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[ Abstract ] The subtitle of The Woman Warrior is Memoirs of A Girlhood among Ghosts. The decoding of “ghost” from the cultural angle is the key point to comprehend this book. “Ghost” in here means Chinese traditional culture and American mainstream White culture. By the usage of the imagery of “Ghost”, Maxine Hong Kingston displays Chinese American’s bewilder ness, pain, wish under the two different cultural contexts and the hard process of the seeking of cultural identity.
[Key words] The Woman Warrior ghost image cultural angle
1. Introduction
Maxine Hong Kingston (1940- ) was born in Stockton, California. She is regarded as the first Chinese American writer who greatly influences the American literary circle.
The Woman Warrior consists of five short stories, “No Name Woman”, “White Tigers”, “Shaman”, “At the Western Palace”, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”. The first three parts are several stories that the narrator “I” heard from her mother in childhood, and the next two chapters are the stories the author narrates.
Since its publication in 1976, lots of people regard it as Kingston’s autobiography. And, Maxine Hong Kingston ever declared that the book is just a novel, which belongs to American novel. （方慧佳,2006） Because The Woman Warrior focuses on both her life experience and the common feeling of second generation of immigrants.
This book’s subtitle is Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. “Ghost” is everywhere from the beginning to the end. There are opinions among critics varying from one to another. Then, the decoding of “ghost” is the key point to comprehend this book.
2. The General Meaning of Ghosts
According to Modern Chinese Dictionary, “ghost” has seven meanings. Except the sense of the spirit of a dead person, it also has the other four negative senses. For example, “讨厌鬼（tao yan gui）——skunk” 、“胆小鬼（dan xiao gui）——cowardly person” ；“鬼天气（gui tian qi）——damned weather”，etc. What we should pay attention is that sometimes “ghost” can be used as positive sense in spoken chinese, meaning” smart”. Take “小鬼(xiao gui),” for example, ” 小鬼 ” here means “smart little child.” In the Modern Chinese, “ghost” has become a term, which is used to express Chinese people’s hate to those foreigners who want to invade China. For instance, “洋鬼子——western invader”， “日本鬼子——Japan invader”, etc.
In Chinese literature, it seems that writers would like to use the image of ghost. In The Strange Tales of Liao Zhai (a classic literature work with a collection of about 500 stories by Pu Songling of the Qing Dynasty)”, each fox ghost in this book is young, kind, beautiful, fervid, who impressed readers greatly. Journey to the West, one of the Four Chinese Classical Novels, also is a world enclosed by ghosts. The different is that those ghosts mostly are devil. Thus the image of ghost in literary works is the same as people understands on ghost in real life. Sometimes, those images are paradoxical.
Also, America is not a place without ghost. From Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying description of ghost to Henry Thoreau’s indignant spirit cry on “under each rail lie an Irish” (薛玉凤,2003) ; From the small ghost revenges his mother after 18 years in Toni Mrrison’s Beloved to the moving affection between people and ghost in the movie Ghost, we can see there is also a ghost tradition in American literature.
The Chinese American critic Frank Chin, thinks that it is just satisfy the White people’s curiosity at the cost of distorting Chinese traditional culture and the true feeling of Chinese Americans.（张子清，2000）However, this understanding is limited. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston describes different ghosts, including concrete, having legend colorific Chinese ghosts, attachable American ghosts; ghosts in virtual world, and ghosts in the real life. Apparently, those images of ghosts couldn’t be simply concluded that Western readers’ curious about the mysterious Eastern country. Actually, “ghost” in this book is not single but diversifies into many, and it’s complex in both positive and negative meaning. Its meaning relates to the cultural background closely.
3. The Specific Meaning of Ghosts
Shirley G Lim points out that ghost actually embody “the threat of personal self- consciousness results from two opposite world and collision.” (Lim, Shirley Geok, 1991) When one side threatens the other in spirit and values or breaks norms and rules of the conventional life, so as to hurt the opposite side’s emotions and arouse his fears and humiliation, then this side becomes a ghost in the other side’s eyes.
