The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is a memoir, or collection of memoirs, by Maxine Hong Kingston, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1976. Although there are many scholarly debates surrounding the official genre classification of the book, it can best be described as a work of creative non-fiction.

Throughout the book's five chapters, Kingston blends autobiography with old Chinese folktales. What results is a complex portrayal of the 20th century experiences of Chinese-Americans living in the U.S in the shadow of the Chinese Revolution.

The Woman Warrior has been reported by the Modern Language Association as the most commonly taught text in modern university education. It has been used in disciplines as far-reaching as American literature, anthropology, Asian studies, composition, education, psychology, sociology, and women's studies. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of TIME magazine's top nonfiction books of the 1970s.

The specific genre of The Woman Warrior has been disputed due to Kingston's blend of perspectives, traditional Chinese folktale, and memoir. With this mixture, Kingston tries to provide her audience with the cultural, familial, and personal context needed to understand her unique position as a first-generation Chinese-American woman.

Friedman's assessment of autobiography with regard to women and minority groups explains Kingston's intricate blend of perspective and genre: women and cultural minorities often don't have the privilege of viewing themselves as individuals isolated from their gender or racial group. Kingston illustrates this condition through her use of Chinese talk-story, her mother's traditional Chinese perspective, and her own first-person view as an immigrant.

"No Name Woman"[edit]

The story was originally published in 1975 as the first of five stories included in a book by Kingston called The Woman Warrior. There are three characters in this section:

Maxine's Aunt (the "no-name woman"): A young woman in China who is married off just before her husband and his brothers leave for America. When she becomes pregnant long after her husband has left, the townspeople ransack her family's home, humiliating the entire family. When it is time for her to give birth, she must do so alone in the barn. Although the baby is born healthy, it is most likely a girl; realizing how limited the infant's prospects are, the Aunt takes the baby and jumps in the well, drowning them both. Her family now pretends she never existed.

Maxine (narrator): Maxine is still a young girl, still coming to terms with adolescence and the transition into womanhood, in terms of not only the physical and emotional changes brought on by puberty, but also of the societal expectations placed on Chinese girls and the discrepancy between Chinese and American ideas of womanhood. She is terror-stricken by her mother's story and keeps silent about it for years, but at the same time fantasizes about what her nameless aunt must have felt, noticing problems with the story that suggest a more complicated picture than what her mother is telling her. Over the years, she wonders if the aunt had fallen in love with the other man, if she was forced into a sexual relationship, or if she was just a woman who enjoyed and wanted sex.

Maxine’s Mother: Maxine's mother tells her the story of her father's alleged sister, claiming that her father and his family won't even acknowledge her existence. The mother uses the story to instill in Maxine a fear of breaking societal norms and of bringing shame to her family. But Maxine realizes that her mother may not be telling the full story: she speaks as though she had seen the events, but she never explains why the Aunt was still living with her own family when custom dictated that she stay with her husband's family. Was her mother really there, was she simply repeating a story she had heard, or was she making up the entire story as a cautionary tale?

Part 1: Mother's Narration

In the first part of this chapter, the narrator is recounting how her mother once told her the story of the No-Name Woman. The chapter essentially opens as a vignette told from the mother’s point of view.

"You must not tell anyone," my mother said, "what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself."

After this opening line, the narration continues in the mother’s voice. She tells the story of the No Name Woman, her husband’s deceased sister. In 1924 China, with her husband already emigrated to the United States, No Name Woman became impregnated through participating in an adulterous relationship. The rural villagers violently rampaged the family house in disapproval of the deed. No Name Woman ultimately gave birth in a pigsty and drowned both herself and the newborn child in a well.

Part 2: Kingston's Interpretation

The middle portion of this chapter is Kingston’s retelling of the No Name Woman Story. Kingston uses her own experiences with Chinese tradition and culture to substantiate alternate “versions” of the tale. For instance, she questions No Name Woman’s agency in her own pregnancy. She first proposes that No Name Woman must have been raped, since “Women in the old China did not choose.”When she later tries to imagine a more sexually liberated No Name Woman, her own experiences interject:

Imagining her free with sex doesn’t fit, though. I don’t know any women like that, or men either. Unless I see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help. 

Kingston finally settles on a version of the story in which No Name Woman is portrayed as someone who embraces her feminine sexuality to quietly attract a lover. She contrasts from the other Chinese villagers who “efface their sexual color and present plain miens.” She also differs from Kingston, who prefers being “sisterly, dignified, and honorable” to any expression of attractiveness. In the end, the villagers’ raid is interpreted as a reaction to the break in community equilibrium caused by No Name Woman’s efforts to be attractive and therefore individualistic.

Part 3: What the Story Ultimately Means to Kingston

At the end of “No Name Woman”, Kingston reflects on the importance of her mother's story. She concludes that the real lesson is not how No Name Woman died; rather, why she was forgotten:

The real punishment was not the raid swiftly inflicted by the villagers, but the family’s deliberately forgetting her. 

Kingston goes on to suggest that the act of writing out her mother’s talk-story serves as an act of remembrance to No Name Woman. A sympathetic reception of this story, however, is complicated by Chinese tradition, which will forever banish the No Name Woman to her well.