Autobiographical fantasia.

The article argues that fiction and fantasy are an artistic necessity in autobiography, and analyzes the presence of the fantastic and its function in Maxine Hong-Kingston's A Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976). In this autobiographical novel, the main character, who remains nameless throughout the book, undergoes a series of transformative experiences which lead her to explore and come to terms with her identity as a Chinese-American. These experiences, however, occur in both the 'real' world and in her 'fantasy' world. Mythology and imagination function as a kind of measure of Kingston's identity and her struggle to place herself in society. The 'wish-mirror' of fantasy--a medium through which Kingston both wishes and 'is' a character she fantasizes about--becomes an indication of the narrator's growth as a character. The narrator's 'real' American life and her fantasy-filled Chinese life are at first incompatible. However, these two lives finally find a common rhythm that molds them into a more or less coherent life.

Introduction

   Most writers write to say something about other people
   and it never lasts. Good writers write to find out about
   themselves--and it lasts forever.

   --Gloria Steinem

The first documented use of the word "autobiography" was by Robert Southey in 1807 (Goodwin xviii). This does not mean, however, that the genre did not exist before that time. As a matter of fact, the origins of autobiography can be traced back to the twelfth dynasty (1991-1962 BC) of ancient Egypt, in the writings of Amenemhet (Kramer 20). Other ancient autobiographers include the Hittite king Hatusilis, the Assyrian king Tiglat Pileser, and the Persian Darius (20-21). Socrates' Apology is also considered an autobiography (Goodwin xv). More formally acknowledged autobiographies of the early centuries include the meditations of Marcus Aurelius and St. Augustine's Confessions. From this point onwards, literary history is full of autobiographical writings, from The Life of Benvenuto Cellini: A Florentine Artist, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, to Edward Said's Out of Place. Autobiography has also appeared in a poetic form--as in Wordsworth's Prelude and Dante's La Vita Nuova--and in drama, such as David Hare's Via Dolorosa. Of course, these titles are only a very small sample of the long, and continually growing, list of autobiographies and memoirs. It is worth noting that autobiography has been written in all forms: narrative, poem, and play. This is an important point in the argument about what autobiography is--an argument that continually crops up in any writing about it. Very few critics feel the need to define what a poem or a play is, whereas any study of autobiography is necessarily introduced with a definition within the framework in which the critic proposes to work.

At this juncture, it becomes increasingly necessary to raise the question: can we consider autobiography as a literary genre unto itself? According to J.A. Cuddon, the term "genre" means "a literary type or class." He goes on to point out that "[t]he major classical genres were: epic, tragedy, lyric, comedy and satire, to which would now be added novel and short story" (366). This definition would seem to exclude autobiography, which is none of the above. However, Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines genre as "a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content" (486). This interpretation offers much broader parameters by stressing that style, form or even content defines characterization. Taking this into account, autobiography would therefore fall under the category of a genre of content, as we have seen that it can exist in any style and form. By labeling autobiography in this way, however, criticism must necessarily question the parameters of this genre.

Autobiography promises little more than plain narrative on first notice. What constitutes good autobiography would inevitably be the way the author has decided to tell his or her life and, of course, how interesting that life is in the first place. The author who writes of a compelling life, whether it is full of fascinating events, or whether the main character is quite extraordinary or interesting, can be ascertained of literary success. However, the scale by which autobiography is measured is not as simple as that. When one studies the amount of criticism that autobiography has generated, two things are striking: the amount of criticism, and the confusion therein. Although one can trace a general outline of an evolutionary pattern through which works have been defined as autobiography, this pattern is unclear and is at best very simplistic.

