doing this she combines the American way of life with the Chinese way of life, and finally finds a way that these two can coexist.

5. Conclusion

The Woman Warrior tells the stories of Kingston and the Chinese American women in her family. These women are characterized by two sets of traits that light both appear in the same character in different periods of time: one sets shed light on feminine stereotypes like weakness, passivity, and silence. The other refers to strength, action, power and voice. Therefore, The Woman Warrior can be interpreted based on the theme of both silence and voice. Through the interpretation of silence and voice in Kingston’s book, it is clear that Kingston has succeeded in creating may true Chinese female warriors. Her popuse is to erase the traditional images of Chinese women in order to improve females’ social status and to rewrite Chinese females’ history. As Kingston writes, she fells it is necessary for her to do it, that “it’s a mission for me to invent a new autobiographical form that truly tells the inner life of woman, and I do think it’s especially important for minority people, because we are always in the brink of disappearing”(Fishkin,1991:786). By writing, Kingston breaks the taboo on silence and rewrites Chinese American female subjectivity in a way that transcends Chinese patriarchal tradition. By writing, Kingston also makes Chinese Americans visible to American society and employs new roles for Chinese American writers in the new society. Just as Ts’ai Yen, her role model, who learns the barbarian’s language and lyrics and then creates a new song for her own people, Kingston master the English language, uses voice and pen as weapons creating pages in American literature, and gives the women warriors she writes about a place in American history and perhaps immortality. By writing, the images of woman warriors also inspire Chinese women who live abroad! My knowledge is limited, and many problems have not been discussed fully in this thesis. The study of immigrants and cultural conflicts and feminism in The Woman Warrior still needs more people’s efforts.

Works Cited

1. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts ,CT275,K5764A33,1977.
2. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, “Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston”, Amercian Literature History, Vol.3, No.4. Winter,1991:782-791.
3. Cheung, King-Kok. “Don’t Tell: Imposed Silence in The Color Purple and The Woman Warrior”. PMLA103, 1988:162-174.
4. Takaki, Ronald, Stranger from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Penguin,1989.
5. Gordon, Charles, “The Racial Barrier to American Citizenship.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Volume 93,1944,237-258.
6. 崔少元.《“汤婷婷采访录”》，中华读书报,2001.
7. 袁静. 《再探“香蕉人”》 ，载人民日报（海外版），2007.

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