Chinese Diasporic Women’s Writing, Gender and Identities

Abstract

This article analyzes Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts . how she constructs a Chinese diasporic feminist identity via autobiographical, familial, and ethnic collective remembrance. In analyzing this memoir, this article is concerned with how gender, identity and memory are interrelated and how they are performed in the Chinese diaspora in America. In rereading the memoir for personal, familial and collective remembrance practices, this essay suggests that Kingston conveys three mnemonic traces: memory as archeological excavation and memory as continuous revision and retranslation; memory as a tool to challenge and to subvert traditional gender ideology; and the relation between memory and storytelling, in which Kingston equates memory and voice with storytelling and silence with oppression. Kingston uses memory narratives as a strategic method to question traditional system of gender identities, roles and expectations. She excavates cultural and familial stories or collective memories, and then revises or retranslates them to understand her place and identities in America and in the Chinese diaspora. Kingston is conscious that the process of recovering, retranslating, and transmitting personal, familial, and ethnic collective memory is always fractured, negotiated, and a product of struggle. Hence it destabilizes constructions of identity and community formation along with knowledge production. Kingston notes that women are frequently the transmitters of memory . personal, familial, cultural, and collective. through their storytelling. This article illustrates that ethnic collective memory, like cultural identity, is a site of heterogeneity and difference, where some memories can perpetuate homeland and diasporic patriarchy while other memories can provide more liberating narratives for women and young girls. The Woman Warrior is an attempt to rewrite both Chinese diasporic memory by challenging its sexism and the national official memory of the United States by pointing to its history of gender inequality, racism, and Orientalism.