According to Dryden, who was one of its earliest commentators, biography is simply "the history of particular men's lives" (Goodwin 2). Autobiography would, by inference, be that history as written by the self (auto-). This straightforward definition would certainly include the ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman autobiographies. More recently, it would also include works like Edward Said's Out of Place. On the other end of the critical spectrum, Carolyn A. Barros interprets any first person "narrative of transformation" as autobiography: "someone telling someone else 'something happened to me'"(6). But what she fails to discuss is whether a completely fictional work written in the first-person can be considered autobiographical, and whether a first-person narrative that does not necessarily depict any transformation is an autobiography. Furthermore, there is the question of whether the first-person narrator must necessarily be the author. Could this narrator merely be a completely fictional persona that the author adopts?

These questions raise a much more controversial one: how relevant is truth in autobiography? Robert Elbaz answers this question confidently enough, saying: "Autobiography is fiction and fiction is autobiography" (1). He goes on to support this by arguing that

   ... text 'begins' through the voice of a third party
   because language accommodates the Other by adopting
   the voice of an Other in its movement towards meaning.
   This process of mediation in turn calls for the non-differentiation
   between autobiography and fiction; because
   self-possession is a myth, one can only possess an Other.

      Thus everything having to do with language is fiction,
   the construction of a speaking subject: one always
   speaks from a linguistic-metaphoric reality. Every discourse
   is an interpretation. The hope of grasping events in
   their bareness and immediately as they happen is an illusion....
   (14)

His reasoning is significant in that it deconstructs the act of writing in such a way that autobiography as fact becomes an impossibility. Even if the author assumes to identify with the 'I' of the text, he or she is necessarily separated--through the act of writing--from this 'I', and therefore the text, cannot pose itself as a proclaimer of truth. This rationalizing stems from another definition that Elbaz assumes: that 'truth' is fundamentally non-interpretative, and consequently must be the record of "events in their bareness and immediately as they happen," which he claims is "an illusion." By inference, all literature--since it is essentially language--is fiction, and at least one step removed from truth. (1)

Elbaz's definition of autobiography is non-categorical, for he rejects generic categorizing as a "hegemonic phenomenon which restricts literary practice to approved, institutionalized forms of expression" (14-15). Instead, Elbaz claims that autobiography is a "discursive practice ... both a process of production of meaning and at the same time a process of structuration of a subjectivity" (155). This definition limits autobiography in two ways: by assigning it the role of a producer of "meaning" and by defining it as providing a structure for the subject. To simplify, according to Elbaz, autobiography is any discourse that works within a subject-oriented structure to provide a meaning. Elbaz's reasoning, however, fails to point out what 'meaning' is, and neglects to define the characteristics of this structure. If Elbaz insists on deconstructing the terminology of 'truth' and 'factuality', as well as other critics' conceptions about autobiography, he should be equally prepared to deconstruct his own terminology of "meaning" and "structuration of a subjectivity." It is only through this deconstruction that he can form a more valid definition of autobiography.

For Albert E. Stone, in contrast, the argument is not as complicated. He simplistically labels autobiography as "nonfictional writing by and about the self"(1). He does not bother to question the nonfictionality of this writing but rather claims that "there is simply no clear line to be drawn between fantasy and real life" and that when "the impulse toward fantasy ... outweighs the wrestle with memory in a given reader's perception of a text, then the shadowy line between autobiography and fiction has been crossed," thereby relegating fantasy to the world of fiction (14, 322). This statement also evokes an interesting suggestion: that it is the reader's--as opposed to the writer's--perception of fantasy and memory that is decisive in determining what can pass as autobiography and what has transgressed its boundaries. (2)

Most critics agree, however, that autobiography has little to do with truth. Frank Kermode claims that

   ... the honest truth, insofar as this suggests absolute
   fidelity to historical fact, is inaccessible; the minute you
   begin to write it you may try to write it well, and writing
   well is an activity which has no simple relation to truth.
   For memory cannot do the necessary work independent of
   fantasy; and if it tries, the result will be a dull report. (1)

The inexorable relationship between memory and autobiography implies the factual imperfection of autobiography. Kermode raises a relevant and interesting point about the role of "fantasy" in autobiography, claiming that it enlivens memory's otherwise "dull report." This is, without doubt, a feature that can be seen in Maxine Hong Kingston's novel, The Woman Warrior. (3)

