Silence in The Woman Warrior

I wrote this post before class this morning, but it turns out to be very relevant to Carol’s presentation this afternoon, especially in regard to the silencing of Asian females. Silence and voice emerge as major themes throughout Hong Kingston’s memoir. The book’s opening line, a quote from Hong Kingston’s mother, reads, “You must not tell anyone…what I am about to tell you” (3). Indeed, the author has been instructed since youth to be silent; some words and topics remained simply unspeakable in her household. Hong Kingston explains that Brave Orchid “never explained anything that was really important,” leading Hong Kingston to loath “the secrecy of the Chinese” (121, 183). However, this silence is not something attributable to Chinese culture—Hong Kingston makes clear that the Chinese have “loud voices, unmodulated to American tones,” and she is unable to “stop [her] mother’s screams in public libraries or over telephones” (11). This silence is instead particular to Chinese Americans. Hong Kingston writes, “Normal Chinese women’s voices are strong and bossy. We American-Chinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American-feminine” (172). Perhaps, then, the silence Hong Kingston experienced in her household and her community was the result of the Chinese American immigrant experience (specifically marginalization and racialization) as opposed to some fault or negative aspect of Chinese culture itself. Moreover, the constant interplay between race and gender can be seen here in this quote and elsewhere; Hong Kingston is silent because she is Chinese and a girl. Hong Kingston explains, “The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl” (166). Also, Brave Orchid cuts Hong Kingston’s tongue, for “the Chinese say ‘a ready tongue is an evil’” (164). However, the very silence around this cutting of the tongue, an act Hong Kingston interprets as a silencing of her own voice and self, causes misunderstanding and animosity between Hong Kingston and her mother. Brave Orchid believes that she cut her daughter’s tongue so that she “would not be tongue-tied. [Her] tongue would be able to move in any language,” but Hong Kingston has trouble understanding this act, especially since her mother did not cut any of her other children’s tongues (164). Brave Orchid, however, refuses to offer any more explanation, furthering the silence in the household.

Hong Kingston, however, defies the rule of silence and uses both her voice and her words. She is a rule-breaker, a transgressor, rejecting the silence both her household and her community perpetuate. In this way, she challenges and even breaks the stereotype of the silenced Asian female. Vengeance plays a significant role in Hong Kingston’s breaking of silence. Interestingly, in White Tigers, the author mentions that a god rides before her: Kuan Kung, the god of war and literature (38). The fact that one god represents both war and the written word reveals a connection between the two; perhaps literature, words, and the breaking of silence are in fact a form of revenge, a way to fight back against something. In many ways, this may be the function of Hong Kingston’s book—to avenge or seek revenge via telling or the written word. Indeed, the author expresses the connection she feels to the swordswoman with the word revenge carved on her back:

What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms for revenge are “report a crime” and “report to five families.” The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. (53)

Hong Kingston’s novel breaks the silence surrounding her past, her culture, and her family and therefore functions as a tool for revenge. Hong Kingston directly counters the opening line of the novel (“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you” (3)) when she declares at the beginning of the memoir’s final section, “I would’ve told. If I was his wife, I would’ve told…” (163). Her ultimate rebellion against the culture of silence, however, is the scene in which she tortures the young girl in her class who will not speak unless asked to read aloud by the teacher. Hong Kingston is so desperate to break the silence in her world that she torments the girl she views as representing that culture of silence. In a way, however, Hong Kingston’s outburst seems a rejection of not only silence but traditional femininity as well. She declares, “I hated fragility…I wanted a stout neck…Her neatness bothered me…I hated pastels…I hated her fingers. I could snap them like breadsticks” (176, 177). Here the author seems to rebel against something more than just silence; she defies the conventional role of women as meek, submissive, and dainty, desiring instead to be strong and stout—in fact, more like the tough, enduring, powerful Brave Orchid.

While the memoir itself functions as a breaker of silence, Hong Kingston breaks her own silence inside the book as well. Significantly, she chooses her mother as the listener, someone who has perpetuated the silence surrounding her childhood. Hong Kingston experiences a physical need to tell, to use her voice—“the throat pain always returns, though, unless I tell what I really think” (205). However, when she finally expresses to Brave Orchid what she has kept silent for years, Hong Kingston finds that her mother “acted as if she hadn’t heard…’Mm,’ she said, nodded, and kept dipping and squeezing” (199, 200). Hong Kingston’s telling seems therefore more something she had to do for herself as opposed to something her mother needed to hear. Because the author truly finds her voice at the end of the memoir (and in the form of the memoir itself) and experiences real growth, change, and understanding, it might be considered a bildungsroman in many ways.

This post is already really long, but I also think the picture of gender roles and relations in Hong Kingston’s memoir is quite interesting. The author’s farther is notably absent throughout the majority of the book, and when he enters the story, he is often referred to as Brave Orchid’s husband as opposed to father or my father. Brave Orchid is clearly the one in charge; she tells Hong Kingston, “I shouldn’t have left [China], but your father couldn’t have supported you without me. I’m the one with the big muscles” (104). The father figures in both Milton Murayama’s All I Askin’ for is My Body and John Okada’s No-No Boy bear a striking resemblance to Hong Kingston’s fairly silent, largely absent (figuratively, not literally) father. The husbands in all three of these families are the weak, subordinate ones; it is the wives who seem to truly run the family. Perhaps these men are reflective of the racialized feminization of Asian American males. Indeed, when Brave Orchid suggests that Moon Orchid “do the hand-finishing on the shirts when they came off the machines,” Hong Kingston recalls that “this was usually Brave Orchid’s husband’s job. He had such graceful fingers, so good for folding shirts…” (136).