Maxine Hong Kingston's Attack On Women Warrior

In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Kingston attempts to reveal Chinese culture while explaining her own dissatisfaction with it. Kingston exaggerates her stories, not for the purpose of butchering, but rather so that she can give implications on how she thinks Chinese culture should improve. To further support this, Kingston repeatedly mentions the power of story telling to hint that legends are still significant to her. Yet, she also repeatedly critiques the negativity of her countrymen, but only so that she may urge better behavior from future generations. By illustrating Chinese culture in such a manner, Kingston attempts to unveil the culture of China in negativity so that injustices of past generations may not be repeated.

To persuade her countrymen to change their behavior, Kingston attempts to influence them by modifying Chinese legends. The main story she alters to serve her purpose is Mulan. Originally, the story of Mulan does not consist of "white tigers" or "swordswomen [that] jump over houses from a standstill" (19) let alone warriors who can "make a sword appear...control its slashing with [their] mind" (33). In fact, in the original Mulan, such mythic proportions do not exist...at least not for the woman protagonist. So why does Kingston endow her Mulan with such fantastical prowess? It is possible that Kingston is waging war in her own little way: a war against the Chinese stereotype of women. To strike out against this chauvinistic behavior, Kingston repeatedly mentions the stereotypes themselves: "Girls are maggots in the rice" "It is more profitable to raise geese than girls" (43) and other sayings that degrade the ability of women. In order to indicate her fight against the stereotypes, Kingston always accompanies the stereotypes with "a female avenger"(43). During No Name Woman, Chinese women are degraded from the start on their appearance: "Women looked like great sea snails--the corded wood, babies, and laundry they carried were the whorls on their backs. The Chinese did not admire a bent back; goddesses and warriors stood straight" (10) Women are oppressed to the point that the only time they allowed "a marvelous feeling of beauty [is] when a worker laid down her burden and stretched and arched" (10). However, the aunt defies this oppression by "[working] at herself in the mirror" (9) especially during a time when people lived with the stereotype that "a woman who tended her appearance reaped a reputation for eccentricity" (9). By being eccentric, the aunt is not servile like the other women and thus society is unable to control her. Since she works on her appearance, the aunt herself is fighting against a despotic culture where "brothers and sister, newly men and women, [have] to efface their sexual color and present plain miens" (11). Sadly, when the "female avenger" finally does lay down her burden and stretch and arch, she is not confronted with a "feeling of beauty" but rather "men--hungry, greedy, tired of planting in dry soil" (13) that "punish her at the birth of her baby" (13) because she is a "physical representation of the break...made in the 'roundness'" (13) of the village. Kingston honors the aunt by "[devoting] pages of paper to her" (16) because she feels that the aunt was more powerful than the villagers in the end since "she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water. 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" (16). The aunt attains greater power in the end because although the villagers attempt to destroy her memory, they indirectly immortalize her as she becomes a force beyond their control. So, to keep the theme of the women avenger constant, Kingston decides to modify the story of Mulan. Since Mulan originally was not an avenger, Kingston decides to "carve revenge on [Mulan's] back" (34). This is important to Kingston because her woman warrior differs from the original as she avenges womankind by defying all the stereotypes. The former defies stereotypes solely for the "legend [of] perfect filiality" (45). When Kingston's Mulan loses the enchanted beads to an enemy, Kingston defends her by explaining that "the rest of the victories would be won on [her] own, slow and without shortcuts" (42) showing that she has the will to persist interminably, unlike the common women who "would not be good for anything" (44). Kingston appoints herself a warrior in the war against sexism as she admits: "The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar...What we have in common are the words at our backs" (53). Similarly to the aunt in No Name Woman, Kingston realizes she is "getting straight A's for the good of [her] future husband's family, not [her] own" (47). The aunt parallels this realization with her own that she "always did as she was told" (6) and thus her family "expected her alone to keep the traditional ways" (8). Offended by such a realization, Kingston decides to show her "mother and father and the nosey emigrant villagers that girls have no outward tendency. [She] stopped getting straight A's" (47). Equally offended, the aunt resists by "changing [herself] frequently in order to hit on the right combination. She wanted [men] to look back" (9). Just like the heroines that she has portrayed in her stories, Kingston hopes that this