Andrew Hudgins agrees, saying that "[a]utobiography is in some ways a translation of actuality onto the page and in other ways a selective and imaginative recreation of it, a work of art--and the two roles can go to bed together and enjoy their uneasy congress by lying to each other" (1). In an intriguing essay, "An Autobiographer's Lies," Hudgins enumerates the different types of lies, or fictional misrepresentations found in autobiography. (4) The most innocent of these lies is the "lie of narrative cogency," in which the writer leaves out superfluous details in order to lighten the load of the narrative. Other lies include those of "texture," "fictional convention," "emotional evasion," and the lie of "the re-created self" (3-4). The lie of "interpretation" is followed by the "lie of impressionism, ... the biggest lie," and both are "inescapable for a writer attempting to create an artistically coherent work" (8). (5) This clearly indicates not only the inevitability of fiction in autobiography, but also, and more importantly, its fundamental and artistic necessity.

A reader of The Woman Warrior would agree with Hudgin's basic claims. Kingston is guilty of "interpretation"--telling us how she interpreted her mother's stories. Yet divested of this fiction, the work would become uninspiring narrative. In fact, the very quality that elevates this work above ordinary autobiography is its use of imagination and fantasy. It is what Kingston thought--portrayed through her imagination by way of fantastic dreams and stories--that intrigues us, and indeed, the focus of this article is much more intriguing than what actually happened. Edwar al-Kharrat, on the question of whether his own book, Turabuha za'faran (City of Saffron), can be considered an autobiography, muses: "I am only wondering whether [the] imaginings of a writer are perhaps more authentically 'biographical' than what actually had 'really' happened" (Ostle 9). To elaborate further, if autobiography is to be considered a writing of the self, then can we not say that the self is best portrayed by an exposition of the internal rather than the external narrative?

When considered in the light of this criticism, The Woman Warrior demonstrates a blending of genres. Kingston's narrative is a mix of fantastical myths and autobiographical events. Even though her publishers placed the book under the category of "nonfiction," Kingston claims that she had little to do with this:

   The only correspondence I had with the published [sic]
   concerning the classification of my books was that he
   said that Non-fiction would be the most accurate category;[sic]
   Non-fiction is such a catch-all that even "poetry is considered
   non-fiction." (As quoted by Wong 30)

Nevertheless, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong points out that "[a] number of Chinese-American critics have repeatedly denounced the [book] ... questioning its autobiographic status ..." (29). As will be seen, however, the problem that Kingston's critics have with her fiction is more oriented towards the possible consequences her 'cultural misrepresentation' could have on the Chinese-American community.

The Woman Warrior and Imagination as a Wish-Mirror

   In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
   A stately pleasure dome decree,
   Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
   Through caverns measureless to man,
      Down to a sunless sea.

        --Samuel Taylor Coleridge

More than a century after Coleridge wrote about Kubla Khan's pleasure dome, it was not an "Abyssinian maid" whose "music loud and long" inspired the ability to "build that dome in air." It is not impossible that Kubla Khan's distant descendant, Maxine Hong Kingston, perhaps endowed with similar power to build pleasure domes in the air, constructed another dome and sang a different song in a later time. The Woman Warrior, Kingston's controversial creation, can very well be compared to Coleridge's imaginary rendition of Kubla Khan's pleasure dome. It also skirts the river Alph in dealing with culturally sacred Chinese mythology. It too, goes through "caverns measureless to man" on several different levels. The scientific impossibility of measuring the caverns parallels the highly inaccessible region of the imagination into which Kingston delves. Furthermore, the immeasurability of the caverns can also be linked to the seemingly endless possibilities in reading Kingston's work. The Woman Warrior even goes "[d]own to a sunless sea" of the inner self and its struggles with identity.

