The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

I checked out this book solely because it was included in the College Board's list of 101 great books, at which list, for lack of a better, I have been chipping away dutifully for nigh on two years now. I thought, perhaps snobbishly, that this book would be merely a requisite representation of the Chinese woman that fulfilled some sort of multicultural quota, and maybe there are elements of that involved in the book's place in the College Board's heart, but Kingston's work is a decent piece of literature in its own right.

Kingston retells the tales her mother mesmerized her with in her childhood in sparse, bare English that evokes the fine, linear simplicity of the art of feudal China. She gives the eponymous woman warrior her own voice, allowing her to narrate the story of her training by a mystical old couple who give her the abilities to avenge the mistreatment of her people. Kingston slowly introduces facets of her own life and eventually moves entirely to talking of her family and their transition to life in America.

Kingston is at her finest when she is recreating the world of her ancestors. Her story-telling is just as riveting as her mother's must have been for her. The legends and fables, moreover, are fresh and unusual to unaccustomed Western ears. If the book were composed only of these, it would make for excellent bedtime reading.

When she draws parallels to her own life and compares her own experiences, there Kingston approaches profundity. I've come to wonder lately if that isn't what all literary fiction is- elegant attempts to make connections. Across ages, across cultures, across categories; within a book, within a concept, within a single sentence. For what is an allusion, but a connection between antiquity and modernity; a metaphor, but an abstract connection between two concrete entities?

The book's impact wanes when Kingston enters the narrow, crowded streets of San Francisco's Chinatown and her early years. She laments the disparagement of the female in her parents' culture, and she depicts the generational conflict between the elders born in China, and their offspring, who are beginning to assimilate into the new country in which they were born. It all lacks the poetic force the ancient stories contained.

But maybe that is where Kingston was going. Her contemporary life seems somehow insufficient when viewed through the lens of the past. The old meets the new, the East meets the West, and yet here we are, by time relentlessly pushed forward.