The Woman Warrior

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1976

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Themes

Ghosts and Hauntings

The Woman Warrior is subtitled “Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.” This is true in more ways than one.

Real ghosts swarm through the pages of The Woman Warrior. The ghost of Kingston’s drowned aunt, the eerie Sitting Ghost who tries to stifle Brave Orchid, and the Sit Dom Kuei who rise up as snakelike pillars of smoke are only a few examples. These ghosts are part of Kingston’s family’s daily life and are greeted with little surprise. Those ghosts who aren’t propitiated are often demanding, frightening, or outright malicious; it takes a strong nerve and a good digestion to defeat them.

But these are not the only ghosts. Kingston’s family considers every non-Chinese person a ghost, and as immigrants to California they’re surrounded by ghosts all the time. Ghostliness, here, makes suspect and alien even the most quotidian activities: The young Kingston imagines the white newspaper-boy as a sinister figure luring real children to their deaths.

Chinese culture itself is a kind of ghost to Kingston. While she has worked hard to separate herself from the injustices and restrictions that were part of her cultural inheritance as a Chinese woman, she feels the perpetual presence of Chinese myth and folklore in her daily life—often uncomfortably, as when she senses the presence of a dead baby weeping and straining in bathrooms at night.

In The Woman Warrior, hauntings are inevitable, the inheritance of any human life. As an unshakeable connection to the past and an image of alienation, they are both a blessing and a curse.

Language and Storytelling

To make sense of her own life, Kingston must break through a tradition of silence and secrecy. The language she finds has the power to create and preserve—such as her rich imaginings of possible lives lived by her nameless, drowned aunt—but also to destroy.

Kingston has a lifelong fascination with language and silence. Her mother cut her frenum so that she could speak fluently, but this doesn’t stop Kingston from feeling inarticulate, trapped between two different worlds in which she can’t fully speak her truth. American culture doesn’t have room for the magical, paradoxical parts of her understanding; Chinese culture doesn’t have room for her personal experience. She makes a lengthy list of things that she needs to say to her mother but can’t. When that list at last explodes out of her over a momentous dinner, it ruptures her connection with her family.

A clue to the resolution of this dilemma comes in Kingston’s mystic episode about the woman warrior. Her call to adventure comes in the form of a bird that looks like the ideograph for “human.” This mixture of realities—the written word becoming a flying, living thing that represents a total humanity—shows Kingston the way out of her liminal dilemma. She must resolve her conflicting wishes for speech and silence through “dragon ways,” holding paradoxical differences together.

To do so, she must invent a language that can contain reason and magic. The writing of The Woman Warrior thus demonstrates how The Woman Warrior came to be written.

Lineage and Family

Kingston’s deep connection with her family is revealed through her separation from it. The very act of imagining her mother’s life is at once a way of coming closer to her mother and distancing herself: her mother’s sense of privacy is outraged as soon as the story begins.

In Brave Orchid’s tradition, the friends and family of the sick or frightened sooth them with a ritual; they rub their earlobes while chanting their line of descents and describing their home village. This ritual draws the person’s wandering soul back into their body. One’s very essence is thus shown to be bound up with one’s ancestors and sense of place—and place and ancestry are presented as nearly the same thing.

To be driven away from the place of one’s heritage is a fate worse than death. Kingston, as a first-generation immigrant, is thus deeply moved by the thought of her nameless aunt’s loneliness as she gave birth. She, like her aunt, is a misfit, far from home.

But the very sense of separation from lineage reveals its fullness and importance. By standing apart from her family and her tradition, Kingston can see their profound influence on her identity. Even her rebellion and her hybrid identity as a Chinese American grow from these deep roots.