However, Kingston's work was neither conceived nor accomplished in Xanadu. Rather, The Woman Warrior appeared in the United States in 1976. To say that it caused a stir in American literary circles, among both writers and critics, would be an understatement. To date, Kingston's autobiography has been one of the most controversial literary works in the Asian-American canon of literature. It sparked a literary feud reminiscent of eighteenth-century England (6) and remains as controversial as ever, inspiring an increasing amount of criticism and counter-criticism.

When it was first published, The Woman Warrior was received with great applause from mainstream American literary circles; so much so, that it won the "National Book Critics Circle Award for the best work of nonfiction in 1976," as the cover of the book published by Vintage International claims. However, both the book and Kingston came under fire from a somewhat surprising quarter: 'their own people'. Kingston found herself harshly criticized by some Chinese-American critics. By far, the most outspoken of these critics was and still is Frank Chin, a Chinese-American novelist, playwright and critic who also has achieved renown, if not to the same degree as Kingston. (7) Chin attacked Kingston and other Chinese-American writers such as Amy Tan and David Henry Hwang for catering to a white audience:

   Kingston and Hwang confirm the white fantasy that everything
   sick and sickening about the white self-image is really
   Chinese. That is their service to white ego ... The source
   of their vision of Chinese-American art and history is white
   fantasy, not Chinese-American history. (Chin 28)

Although Chin's criticism is harsh, bitter and damning, it is worth examining, as it brings to light several issues pertaining to minority literature.

One concern that Chin raises is that as an Asian American, Kingston has to be sensitive to her delicate position as a 'cultural ambassador' from Chinese America to mainstream America. He "declares that personal pain--merely a matter of 'expression of ego' and 'psychological attitudinizing'--must be subordinated to political purpose" (As quoted by Wong 35). This suggests several disturbing points: that as a minority writer, Kingston has no business to get personal, that she must have a set political mission in mind as a writer, and that by writing about her personal life, she is indulging in a luxury her 'race' cannot afford. Although these suggestions seem to violate all notions of artistic freedom by imposing politically didactic aims on literature, what is even more frightening is that some mainstream critics fall into the mistake of doing what Chin feared: they misinterpret and generalize works such as The Woman Warrior. For example, Shirley K. Rose proclaims that "autobiography is a cultural document, a source of information for anyone seeking a better understanding of the myths and ideology of the culture in which and from which it arises" (3). This is exactly what Chin was warning against, namely, mainstream readers taking The Woman Warrior as a guided tour through Chinese America. But does this mean that because of her identity as a Chinese-American, Kingston is not allowed the same artistic license as her mainstream counterparts? It is important to note, however, that Rose's mistake lies not so much in her taking The Woman Warrior as a guide through Chinese America as it does in her taking autobiography as an anthropological document. The Woman Warrior cannot be such a document simply because it is autobiography, which cannot, as San-Ling Cynthia Wong says, "be more than one person's life story" (38, her emphasis).

This point takes us to another question that Chin's criticism of Kingston raises: can autobiography be adopted by Chinese-American writers as a valid genre? Chin does not think so: "His rationale is that all autobiography, like religious confessions and conversion testimonials, demonstrates 'admission of guilt, submission of my self for judgment,' for 'approval by outsiders'" (As quoted by Wong 35). However, this viewpoint is a very shaky one, since it not only tries to nationalize and racialize genres, but also refuses to let the national and racial boundaries change in any way and at any time. His argument that autobiographical writing is parallel to Christian confession reduces the genre to little more than "admission of guilt" and does not see it as, for example, a medium for self-exploration.

