American girlhood in California are spliced with myths and anecdotes told by her imposing and thoroughly Chinese mother. Chapters are arranged in blocks against opposing chapters, some gaps bridged with cries of self-doubt or victo ry, while others are left for the reader to interpret. Kingston breaks up time as she breaks up the usual distinctions between fact and fantasy, and in doing so, separates her book from more traditional, chronological autobiographies. Her first chapter relates and then embroiders a story that was told by her mother, Brave Orchid, when Kingston first menstruated. It is a cautionary tale about a real aunt in China who bore an illegitimate child, brought down the village's violence on her house, drowned herself and was then excluded by the retaliatory silence of the family from the comforts that family ghosts expect. Her name was suppressed, all talk of her forbidden. Kingston's second section relates an entirely different tale about Fa Mu Lan, the mythical Warrior Woman. This talk-story, which was repeatedly chanted by Brave Orchid and her daughter, told of a girl taken to the mountains by a magic bird, who trained herself to become strong in self-discipline and magic and later returned to wreak vengeance on her family's and country's enemies. These introductory myths juxtapose a woman who, as an outlaw, became a victim against a second woman, dutiful and heroic. Kingston jumps from these stories to the central history of her mother in China, then to the tale of another aunt, Moon Orchid, a delicate and giggling old woman who emigrated and ended in madness, broken by the U.S., which Kingston's mother had survived. Kingston, the narrator, the expected subject of this autobiography, never set foot in China, where her mother was a medical student, nor was she present in Los Angeles, when her fragile aunt received the rebuff that led to her madness. This distance of the narrator, this self-effacing quality, contrasts with the intimacy one can sense in reading the book. Kingston links inherited stories with explications and memories of her own. She also works to see these people clearly, trying to construct a picture of her relatives from fragments and to enter their world in much the same way that a sympathetic reader would. She is as involved in this process of learning as we are. Her labor becomes most apparent when we compare the writer's detailed, scenic conjectures about the crises that overwhelmed her aunts in China and Los Angeles with the bare tales which were actually given to her. Her outlawed aunt was raped ... or no, she was in love, a flirt, who combed her hair into wisps and burned out a freckle;
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Jul 30, 2009
Anna Coutsoudis + 2
Open Access