A coming together to celebrate the Asian American experience and its representation in literature.

“‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I’m about to tell you.’”

This is the famous opening line of one of the most influential works of Asian American literature, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. In it, a rule is given that is immediately broken when Kingston tells us the secret her mother bid her keep silent, setting up the conflict between silence and voice that will come to dominate the rest of the memoir. On October 27, I attended a reading hosted by the Asian American Initiative celebrating the 50th anniversary of this book, accompanied by Kingston herself. 

Coming into the event, I didn’t know much about Kingston and The Woman Warrior aside from one class lecture on the topic in my Introduction to Asian American Literature class (which, by the way, I highly recommend; Professor Denise Cruz is an amazing professor!). Professor Cruz, being a huge fan of Kingston, heavily promoted the reading in class, so I decided that I had to go check it out and learn more about why this work is such an important part of the American literary canon. 

For some context, Kingston was born in Stockton, California, as a daughter of Chinese immigrants and attended the University of California, Berkeley. She is a poet, writer, and anti-war activist who has won numerous awards, such as the National Medal of Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ National Humanities Medal, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award in Literature, and the National Book Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Her most famous work, The Woman Warrior, merges autobiography with Chinese myth to reveal the complexities of being a second-generation Chinese-American woman, telling the stories of five different Chinese women that focus on issues of identity, womanhood, culture, and speech. 

During the reading, various speakers read aloud different sections of the book, connecting the passage they read with their own life and how it made an impact on them. David Chen, an undergrad studying English and Economics, resonated with the question of what makes a Chinese-American Chinese presented in the chapter “No Name Woman,” as, despite being born in Minnesota, he had forgotten English when he moved back to the U.S. from Fuzhou, China. David Henry Hwang, a Tony Award-winning playwright, read aloud the chapter “White Tigers” about a mythical female warrior Fa Mu Lan, having himself been inspired by Kingston to add Chinese mystical stories to his breakthrough play, FOB. Rachel Adams, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, came to understand the mother-daughter relationship between Kingston and her mother Brave Orchid in the chapter  “Shaman” when she became a mother herself, reading out the passage where Brave Orchid understands Kingston’s wish to live away from home and the “ghosts” that linger there. Marie Myung-Ok Lee, a prominent Korean-American writer, talked about how she had thought no autobiography existed for Asian Americans, having grown up in a household that removed almost all traces of their Asian heritage, until she read Kingston’s work; she particularly connected with the chapter “At the Western Palace,” where Brave Orchid meets her sister, Moon Orchid, for the first time in decades and can’t believe how old she’s gotten, as Lee’s own father held a view of Korea frozen in time.

Sharon Marcus, the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, found Kingston’s imagining of her mother moving into a dorm in “Shaman” representative of how, as we grow up, we come to realize that our parents are people in their own right, with hopes and dreams that have nothing to do with us. Ken Chen, an Assistant Professor and the Associate Director of Creative Writing at Barnard, remarked on how speaking can be a tool of violence, not just healing, after reading a portion of the chapter “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” where Kingston bullies a silent Chinese girl in her class who shares her own struggles with speech. Nico Dao, an undergrad studying English and Race and Ethnicity Studies, dared us to be crazy and write about what scares us, just as Kingston writes about feeling like the crazy person in her house in “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.” Jay Gao, a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, related Kingston’s wish to tell her mother an extensive list of secrets in “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” to his own experience with his grandmother, having his own list of things he wished he had said to her despite their language differences. 

Kingston herself read out portions of her other books, The Fifth Book of Peace and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. She expressed the disparities between sacrifice and despair, destruction and peace, and individual and community, reflecting her famous quote in The Woman Warrior, “I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.” Her explanation for why she writes especially hit close to home for me: as a quiet girl, writing was her secret way to let her thoughts out, but she decided to show her writing to the world to allow others to understand and relate to it as well. Being a quiet person myself, I find writing a similar refuge, as a way to communicate what I can’t say aloud.

The reading ended with a surprise birthday celebration, as it was Kingston’s 86th birthday on the same day, and a giant cake-version of The Woman Warrior was wheeled out while we sang “Happy Birthday” to Kingston. Before leaving the event, I saw the speakers all gathered around Kingston for a group photo: tangible proof of the lives Kingston touched and changed through her powerful writing, of people who decided to share their own experiences out to the world just as Kingston does.

Image via Author