Reality and Fantasy: The Chinese-American Woman's Quest for Identity

Abstract

Maxine Hong Kingston explores with uncanny frankness and sensitivity in her first autobiographical novel, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, the dilemma of the Chinese-American woman as she struggles for selfhood in a chaotic and hostile environment. Straddling two cultures, Maxine, the author/heroine, has to confront the reality or fiction of her Chinese heritage that reaches her mainly through her mother's mythical yet authoritative talk-stories, and the equally puzzling realities of her American birth, education, and experience. Both heritages impose external limitations and demand prescribed behaviors even though she is constantly aware of the remoteness of ancestral China and her essential separation from it, as well as her marginal status of exclusion and alienation in the American society. As a ChineseAmerican woman, Maxine must come to terms with her past and present, with China and America, with woman-as-slave and woman-aswarrior, and thus find her own identity and voice, one that is not externally imposed but self-expressive, born painfully out of the experience of alienation and suffering. This journey necessarily involves a rejection of all superficial authorities and restrictions, either Chinese or American, in order for her to open the way toward individual growth and self-expression that fuse the past with the present, the Chinese simultaneously with the American. This quest for selfhood must involve a deliberate act of self-assertion. She must deal with her Chinese-American-ness in the depth of her own being in order to know who she is and where she belongs. Values and behaviors deemed meaningful and valid to other women may turn out to be myths and falsehoods to her. She must examine established values and behaviors and then evaluate them in terms of her own perception and experience. As a Chinese girl growing up in America, Maxine has to test her strength to establish realities in the midst of conflicting alternatives: Those of us in the first American generation have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fit in solid America.' Growing up is a painful process for any youngster any