From Silence to Song: The Triumph of Maxine Hong Kingston

Abstract

Maxine Hong Kingston begins Woman Warrior with the tale of her nameless aunt, woman engulfed by defeating silence. She concludes her memoir with the legend of Ts'ai Yen, female poet who triumphs in song. An American heiress confounded by legacy of Chinese and culture, Kingston records her own struggle for self-expression. mute schoolgirl who smeared paper with opaque black paint, the incommunicative adolescent who could not voice her sorrow to her mother, the inarticulate young adult who could only peep in protest to her racist employers eventually becomes the adult artist who talks-story in high and clear voice.1 In Woman Warrior Kingston inextricably knots this pursuit of words with the process of self-creation and survival. Silence obliterates identity. It blots the self from Kingston's childhood paintings as it effaces her aunt's name, hence her being, from posterity's memory. Wordlessness is paired with insanity, the disintegration of the coherent self: Insane people were the ones who couldn't explain themselves, Kingston's narrator decides (p. 216). Deranged women, all of them inarticulate, haunt the text's nightmarish landscape.2 Kingston's neighbor, now chattering, now speechless, is eventually shut up in an insane asylum. Laughing, snarling, crazy Mary points at the invisible and lunges out of darkness. Pee-a-nah, the village idiot, wordlessly pursues children through slough and street. Moon Orchid, Kingston's transplanted aunt, her soft voice dissipating into whispered lunacies, ultimately finds others who the same language only in mental hospital (p. 185). These nonspeakers torment young Kingston who believes and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity' (p. 216). She worries that she will join the mad sorority; she too is unable to speak to others; she too visits with the people inside her head. Conversely, articulation creates selfhood. Kingston, unlike the lunatic women who plague her, in the end does not succumb to the silence that imperils her childhood and adolescence. As an adult, as the writer of her autobiography, she eventually discovers her voice and the courage to employ it. Woman Warrior narrates Kingston's own journey from silence and selflessness to song and selfhood. This triumphant telling, the act of writing, engenders and preserves the identity of its creator.3 Kingston depicts her childhood and adolescence as an unending, yieldless labor for words to express and beget her identity. Her taunt at another mute schoolgirl-If you don't talk, you can't have personality-is actually the self-directed warning of child frightened by desolate expanse of widening silence (p. 210). This early silence is, in part, legacy from people who believe that a ready tongue is an evil.4 Chinese keep secrets, they conceal their real names, they withhold speech. hovering threats of deportation directed toward Chinese immigrants in America deepen this taciturnity.5 Even as child Kingston realizes the cultural roots of her reticence: The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being Chinese (p. 193). Her speechlessness has to do also with cultural dislocation: being Chinese girl in an American school, daughter of China exiled in an alien country.6 She must disentangle the traditions and language, the legacies of her dual homelands: Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid