Subtitle of The Woman Warrior is ‘Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts’ (x)

“Ghosts has two meanings”  – 1) ”disembodied spirits of the dead.” And 2) in Chinese it is a synonym for a white person, one of those in power, those who make the rules, at once god-life and despised….so the Chinese American must negotiate her war through the land of white ghosts; she is accompanied by them, through their stories, both factual and mythical: they tell her who she is, and perhaps more importantly, who she might be,” (x-xi)

NO NAME WOMAN

 Hong Kingston starts with the story of her aunt who delivered a baby out of wedlock. The villagers came and destroyed the home. (5-7)

“Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.” (7)

“Adultery is an extravagance…. To be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was a waste enough. My aunt could not have been the lone romantic who gave up everything for sex. Women in old China did not choose. Some man commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil. I wonder whether he masked himself when he joined the raid on her family.” (8)

Pages 16-17 talk about the aunt’s birth after the villager ransacked the house.

Hong Kingston talks about how her aunt probably had to ask for food. (“Always hungry, always needing, she would have to beg for food from other ghosts, snatch and steal it from those whose living decedents give them gifts.”) 18

WHITE TIGERS

Hong Kingston opened up with the story of a woman who learned a new martial art from a white crane.

“My mother told others that followed swordswomen through woods and palaces for years. Night after night my mother would talk-story until we fell asleep. I couldn’t tell where the stories left off and the dreams began, her voice the voice of heroines in my sleep.” 20

“At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking-story. After I grew up, I heard the chant of Fa Mu Lan, the girl who took her father’s place in battle. Instantly I remembered that as a child I had followed my mother about the house, the two of us singing about how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive from war to settle in the village. I had forgotten this chant that once was mine, given me and my mother, who may not have known its power to remind. She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of a warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman.” 21