Monkey Mothers and Other Paradoxes: The Woman Warrior

Although Kingston does not introduce an overt trickster character into her works until Tripmaster Monkey , the formal and thematic concerns of The Woman Warrior and China Men show signs of the trickster's influence.^[2] Classified as "autobiography," and labeled as nonfiction on its cover, The Woman Warrior transgresses both of these restrictive definitions and offers a trickster-inspired model for narrative form and the construction of identity. As a trickster text, The Woman Warrior encourages a sense of truth as multifaceted, both through the example of the trickster mother, Brave Orchid, and through a narrative that demands and plays on reader involvement.

Though much of the criticism of The Woman Warrior focuses on the difficulties created by competing and often contradictory allegiances,^[3] such contradiction is not necessarily debilitating.

Kingston's multivocal Woman Warrior redefines autobiography as a process of acknowledging and giving voice to contradictions and paradoxes within the self. The trickster, whose identity is not stable but always shifting, who speaks in many languages and challenges preconceived notions, embodies this process. The trickster's androgynous, multivocal, polyvalent identity reconciles or encompasses the "agonizing contradictions" that split women writers by their allegiance to various groups (Hunt 11). Like Han Suyin's avowal that "I shall be both" and Gloria Anzaldúa's assertion that "only your labels split me," Kingston's autobiography affirms a fluid, tricksterlike identity not bounded by restrictive definitions (Ling 115; Anzaldúa and Moraga 205).^[4] Kingston's conception of identity in The Woman Warrior challenges a predominantly male tradition in Asian American literature, which stresses a monolithic, unified identity.^[5] Robert Lee connects the form of the work to a political subversion of the status quo, suggesting one way in which The Woman Warrior plays a trickster role in relation to Asian American tradition: "It is precisely the discontinuities, dislocations, and erasures in the history of Chinese women in the United States that The Woman Warrior interrogates, thereby challenging both the silence imposed by Orientalism and the authoritarianism of a reasserted patriarchy that threatens to seal Chinese American women's experiences off in its masculinized revision of history" (55). In the spirit of the trickster, The Woman Warrior outrageously pokes holes in stereotypes and established hierarchies. The text uses trickster strategies both to challenge a stultifying patriarchy and to champion an ethnic Chinese American culture that, in the face of harsh discriminatory laws, has had to rely on trickster strategies for its continuity. It is "camouflage, subterfuge and surprise that enable

the immigrant traditions to survive and [that] imbue them with power for resistance" (Lee 57).

Kingston's autobiography incorporates memoir, novel, myth, fantasy, legend, and biography and thus not only challenges an Asian American male tradition but also rejects a view of the self as an isolated individual. The author's remark that "I hope my writing has many layers, as human beings have layers," encourages us to read the self as composed of multiple stories ("Cultural Mis-Readings" 65). The Woman Warrior encompasses the voices and perspectives of the narrator's mother, her aunts, her sister, and her grandmother, as well as mythical forebears Fa Mu Lan and Ts'ai Yen, and thereby suggests a notion of identity that includes one's community and culture.^[6] "'I' am nothing but who 'I' am in relation to other people," Kingston explains ("Personal Statement" 23). This relational view of identity calls for a fluid conception of autobiography as a form that creates and preserves community as well as individuality. She feels compelled to invent a new autobiographical form, she explains, because "we're always on the brink of disappearing. Our culture's disappearing and our communities are always disappearing" (Fishkin 786). Kingston's autobiography gives voice to the many women who have created community for her.

As a gathering of varied and often contradictory stories, The Woman Warrior explores a sense of truth that allows for paradox. The tricksterlike image of the elusive, ever-changing dragon appears throughout The Woman Warrior suggesting the impossibility of a single all-encompassing perspective. The narrator, as Fa Mu Lan, learns about paradox through dragons: "I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. . . . The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes,

and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium. Its voice thunders and jingles like copper pans. It breathes fire and water; and sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many" (WW 29).^[7] Like truth, the dragon can never be seen in its entirety and therefore forms a central trope in the text for the indeterminacy of any one point of view.^[8] The idea that paradox may be the most accurate representation of truth becomes clear when the narrator speculates about her mother cuffing her frenum. "She pushed my tongue up and sliced the frenum. Or maybe she snipped it with a pair of scissors. I don't remember her doing it. . . . I saw no scars in my mouth." The narrator is unsure not only about how but also whether and why her mother cut her frenum: "Sometimes I felt very proud that my mother committed such a powerful act upon me. At other times I was terrified—the first thing my mother did when she saw me was to cut my tongue." In the same act, the mother silences her daughter and frees her tongue "to move in any language" (WW 164). The passage captures the ambivalence of the narrator's relationship to her mother and the paradoxically debilitating and empowering effect Brave Orchid has on her.