3.1 Chinese Ghost- Chinese Traditional Culture
There are all kinds of Chinese ghosts in The Woman Warrior, wall ghosts, blithering ghosts, starving ghosts, broom ghosts, drowned ghosts, etc.
From the second-generation immigrants’ perspectives, China and the Chinese traditional culture are mysterious. Kingston feels herself moving farther and farther apart from the Chinese culture as she attends school with Americans and accepts American ways of life. Kingston couldn’t understand Chinese culture correctly because her parents don’t explain why and how they practice the Chinese customs. In The Woman Warrior, the first sentence “You must not tell anyone […] what I am about to tell you” (Kingston, 1981) impressed readers very much. Mother breaks down father’s prohibition of “don’t tell,” and tells no name aunt’s story to “I”, then, “I” regardless of mother’s interdict, letting the story was known by writing it on her book. In fact, saying female itself is a challenge on Chinese traditional male culture. By using language, Kingston presents the traditional idea of “male supremacy over female” (薛玉凤,2003) since several thousand years. No name aunt is the sacrifice in the male-dominated society.
After the hurry-up wedding, aunt’s husband and other male in the village sailed for the Gold Mountain in order to search for gold. Several years later, aunt had an adulterous affair, and had an illegitimate pregnancy. On the night the baby was to be born the villagers raided the family house. The aunt had to give birth in the pigsty that night, and plug up the family well with her baby the next morning. From then on, the family kept science on the matter. They deny her. Her betrayal disgraced them. She would like to be forgotten as if she had never been born. They deliberately forgetting her and “punished her forever”——suffer forever, even after death. (Kingston, 1981)
In Chinese traditional idea of male-dominancy, female are not allowed to pursue love and freedom. In literary works, “becoming ghost” is a way for female seeking after freedom and love. The heroine in “No Name Woman” also gets her freedom when becomes “ghost” and releases her oppressed voice and desire as a “woman”. On the one hand, aunt drowned herself and her inglorious new-borned baby in the well. Their blood is filtering into the well water. It’s impossible for her family to expel her drastically. Besides, when they drink the well’s water which contains her and her baby’s blood, the village’s people could not shake off her shadow forever, let alone clarify the genealogical line. On the other hand, she didn’t tell the inseminator’s name until die, which make her family lose the change to revenge him forever. And the way she suicide was retaliatory. Kingston wrote “The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute.” (Kingston, 1981) The no name aunt’s behavior left an indelible horror in villagers. The moan of her ghost lingers around the well surroundings in a long time and villagers are uneasy for their ruthless they’ve dome for her. The silent death of no name and no voiced aunt became the most powerful whoop on her revenge. And several years later, she was reborn in Kingston’s words as the image of “Woman Warrior”. Kingston neglects her mother’s warning, devotes pages of paper to the no name aunt. She is telling to her aunt. By this new way, Kingston liberates the no name aunt from the male oppression.
To Chinese immigrant group, Kingston is also a half ghost. With the age increasing, Kingston begins to conflict with China’s behavior code. In real life, Kingston’s behavior was accused of not like a girl by her Chinese neighbors. She was isolated from Chinese immigrant group.
In the second chapter “White Tigers”, Kingston begins to write her legend. In the dream, she became the woman warrior like Fa Mulan. However, dream just an illusion. Freud Sigmund says, “Happy one never has illusion, only depressed one owns it. The motivation of hallucination is the wish which could not be achieved. Each illusion can accomplish the wish that can’t be carried out in real life”. (Punter, David. 1980) Kingston feels depressed in Chinese immigrant group, but she can’t counterbalance with the powerful society. So, she abreacted her wish in dream. And, this value was expressed by the new Fa Mulan story. That is: as a female, when she grows up, she should not only be other’s wife or servant, but also be the woman warrior fighting off any oppression.