Perhaps the strongest criticisms of The Woman Warrior, however, come not only from Frank Chin, but also from other Chinese-American critics, such as Jeffrey Chan, Katheryn Fong, and Benjamin Tong. They complain that Kingston's myths are not true to their originals, and that Kingston distorts and mangles time-honored Chinese myths to suit her own purposes at the risk of endangering their purity. Fong tells Kingston, "I read your references to mythical and feudal China as fiction.... The problem is that non-Chinese are reading your fiction as true accounts of Chinese and Chinese-American history" (As quoted by Wong 31). Fong fails to even entertain the idea that the fault in her projected case of misunderstanding lies not in Kingston's rewriting of the myths, but rather in the willingness of readers to take autobiography as a true account of an entire culture rather than as a personal, and thus a subjective, work. Chin is even more vehement. He wrote a short parody of The Woman Warrior, entitled The Unmanly Warrior. In this piece, Chin mangles the story of Joan of Arc beyond recognition in an attempt to bring home to a 'western' reader the effect that impure history has on readers who have been 'culturally violated'. Chin drives the point home with a moral at the end of his story, spelling it out for everyone:

   The violation of history and of fact and of Joan of Arc
   makes no difference to the pleasure and stimulation the
   Chinese get from Unmanly Warrior, so why should the
   falsification of history, the white racist stereotypes and
   slurs in Kingston's prose and Hwang's theater mean anything
   to the pleasure whites derive from reading and seeing
   their work? They don't, of course. (Chin 27)

The bitterness that Chin feels towards Kingston's work and its acclaim in mainstream literary circles is due to the fact that The Woman Warrior has been accepted despite its cultural 'impurity'. But however vehement this criticism is, Chin fails to put Kingston's work in its proper context. As one critic puts it,

   ... Kingston still insists upon the singularity of her view
   and does not attempt to speak for all Chinese-Americans
   or represent them completely. In the book she admits that
   she cannot speak for Chinese-Americans because she is
   not even sure what exactly is the Chinese-American
   experience. (Nishime 4)

Kingston's detractors do not see the singularity of experience that The Woman Warrior offers and insist on "a notion of ethnic autobiography as a learning tool for the projected white audience" (Nishime 4).

Chin also fails to put a possible misreading of the book in its proper context. As has been shown in Rose's essay on The Woman Warrior, Chin's fear that the book will be taken as representing Chinese-Americans and the myths within it as 'genuine' or 'unadulterated' Chinese mythology is a very real and valid fear. However, he insists on putting the blame on Kingston herself rather than on the uninformed white readership. He fails to see that Kingston's work has been misread not because she has distorted the 'truth,' but because her audience is ignorant of this truth. Instead of criticizing Kingston for playing with myths, he should be examining the tendency of readers to take what they read as unmediated truth. It can be said that Kingston's readers have overextended the "willing suspension of disbelief" and allowed it to encroach upon their understanding of both the limitations of literature and the workings of culture, unaware of the danger of applying one person's experience to a whole national mythology and culture.

Had both Kingston's detractors and her mainstream audience read the book carefully, they probably would have thought twice about jumping

to their respective conclusions. Kingston addresses the very issues that have caused so much controversy in the following passage in The Woman Warrior:

   Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what
   things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is
   peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family,
   your mother who marked your growing with stories, from
   what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is
   the movies? (5-6)

These questions are exactly the ones that her readers should have been asking. What is clear is that Kingston is grappling with the same concerns of the likes of Frank Chin and Katheryn Fong. The Woman Warrior is all about her identity as a Chinese-American woman, and it is through Chinese myths, however distorted, that she can explore this borderline identity.

Mythology and imagination, which are closely linked and almost interchangeable in The Woman Warrior, take on a critical role. They function as a measure of Kingston's identity and her struggle to place herself in society. In exploring the position that imagination occupies in the book, several questions pose themselves. Why does Kingston use imagination? How do these fantastic episodes fit in with the rest of the book? On how many different levels can they be read? What coherence, if any, do they offer? These are some questions that will be addressed within the coarse of this study.

