Rethinking Orientalism: The Woman Warrior

Rethinking Orientalism: The Woman Warrior

Orientalism is defined as the exoticism of the 'East' in the eyes of the 'West.' It is a colonial understanding of non-white, Asiatic peoples as 'other.' It views the East as feminine, foreign, mysterious and submissive. As a postmodern concept it is not attached or intrinsic to the nature of the person practicing the ideology. Much as women can be sexist and discriminate against other women, non-white people can also use the tropes of Orientalism. However, Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir of growing up as a Chinese-American, the Woman Warrior, uses the images of Orientalism, not to objectify China, but to embark upon a journey of self-discovery as a writer. Kingston takes a deliberately ironic view of the construct of Orientalism and of the genre of memoir itself. She blends folk tales, second-hand personal accounts, and tales of her familial past in China and American as a way of reflecting upon Chinese-American identity and the immigrant experience.

Kingston's memoir is not a straightforward, linear, chronological coming-of-age narrative. It suggests the experience of a people, rather than an individual. Long stretches of the narrative are told in the third, rather than in the first person. The history of modern China during the Cultural Revolution is woven seamlessly in with the stories of Kingston's own family. Like any memoirist, Kingston is a selective narrator, and she purposefully chooses incidents that highlight the themes she wishes to address in her life history: the role of women, the fear of losing one's mind, and the need for individuals to speak across the barriers of time and language.

Unlike the classical Caucasian Orientalist, Kingston does not use the contrasts between China and her own life in America to show the superiority of the West or East, but instead to search for the truth. For example, when telling the story of a relative who drowned herself after giving birth to a child out of wedlock, Kingston imagines various scenarios that could have lead the woman to her fate. The stereotypical image of the repressed Chinese woman with her feet bound is given new life in Kingston's ideation. Kingston first wonders if the woman was raped, then if the woman was highly sensual, and then finally Kingston takes comfort in the fact that rather than being consigned to dust and forgotten, through her words the 'No-Name' woman will always be remembered. But even though she is able to speak for the woman, Kingston is also aware of the fact that she can only present her imaginative versions of the relative's tale. The tale is already twice-told, passed down from mother to daughter. This is also true of all of her mother's experiences, like the story of her mother 'Brave Orchid' attempting to reunite her sister Moon Orchid (Kingston's aunt) with her American husband. Unlike the traditional Western Orientalist, Kingston is at least self-conscious about the fact that Chinese culture cannot be perfectly translated into English prose.

Some of the images of China that Kingston conjures up in the book, such as the powerful woman warrior with her parent's names carved upon her back who braves tigers and dragons, do suggest a kind of Chinese painting of an earlier era. However, Kingston is clearly retelling the narrative to provide herself with a source of strength and power in contemporary society, rather than merely presenting a tale of a young woman from a far-off and magical land. The excitement of the narrative of the woman warrior derives from its exotic setting, but the meaning ascribed to the narrative is Kingston's. Kingston also tells the story of her mother, a woman who was able to become a midwife and gain an education, despite the difficulty of a woman doing so during that era in China. Kingston acknowledges that the woman warriors of China are not only exotic sorceresses, but also the ordinary woman who survived oppression, who were not afraid.

It is true that while Kingston can use irony against the stereotypes of passivity imposed upon Chinese femininity, at other times she seems to use these stereotypes less self-consciously. Her portrayal of her mother calling white people 'ghosts,' and her decision to name her mother Brave Orchid, seem to reflect cultural construction of Oriental women and Asians in general as superstitious and somewhat primitive in their understanding of the world. But there are always intrusions of the modern world that satirize the tendency to render China as exotic and Oriental. The fact that Kingston calls her mother 'Brave Orchid' and her aunt 'Moon Orchid' are less important than the cultural clash that transpires between their ways of life.

The characters in Kingston's work are always recognizably human in the manner in which they illustrate the immigrant experience. Moon Orchid is shown marveling at as well as being horrified by American ways and manners, but much of the dialogue between the two sisters could take between any women, from any culture. The two sisters have contrasting personalities: one is strong, the other is yielding. Moon Orchid is a fragile woman, unable to fend for herself in the West. But although Moon Orchid's former husband tells both her and her sister she belongs to a far-away culture and place, Brave Orchid is steely enough to work long hours in a Laundromat at age sixty-eight, in hundred and eleven degree heat. There is no singular Chinese immigrant experience. Even Moon Orchid's struggles to make a new life for herself, her fear of other immigrants, and eventual institutionalization are not surreal and folkloric, but show how decisions like her husband's bigamous remarriage can have real and tragic consequences.

It is true that Kingston uses aspects of the stories of her family symbolically, and some of her stories have an unreal quality to them. But by assigning the characters fantastic names and admitting she has heard so many of their stories second and third-hand, even when resorting to fantasy she does not speak with the authority of the 'Orientalist' observing the East. Her own Chinese ancestry, as the child of an immigrant, does not necessarily mean that she has perfect psychological insight into her mother's life. Kingston's narrative is at once intensely subjective and personal yet also objective about the limits of her point-of-view. Even while she reflects upon her connection to a heritage larger than her own story, she also acknowledges that when she speaks for her mother, aunt, and the No-Name woman, she is doing so in her own voice, from her own perspective.