3.2 American Ghost—— the Mainstream White American
The ghosts in “The Woman Warrior” are not only refer to Chinese ghosts, but also mean to “White Ghosts”——American ghosts. Kingston called all the American be ghosts in this book, who were divided into White Ghosts, Black Ghosts, Yellow Ghosts, and so on by their skin color; Gas Ghosts, Sale Ghosts, Immigrant Ghosts, and so on by their work category. Kingston described America was full of machines and ghosts; there were Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, etc.
To name the non-Chinese Americans, especially to name the whites as “ghosts”, is not only out of the fear of white oppression, but also a way of avenge against the injustice they’ve done to Chinese-Americans. Kingston’s mother, who used to be a village doctor in China, She was famous for killing a ghost, but now has to work in the laundry, arranging heaps of socks. She called America a terrible ghost country, where a human being worked her life away. Her revenge to this injustice is private: “‘No tickee, no washee, mama-san?’ a ghost waould say, so embarrassing. ‘Noisy Red-Mouth Ghost’, she’d write on its package, naming it, marking its clothes with its name.” (Kingston, 1981)
Since Kingston was born to a Chinese immigrant family, her family and community culture determine her being an expeller in American society. America, in some way, is a ghost land. Kingston expresses this sense of dislocation in the book: “Once upon a time, the world was so thick with ghosts, I could barely breathe; … I could hardly walk around the White Ghosts….” (Kingston, 1981) Not only Kingston’s parents’ paranoid but also the injustice she experienced of “American white ghosts” or ghost-like America. The course of her transformation from a quite girl with a “Zero IQ” (Kingston, 1981) to an “American-normal” people is difficult and sorrowful. Kingston hates the white for not letting her talk. “Sometimes I hated the ghosts for not letting us talk ... It was when I found out I had to talk that school became a misery…” (Kingston, 1981)
Because of the historical racial discrimination, Chinese Americans origin can’t receive equal treatment as the white. They are viewed as “foreigners”. In Whites Americans’ eyes, they called Americans of Chinese group “chink”, a crude nickname for the Chinese. However, Chinese people like Kingston’s mother Brave Orchid also viewed the white as the hostile “other”, they use the term of “ghosts” to name foreigners, and name white Americans be “White Ghosts”. The “ghost” takes on the meaning of “devil” and “demon”. To some extent, Chinese Americans tend to treat foreigners with such an isolated attitude, which is a form of prejudice against American culture and people. By describing the Americans are a devil or demon group——“ghosts”, Chinese Americans revenge for their race.
Based on the above, “American ghosts” not only refers to Americans, but also symbolizes of race, meaning the culture under multivariate cultural context and racial discrimination.
4. Conclusion
The “ghosts” is one’s isolation from other people and the society. Firstly, “ghosts” indicates the sexism women encounters in Chinese cultural context; secondly, “ghosts” also is treated as the Americans’ racist ideas and prejudice towards minority communities, and the first generation of Chinese immigrants’ prejudice and distorted view on American society and people. The woman warrior is the ghost-fighter within Maxine Hong Kingston and other female, even all the people who struggle against their restrained surroundings. By the usage of the metaphor of “ghost”, Kingston displays her painful experience of loosing oneself in the collision between Chinese and American culture. Meanwhile, she shapes the image of the woman warrior like Fa Mu Lan in her own story, fully expressing her hope of finding oneself in the collision of the two cultures.
Bibliography：
[1] Kingston, M. H. (1981). The Woman Warrior. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd，11-164.
[2] Lim, S. G. (1991). Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s the Woman Warrior. New York: Modern Language Association of America，139.
[3] Punter, D. (1980). The Literature of Terror. London: Longman Group Limited，409.
[4] 方慧佳. 边缘的呐喊——剖析《女勇士》中“鬼”的意象[J].重庆工学院学报,2006, (3):159-161.
[5] 薛玉凤.鬼魂言说：《女勇士》中“鬼”的意象之文化解读[J]. 解放军外国语学院学报,2003, 26(1): 86-89.