The Woman Warrior is subtitled "Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts." The word memoir comes from the Latin memoria, referring to memory and remembering. Its use in the subtitle suggests that the book deals more with memory and remembering than with the writing of a historical life. It lays the basis for saying that this book is written as its events and stories are remembered, not as they actually happened. Keeping in mind the fragile, subjective, and changeable nature of memory, the reader must beware of reading the book for factual truths. Running parallel to memory is imagination, which can be seen as 'remembering' things as they could have been. As a result, this autobiography deals more with the integration of memory and imagination than it does with the straightforward telling of a life. It becomes obvious, therefore, that in order to come to a more coherent understanding of the book, one must closely reread the chapters dealing with imagination.

The imaginative episodes in The Woman Warrior can be divided into two main categories: cultural mythology and family history. The chapters titled "No Name Woman," "Shaman" and "At the Western Palace" deal more with family history, while "White Tigers" and "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" are more mythological than personal. However, these categories are anything but rigid, and their boundaries are fluid: personal or family history blends with cultural mythology, and mythology crosses over into personal life. It is this dynamism between the two categories that makes The Woman Warrior such an intricately wrought work of art.

Placing "No Name Woman" at the very beginning of The Woman Warrior positions this chapter as a kind of guideline to the rest of the book. First, we are treated to what passes as the 'truth' or to what authority wants us to accept as true: the no-frills, no-emotions version of the story of a significantly no-name aunt, Maxine's father's sister. The story is about how the aunt's husband left her to travel to Gold Mountain (America). Years after his departure, Brave Orchid noticed that the aunt was pregnant, but as she tells Maxine, "No one said anything. We did not discuss it" (3). When she was about to give birth, the villagers raided the house and destroyed it. That same night, no-name aunt gave birth to a baby girl in the pigsty, and then drowned herself and the baby in the family well. It is a carefully tailored version: a neat story with a moral at the end. "Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could have happened to you," the mother, Brave Orchid, lectures to her daughter; adding "Don't humiliate us. You wouldn't like to be forgotten as if you had never been born." She ends with a warning: "The villagers are watchful" (5).

Although the story itself is devoid of motives and emotions, this no-frills version is significant on several counts. The silence that accompanies the discovery of the aunt's pregnancy is consistent with the silence that follows Brave Orchid's quick rituals in America:

   Never explaining. How can Chinese keep any traditions at
   all? They don't even make you pay attention, slipping in a
   ceremony and clearing the table before the children notice
   specialness. The adults get mad, evasive, and shut you up
   if you ask.... I don't see how they kept up a continuous
   culture for five thousand years. Maybe they didn't; maybe
   everyone makes it up as they go along. If we had to depend
   on being told, we'd have no religion, no babies, no menstruation
   (sex, of course, unspeakable), no death. (185)

It would seem that Brave Orchid and the villagers were rendering No Name Woman's pregnancy out of existence by not mentioning it. However, this premise falls apart, as her pregnancy continues despite the silence surrounding it; the baby is born despite the denial of the possibility of its existence. The discordant relationship between being and speech is an intriguing one that will be reiterated throughout the book.

Brave Orchid's version of the story also contains her warning to Maxine: "The villagers are watchful." Several questions emerge at this junction: Who is Brave Orchid talking about? Has she forgotten that she is talking to a daughter who was born and raised in America, and has never been to China? Has she forgotten that the Chinatown in Stockton, California covers only one block? With this in mind, it seems that Brave Orchid is trying to construct an imaginary world where there are watchful villagers in America in order to assure the chastity of her daughter.

To some degree Brave Orchid succeeds. Maxine creates an imaginary world, albeit not entirely in the way her mother would have wanted it. Maxine imagines different scenarios, trying to fill in the blanks of No Name Woman's life. As Sidonie Smith writes:

   ... she imagines her aunt in a series of postures toward
   that excess of sexuality signified by the growth of her
   womb. Initially dismissing the probability that [the
   Chinese] could ... "engender a prodigal aunt," she imagines
   her aunt the victim of rape, fearful, silent, and vulnerable
   before her victimizer.... (61)

Maxine eventually adopts a version that suits her own ideas about China and her mysterious aunt: she was a woman who used a "secret voice, a separate attentiveness" (11). