Newsweek

October 11, 1976, UNITED STATES EDITION

SECTION: THE ARTS; BOOKS; Pg. 109

LENGTH: 659 words

HEADLINE: East Meets West; THE WOMAN WARRIOR: MEMOIRS OF A GIRLHOOD AMONG GHOSTS. By Maxine Hong Kingston. 209 pages. Knopf.$7.95.

BYLINE: WALTER CLEMONS

BODY: The debased word "thrilling" here applies. "The Woman Warrior" is a book of fierce clarity and originality, by a Chinese-American born in California during World War II to recent immigrants. Maxine Hong Kingston grew up haunted by two sets of ghosts. The first were ancestral figures from Chinese village life, handed down in cautionary tales by her mother: "Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fit in solid America." The second set of ghosts were the white-faced Americans she grew up among. To Chinese of her parents' generation, all Westerners were ghosts, and she herself became a ghost in their eyes when she adopted American ways. Seeing her smile in a snapshot, her mother asks, "What are you laughing at?" - for "Chinese do not smile for photographs," Kingston writes. "Their faces command relatives in foreign lands - 'Send money' - and posterity forever - 'Put food in front of this picture'."

Funny, disconcerting details give us entry into an unfamiliar world. Her mother deals handily with customers in the family laundry: "'No tickee, no washee, mama-san?' a ghost would say, so embarrassing. 'Noisy Red-Mouth Ghost,' she'd write on its package, naming it, making its clothes with its name." For a Chinese-American, sexuality was an even darker puzzle than it is for indigenous American youth. "Brothers and sisters, newly men and women, had to efface their sexual color and present plain miens. Disturbing hair and eyes, a smile like no other threatened the ideal of five generations living under one roof."

Achieving female pride was particularly difficult for an intelligent young woman born into a culture where girl children were unwanted. "When you raise girls, you're raising children for strangers," went a village saying, for women would move away into their husbands' families. To become a mere wife was an admission of failure, and in a chapter that gives her book its title, Kingston spins a girlhood fantasy of going out into the world to acquire a warrior's skills for the defense of her family. But which family? She juxtaposes an abstract ideal of Amazonian prowess against the wifely heroism of her mother, Brave Orchid, who took a degree in midwifery and practiced medicine while awaiting her husband's summons to join him in this country. Arriving here in 1940, she gave birth to six children after the age of 45. "You have no idea how much I have fallen coming to America," says Brave Orchid of the abandonment of her professional career. She is formidable, exasperating, brilliantly distinct personage.

Surprise: In the book's most amusing and most painful section, Brave Orchid brings her foolish sister, Moon Orchid, to America. The sister's husband has sent her money in China for 30 years, but has taken a younger second wife in this country. Brave Orchid stiff-arms her sister into paying them a surprise visit: "Walk right into his house with your suitcases and boxes. Move right into the bedroom. Throw her stuff out of the drawers and put yours in. Say, 'I am the first wife, and she is our servant'." The confrontation is excruciating.

Maxine Hong Kingston dedicates her book to her parents, but they are not absolved from her anger. "From afar," she writes from Hawaii, where she now lives with her husband and son, "I believe my family loves me fundamentally. They only say, 'When fishing treasures from the flood, be careful not to pull in girls,' because that is what one says about daughters. But I watched such words come out of my own mother's and father's mouths . . . And I had to get out of hating range. I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, 'Girls are necessary too'; I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession." She was, she tells us, a puzzled, self-doubting, inarticulate girl. In this lean, vivid memoir she has found her voice.