[6] 张子清. 与亚裔美国文学共生共荣的华裔美国文学(总序) [A]. 北京：译林出版社，2000:1-2.
[Key words] The Woman Warrior ghost image cultural angle
1. Introduction
Maxine Hong Kingston (1940- ) was born in Stockton, California. She is regarded as the first Chinese American writer who greatly influences the American literary circle.
The Woman Warrior consists of five short stories, “No Name Woman”, “White Tigers”, “Shaman”, “At the Western Palace”, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”. The first three parts are several stories that the narrator “I” heard from her mother in childhood, and the next two chapters are the stories the author narrates.
Since its publication in 1976, lots of people regard it as Kingston’s autobiography. And, Maxine Hong Kingston ever declared that the book is just a novel, which belongs to American novel. （方慧佳,2006） Because The Woman Warrior focuses on both her life experience and the common feeling of second generation of immigrants.
This book’s subtitle is Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. “Ghost” is everywhere from the beginning to the end. There are opinions among critics varying from one to another. Then, the decoding of “ghost” is the key point to comprehend this book.
2. The General Meaning of Ghosts
According to Modern Chinese Dictionary, “ghost” has seven meanings. Except the sense of the spirit of a dead person, it also has the other four negative senses. For example, “讨厌鬼（tao yan gui）——skunk” 、“胆小鬼（dan xiao gui）——cowardly person” ；“鬼天气（gui tian qi）——damned weather”，etc. What we should pay attention is that sometimes “ghost” can be used as positive sense in spoken chinese, meaning” smart”. Take “小鬼(xiao gui),” for example, ” 小鬼 ” here means “smart little child.” In the Modern Chinese, “ghost” has become a term, which is used to express Chinese people’s hate to those foreigners who want to invade China. For instance, “洋鬼子——western invader”， “日本鬼子——Japan invader”, etc.
In Chinese literature, it seems that writers would like to use the image of ghost. In The Strange Tales of Liao Zhai (a classic literature work with a collection of about 500 stories by Pu Songling of the Qing Dynasty)”, each fox ghost in this book is young, kind, beautiful, fervid, who impressed readers greatly. Journey to the West, one of the Four Chinese Classical Novels, also is a world enclosed by ghosts. The different is that those ghosts mostly are devil. Thus the image of ghost in literary works is the same as people understands on ghost in real life. Sometimes, those images are paradoxical.
Also, America is not a place without ghost. From Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying description of ghost to Henry Thoreau’s indignant spirit cry on “under each rail lie an Irish” (薛玉凤,2003) ; From the small ghost revenges his mother after 18 years in Toni Mrrison’s Beloved to the moving affection between people and ghost in the movie Ghost, we can see there is also a ghost tradition in American literature.
The Chinese American critic Frank Chin, thinks that it is just satisfy the White people’s curiosity at the cost of distorting Chinese traditional culture and the true feeling of Chinese Americans.（张子清，2000）However, this understanding is limited. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston describes different ghosts, including concrete, having legend colorific Chinese ghosts, attachable American ghosts; ghosts in virtual world, and ghosts in the real life. Apparently, those images of ghosts couldn’t be simply concluded that Western readers’ curious about the mysterious Eastern country. Actually, “ghost” in this book is not single but diversifies into many, and it’s complex in both positive and negative meaning. Its meaning relates to the cultural background closely.
3. The Specific Meaning of Ghosts
Shirley G Lim points out that ghost actually embody “the threat of personal self- consciousness results from two opposite world and collision.” (Lim, Shirley Geok, 1991) When one side threatens the other in spirit and values or breaks norms and rules of the conventional life, so as to hurt the opposite side’s emotions and arouse his fears and humiliation, then this side becomes a ghost in the other side’s eyes.
