Ep 07: Manipulating Silence in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Narrative of No Name Woman
Today’s podcast we talk about the very excellent author Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir The Women Warrior, in which Kinston tells her story of being a Chinese American, and being a woman.
The opening sentence of The Woman Warrior, “You must not tell anyone,” unveils the central theme Kingston tries to reveal in her memoir: the shifting meaning and attitudes of control, power, and agency behind what can be said, and what must be silenced, left unsaid. The opening line exemplifies the prevalent attitude of silence and obedience with which Kingston feels women characters she depicts in her memoir, as well as she herself feels, are pressured to behave. But the opening line also encourages the author to create narratives that both accentuate and manipulate instances of silence or silencing, where characters are denied the opportunity to speak or cannot speak. By addressing her family story in No Name Woman, the protagonist struggles to become stronger and able to articulate what she feels is unspoken. From the very beginning Kingston has successfully broken the silence and given women such as her aunt a redemption through a narrative, one she weaves into part of her own life. The Woman Warrior, in part, acts as a vessel for many stories—true or not—that draw upon the experiences of women whose stories shaped her life; by shaping and retelling these stories Kingston not only uses their stories to find her own voice but also allows stories of people who might otherwise have been forgotten or languished in obscurity a new kind of life by redeeming them in her retelling of those stories.
In chapters like “No-Name Woman,” Kingston does not revive or depict individuals and characters with full, maximalist stories that encompass all aspects of their lives. Rather, the approach she takes is one of consuming, assimilating, and retelling an ongoing process of identity-generating. By creating spaces for these women in her memoir she shows how she consumed their stories as a reader, was able to incorporate, adjust and ultimately assimilate, to varying degrees, these stories into how she understood herself and the world. Ultimately, when she begins crafting her own sense of self, she is able to articulate these stories in a voice that throughout the book recognized as Kingston’s. In an interview with Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Kingston is very clear about her purpose to “save” people’s stories that might otherwise be lost or consigned to forgetting. For instance, with “No-Name Woman,” “these villagers are taking a living creature and saying, “we’re going to wipe her out of the book of life, we’re going to forget. She never existed. I realized that by writing about her I gave her back life and a place in history and maybe immortality (Interview, 786).” What is striking is that Kingston believes in the institutional powers of literature and the restorative and preservative powers of narratives produced for public consumption. The “silence” that Kingston negotiates with is very specific, where individual stories, be they fables or open secrets, family gossip or village tales, are banished or held to a degree of obscurity that is tantamount to silence rather than grappled with in search of meaning or thrown into a dialogue with others.
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Several generations of readers have passed since the first publication of The Woman Warrior, and we can begin to see the full implications of the form of memoir and autobiography that Kingston helped pioneer, as well as the significance and difficulty of representing stories of women and minorities in American writing, both fictional and not. To the extent that such silences continue to be broken through narratives that now use Kingston’s blend of both nonfiction and fiction, emotional truth and novelistic technique, readers must now reckon with the challenge that The Woman Warrior is chiefly still a book about Maxine Hong Kingston: it remains first a form of memoir. The extent to which we as readers can extrapolate writ large to the Chinese society she depicts her parents emigrating from, the Chinese immigrant community she writes of, and the American society she depicts searching for her own voice and identity in, is both given great freedom and limitation based on the degree to which she chooses to use fictional and nonfictional techniques. To opt for both fact and fiction, in order to depict and arrive at what she believes are pivotal moments of identity creation and self-discovery of who she believes she can most authentically be remains a bold technique for identity formation, but carries with it tremendous narrative burdens and consequences of its own, one which may be best continued by looking not just at The Woman Warrior but at all the works that use the techniques Kingston helped pioneer to help her break her own silence, and discover her voice.