Inventing the Book

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston.  From Kingston Library of America. Viet Thanh Nguyen, editor.  pp. 1-180.  *****

China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston.  From Kingston.  Library of America.  Viet Thanh Nguyen, editor.  pp. 181-477.  *****

I’ve heard this said about other writers but was never sure what it meant: Maxine Hong Kingston writes as if no one else ever wrote a book, as if she doesn’t even know what a book is.  She combines myth, legend, family stories, fact, personal narrative, anecdotes, all between the same two covers, so you’re never sure what’s what.  I actually didn’t understand what was going on in The Woman Warrior, in which her mother was spinning an elaborate story of a Chinese woman warrior, to what purpose I didn’t know, and then I was stopped short by this passage, which came after all the myth-spinning.

“My American life has been such a disappointment.

“’I got straight A’s, Mama.’

“’Let me tell you a true story about a girl who saved her village.’”

Nothing Maxine did was ever enough.  Everything she did was compared to the actions of mythical people or to her ancestors.

I didn’t understand what was up—though the strong prose kept me going—until  I got into China Men, in which she was mixing stories about much earlier China men, the ones who came to the west to work on the railroads, with the remarkable story of her own father, who was a renowned scholar in China but couldn’t get the hang of teaching village schoolchildren, which was the job where he wound up.  He decided, like his forbearers, that the United States was the place where he would make his fortune, so he moved here in an arduous journey after which it took him forever to be admitted into the country, then lived in New York for years, working at a laundry that he opened with other men.  I mean really years, I think it was fifteen years.  This man seemed to lead several lives, he did so many things.

All that time he had been separated from his wife, who was back in China with their two children, both of whom died of childhood ailments.  He wanted her to join him in this country, but she had to have a skill, so he insisted she go to school in some science.  She chose medical school!  And gave up everything else she was doing to do that for a few years.  Finally, with this credential, she was able to join him in New York, where she cooked for the four men running the laundry, only to have them cheat her husband out of his share of the business (I didn’t grasp how they did that, but it seemed like a vile act).  The couple resolved to recover and moved to California, where they first ran an illegal gambling house (Maxine was named for one of its patrons) and eventually opened their own laundry, and started another family altogether, in which Maxine was the first child (you begin to wonder how the years all add up).  They had four more children, all of whom helped in the laundry in addition to going to school.

What I’ve related here sounds like a whole book, but it’s just a chapter.  China Men is worth several books.

Maxine and her family spoke an obscure dialect of Cantonese, so that they were isolated not only in the United States but also in the Chinese community.  When she first went to kindergarten, she knew no English whatsoever, and when she was give a work sheet as part of an intelligence test, she covered the whole thing in black (she had been to the theater, and later said she was drawing a curtain that would soon be raised up).  The teachers at the school didn’t know what to make of this, and actually recorded her IQ as 0.  No intelligence whatsoever.  Twelve years later she would enroll at Berkeley, and eighteen years after that publish The Woman Warrior.  I wonder what they thought then.

I have to admit to being flummoxed by The Woman Warrior, but the scene that I absolutely loved, and that kept me reading the larger volume, was an argument she had with her mother toward the end.  After what seemed to be years of being meek and obedient and doing what the woman said, she stood up to her and told her off, saying she wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t slow, she was about to go to one of the best colleges in the country: she really stood up for herself.  And her mother gave as good as she got, telling her she had treated her that way for her own good, she was trying to get the best out of her.  It was a wonderful scene between mother and daughter.  It made the whole book for me.

I was well into China Men before I realized: you can’t read these books the way you read others.  They’re not coherent in that way.  But the narrative as a whole (she had originally wanted to publish them together, her “Mother book” and her “Father book”) is incredibly rich.  You haven’t read anything like it.

Viet Thanh Nguyen edited the volume, and did the usual superb Library of America job.  The chronology alone is worth the price of admission.

A few more astonishing facts about Kingston (who is the same age my sister would be had she lived, born in 1940).  During the sixties, out in California, she and her husband were war protestors, but they were so upset that they decided to move to Japan (why Japan I do not know).  They were flying there, but on the way stopped in Hawaii, and liked it so much they stayed, so Hawaii was their base of operations for years after that, and a fair amount of her later writing is about that state, including a long book called Hawaii One Summer.  Next up in this volume is a novel entitled Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, which begins with this sentence (I can never resist looking ahead): “Maybe it comes from living in San Francisco, city of clammy humors and foghorns that warn and warn—omen, o-o-men, o dolorous omen, o dolors of omens—and not enough sun, but Wittman Ah Sing considered suicide ever day.”  And Kingston is working on an immense novel entitled Posthumously, Maxine, which she wants published only after her death.

This woman is a true original.