3.1 Chinese Ghost- Chinese Traditional Culture
There are all kinds of Chinese ghosts in The Woman Warrior, wall ghosts, blithering ghosts, starving ghosts, broom ghosts, drowned ghosts, etc.
From the second-generation immigrants’ perspectives, China and the Chinese traditional culture are mysterious. Kingston feels herself moving farther and farther apart from the Chinese culture as she attends school with Americans and accepts American ways of life. Kingston couldn’t understand Chinese culture correctly because her parents don’t explain why and how they practice the Chinese customs. In The Woman Warrior, the first sentence “You must not tell anyone […] what I am about to tell you” (Kingston, 1981) impressed readers very much. Mother breaks down father’s prohibition of “don’t tell,” and tells no name aunt’s story to “I”, then, “I” regardless of mother’s interdict, letting the story was known by writing it on her book. In fact, saying female itself is a challenge on Chinese traditional male culture. By using language, Kingston presents the traditional idea of “male supremacy over female” (薛玉凤,2003) since several thousand years. No name aunt is the sacrifice in the male-dominated society.
After the hurry-up wedding, aunt’s husband and other male in the village sailed for the Gold Mountain in order to search for gold. Several years later, aunt had an adulterous affair, and had an illegitimate pregnancy. On the night the baby was to be born the villagers raided the family house. The aunt had to give birth in the pigsty that night, and plug up the family well with her baby the next morning. From then on, the family kept science on the matter. They deny her. Her betrayal disgraced them. She would like to be forgotten as if she had never been born. They deliberately forgetting her and “punished her forever”——suffer forever, even after death. (Kingston, 1981)
In Chinese traditional idea of male-dominancy, female are not allowed to pursue love and freedom. In literary works, “becoming ghost” is a way for female seeking after freedom and love. The heroine in “No Name Woman” also gets her freedom when becomes “ghost” and releases her oppressed voice and desire as a “woman”. On the one hand, aunt drowned herself and her inglorious new-borned baby in the well. Their blood is filtering into the well water. It’s impossible for her family to expel her drastically. Besides, when they drink the well’s water which contains her and her baby’s blood, the village’s people could not shake off her shadow forever, let alone clarify the genealogical line. On the other hand, she didn’t tell the inseminator’s name until die, which make her family lose the change to revenge him forever. And the way she suicide was retaliatory. Kingston wrote “The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute.” (Kingston, 1981) The no name aunt’s behavior left an indelible horror in villagers. The moan of her ghost lingers around the well surroundings in a long time and villagers are uneasy for their ruthless they’ve dome for her. The silent death of no name and no voiced aunt became the most powerful whoop on her revenge. And several years later, she was reborn in Kingston’s words as the image of “Woman Warrior”. Kingston neglects her mother’s warning, devotes pages of paper to the no name aunt. She is telling to her aunt. By this new way, Kingston liberates the no name aunt from the male oppression.
To Chinese immigrant group, Kingston is also a half ghost. With the age increasing, Kingston begins to conflict with China’s behavior code. In real life, Kingston’s behavior was accused of not like a girl by her Chinese neighbors. She was isolated from Chinese immigrant group.
In the second chapter “White Tigers”, Kingston begins to write her legend. In the dream, she became the woman warrior like Fa Mulan. However, dream just an illusion. Freud Sigmund says, “Happy one never has illusion, only depressed one owns it. The motivation of hallucination is the wish which could not be achieved. Each illusion can accomplish the wish that can’t be carried out in real life”. (Punter, David. 1980) Kingston feels depressed in Chinese immigrant group, but she can’t counterbalance with the powerful society. So, she abreacted her wish in dream. And, this value was expressed by the new Fa Mulan story. That is: as a female, when she grows up, she should not only be other’s wife or servant, but also be the woman warrior fighting off any oppression.
