When I finally got to Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir it was nothing like I expected, and much more. Much more—and much less, too—than an ordinary memoir, the experimental flavor of it penetrates and suffuses and carries away much of the simple factual material. This goes beyond showing how events felt to showing how the unconscious experienced the events, and invented events of its own to absorb the blows of deeply foreign experience. It is full of strange dreams and fears torqued to maximum impact—the anger and sorrow and impossibility of such a transition are preserved almost perfectly, even as the homely details are mostly left behind. Thus, surprisingly, it becomes a story of great spirit encountering the strangely physical. There's not a lot to hang a hat on here—very little directly about language adjustments, ethnic self-awareness and accommodation, neighborhoods, schools, kindly adults. They are there, make no mistake—but their context is fierce and fantastic. One of the great things Kingston does is put the focus on Chinese culture and her heritage. The Western sophistication she has achieved speaks for itself, and is the perfect vehicle for saying what she's got to say. The hardships and privations can be wrecking. A raid, as recalled by Kingston's mother: "The villagers broke in the front and the back doors at the same time, even though we had not locked our doors against them. Their knives dripped with the blood of our animals.... Your aunt gave birth in the pigsty that night. The next morning when I went for water, I found her and the baby plugging up the family well." Unflinching stuff, yet followed by a beautiful and complex tale spun out of her mother's "talk-story" that she lulled her children to sleep with, about a powerful swordswoman and heroine, a shiny brilliant character. A variation of Wonder Woman, to the Western comic book reader. The story is bold and swift and absorbing. The whole book is great.
In case it's not at the library.
When I was at Cal, I taught Woman Warrior a few times. The last time ... I can't remember why, but I decided to only assign the first section, which I put into a class reader. So one day, I went into the English office to copy the section, so I could take it to the place where the readers were made.
ReplyDeleteI forgot to mention that Kingston taught in the English department for a long time ... perhaps she still does. Anyway, I'm copying away, and who walks into the copy room but Maxine Hong Kingston. (She was hard to miss, five feet tall at the most, with wonderful straight grey hair that reached almost to the floor.)
There's no real point to this anecdote. If she noticed what I was doing, she didn't say anything.
Great story!
ReplyDeleteNice writeup. A throbbing heart of a novel, masterfully told. And, yeah, great anecdote, Mr. Regret.
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