Engendering Genre: Gender and Nationalism in China Men and The Woman Warrior

Abstract

China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston's book on the history of Chinese-Americans, followed close on the heels of the publication of her much acclaimed autobiography The Woman Warrior. Kingston has said that she first envisioned the two volumes as one book; yet if we view these books as companion works, then it is curious how differently they represent what might be called the Chinese-American experience (Talbot 12). While the first, most obvious divide may be at the level of gender, as evidenced by the two books' titles, another equally important division takes place at the level of genre. When Kingston allies generic distinctions, i.e., history and autobiography, with particular genders she both explores and exposes that underlying alliance, raising questions about the role genre plays in defining both gender roles and Chinese-American identity. At the same time, she raises questions about the meaning of the public and private in relationship to history and autobiography and how notions of public and private give those genres a gendered status. By locating gender in Kingston's manipulations of genre and mythology and looking at the gendered categorization of generic forms, we can also locate the place of Chinese-American identity in her conception of gender and genre. Much of the power of these two works lies in Kingston's attempt to intervene in and undermine a master narrative of history and identity in America. Although Kingston does skillfully parody and disrupt accepted notions of history and autobiography and destabilize those categories with her introductions of gender and race, her ability to escape the boundaries of genre remains in question. Perhaps the question that must be asked is: How complete is the connection between genre and the ideology that gave rise to it? Does Kingston's of these genres, albeit in altered forms, merely contribute to reinforcing those forms or, as Judith Butler claims, can there be repetition with a difference? In other words, as Gayatri Spivak might ask, Can the subaltern speak? Kingston never fully escapes genre because she must write within and against the constraints of generic forms in order to comment upon them and manipulate them. If she abandons the forms completely, the cultural resonances so crucial to her disruption of hegemonic conceptions of Chinese-American identity, gender and history, would be lost, but her adherence to those forms raises questions about her ability to fully subvert or escape the ideologies that inform those genres. Whether Kingston speaks without being consumed by the epistemic violence of her writing tools, namely language and genre, is my central question. My search is not for Kingston's authentic voice hidden within these forms, but an examination of how she engages with and uses these forms to her own ends. By examining Kingston's deconstruction of the opposition between fictional and non-fictional forms, such as autobiography and history, her use of mythology to explore issues of national identity, and her manipulations of genre and mythology through the introduction of race and gender, I hope to delineate constraints of genre and the meaning of the subversion of these forms at the intersection of gender and Chinese-American identity. Looking at the opposition between these two books' genres proves to be no easy matter, as Kingston rarely lets any clear opposition stand. Instead, what was a matter of black and white, autobiography and historiography, slips away into a hazy area where generic boundaries are difficult to define. Although both books blur the boundaries between the two genres, they do not find a common third term, and instead they present examples of two very different approaches to both history and autobiography.(1) These unstable oppositions are apparent even before one cracks the binding of either book. Although both books now can be found in the fiction or Asian American literature section, the generic distinctions given to them by their publisher betray their earlier distinctions. …