3.2 American Ghost—— the Mainstream White American
The ghosts in “The Woman Warrior” are not only refer to Chinese ghosts, but also mean to “White Ghosts”——American ghosts. Kingston called all the American be ghosts in this book, who were divided into White Ghosts, Black Ghosts, Yellow Ghosts, and so on by their skin color; Gas Ghosts, Sale Ghosts, Immigrant Ghosts, and so on by their work category. Kingston described America was full of machines and ghosts; there were Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, etc.
To name the non-Chinese Americans, especially to name the whites as “ghosts”, is not only out of the fear of white oppression, but also a way of avenge against the injustice they’ve done to Chinese-Americans. Kingston’s mother, who used to be a village doctor in China, She was famous for killing a ghost, but now has to work in the laundry, arranging heaps of socks. She called America a terrible ghost country, where a human being worked her life away. Her revenge to this injustice is private: “‘No tickee, no washee, mama-san?’ a ghost waould say, so embarrassing. ‘Noisy Red-Mouth Ghost’, she’d write on its package, naming it, marking its clothes with its name.” (Kingston, 1981)
Since Kingston was born to a Chinese immigrant family, her family and community culture determine her being an expeller in American society. America, in some way, is a ghost land. Kingston expresses this sense of dislocation in the book: “Once upon a time, the world was so thick with ghosts, I could barely breathe; … I could hardly walk around the White Ghosts….” (Kingston, 1981) Not only Kingston’s parents’ paranoid but also the injustice she experienced of “American white ghosts” or ghost-like America. The course of her transformation from a quite girl with a “Zero IQ” (Kingston, 1981) to an “American-normal” people is difficult and sorrowful. Kingston hates the white for not letting her talk. “Sometimes I hated the ghosts for not letting us talk ... It was when I found out I had to talk that school became a misery…” (Kingston, 1981)
Because of the historical racial discrimination, Chinese Americans origin can’t receive equal treatment as the white. They are viewed as “foreigners”. In Whites Americans’ eyes, they called Americans of Chinese group “chink”, a crude nickname for the Chinese. However, Chinese people like Kingston’s mother Brave Orchid also viewed the white as the hostile “other”, they use the term of “ghosts” to name foreigners, and name white Americans be “White Ghosts”. The “ghost” takes on the meaning of “devil” and “demon”. To some extent, Chinese Americans tend to treat foreigners with such an isolated attitude, which is a form of prejudice against American culture and people. By describing the Americans are a devil or demon group——“ghosts”, Chinese Americans revenge for their race.
Based on the above, “American ghosts” not only refers to Americans, but also symbolizes of race, meaning the culture under multivariate cultural context and racial discrimination.
4. Conclusion
The “ghosts” is one’s isolation from other people and the society. Firstly, “ghosts” indicates the sexism women encounters in Chinese cultural context; secondly, “ghosts” also is treated as the Americans’ racist ideas and prejudice towards minority communities, and the first generation of Chinese immigrants’ prejudice and distorted view on American society and people. The woman warrior is the ghost-fighter within Maxine Hong Kingston and other female, even all the people who struggle against their restrained surroundings. By the usage of the metaphor of “ghost”, Kingston displays her painful experience of loosing oneself in the collision between Chinese and American culture. Meanwhile, she shapes the image of the woman warrior like Fa Mu Lan in her own story, fully expressing her hope of finding oneself in the collision of the two cultures.
Bibliography：
[1] Kingston, M. H. (1981). The Woman Warrior. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd，11-164.
[2] Lim, S. G. (1991). Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s the Woman Warrior. New York: Modern Language Association of America，139.
[3] Punter, D. (1980). The Literature of Terror. London: Longman Group Limited，409.
[4] 方慧佳. 边缘的呐喊——剖析《女勇士》中“鬼”的意象[J].重庆工学院学报,2006, (3):159-161.
[5] 薛玉凤.鬼魂言说：《女勇士》中“鬼”的意象之文化解读[J]. 解放军外国语学院学报,2003, 26(1): 86-89.
[6] 张子清. 与亚裔美国文学共生共荣的华裔美国文学(总序) [A]. 北京：译林出版社，2000:1-2.