As Brave Orchid teaches her daughter to value paradox, she passes on a trickster legacy, for Brave Orchid, whose very name is a paradox, is a trickster who undermines and upsets the injunctions that she delivers. The mother's legacy to her daughter is necessarily complex because she represents for her daughter the oppressive authority of Chinese culture, especially regarding acceptable female behavior. Yet through her actions and her stories, Brave Orchid sends vivid messages that subvert her authoritarian proclamations. The no name aunt's story dramatizes this tension between an oppressive overt message—"Don't humiliate

us" (WW 5)—and a subtle message of rebellion; like the narrator, who flouts her mother's injunction not to tell, Brave Orchid herself has broken a taboo by telling the story of the no name aunt to her daughter. Though "You must not tell" carries the force of command, Brave Orchid's later request, "Don't let your father know that I told you," betrays her own sense of transgression and sets up a clandestine alliance with her daughter against the father (WW 5). Brave Orchid hands down a secret legacy of powerful stories to her daughter, who muses, "I have believed that . . . words [were] so strong and fathers so frail that 'aunt' would do my father some mysterious harm" (WW 15).

Contradiction and paradox, the trickster's hallmarks, define Brave Orchid. She slyly communicates trickster strategies to her daughter through the disparity between her words and her actions. Though she openly repeats misogynistic sayings like "'There's no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls,'" Brave Orchid sings the legend of Fa Mu Lan to her daughter, thereby giving her a means to fight against tradition. "She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman" (WW 20). Brave Orchid's life story, told in "Shaman," suggests that her example as a deserted wife turned doctor, who would cross the ocean to bear six children after the age of forty-five, provides another powerful antidote to her misogynist maxims.

As the protagonist struggles to come to terms with her cultural heritage, she must wrestle with her mother's confusing, contradictory, cryptic stories (WW 163). "'I don't want to listen to any more of your stories; they have no logic. They scramble me up. You lie with stories. You won't tell me a story and then say, "This is a true story," or "This is just a story." . . . I can't tell what's real

and what you make up'" (WW 202). The book records the process of the narrator's gradual acceptance that truth is multifaceted. Reality encompasses different, sometimes conflicting versions, and the enigmatic Brave Orchid, both woman and shaman, has trickily equipped not crippled her daughter by conveying this. Whereas the naive protagonist struggles with distinctions between "a true story" and "just a story," the narrator finally collapses these distinctions by presenting herself as a tricksterlike "outlaw knotmaker" whose story is a mix of actual, fictional, and mythic events (WW 163).

As The Woman Warrior works to subvert the protagonist's polarized thinking, it does the same for the reader. The narration of Moon Orchid's adventures in "At the Western Palace" provides a useful example of how the text questions the relative values of "a true story" and "just a story." Kingston will not allow her reader to rest comfortably with the separation of "fiction" and "fact," or with the idea that either possesses a higher claim to reality. "At the Western Palace," the fourth section of The Woman Warrior is an extended third-person omniscient narrative, thoroughly grounded in the mundane details of modern life. With its classic short story structure, the chapter seems at first glance to be the most "realistic" and accessible and therefore the most reliable of the work's five sections.^[9] However, the opening words of the next section destabilize that comfortable trust in the narrator's omniscience: "What my brother actually said was" (WW 164). Not having witnessed most of the events herself Kingston has embellished her brother's version of the story. She considers the relative worth of the two stories and concedes, "His version of the story may be better than mine because of its bareness, not twisted into designs" (WW 164). Yet although she suggests that

her brother's story may be closer to the "facts," her inclusion of "At the Western Palace" implies that she is proud of her outlaw knotmaking. Indeed, although the brother drove Brave Orchid and her sister to Los Angeles and participated in some of the story's events, he is limited by his perspective. His brief statements highlight his absorption in his own role: "I drove Mom and Second Aunt to Los Angeles to see Aunt's husband who's got the other wife. . . . I don't remember [what Mom said]. I pretended a pedestrian broke her leg so he would come" (WW 163). The narrator's fictionalized version of the story, which imaginatively enters the minds of the participants ("Moon Orchid was so ashamed, she held her hands over her face. She wished she could also hide her dappled hands" [WW 153]), may be truer than a firsthand account.

In presenting alternative variations on stories, Kingston's tricksterlike narrative acts upon her reader in much the same way as Brave Orchid's stories act upon the narrator. Vicente Gotera records student responses to The Woman Warrior that sound much like Kingston's narrator: "I had trouble determining whether a particular storyline was truth or fantasy," one student writes (65).^[10] Like Brave Orchid's story of the no name aunt, Kingston tells us "once and for all the useful parts" (WW 6), leaving gaps and blanks in her story that test the reader's "strength to establish realities" (WW 5). Kingston explains, "I meant to give people those questions so that they can wrestle with them in their own lives. You know, I can answer those questions, but then . . . I just answer [them] for me. . . . When people wrestle with them and struggle with them in their own minds and in their own lives, all kinds of exciting things happen to them" (Fishkin 785). Kingston implies that there is no definitive way to fill the gaps in

the text—the answers to the questions that the text raises change according to the reader. Kingston's comments suggest that she sees reading as an interactive process. When readers encounter a trickster text, "all kinds of exciting things happen to them," as they, like Kingston's narrator, wrestle with unresolved contradictions and perhaps begin to question their own comfortable way of viewing the world.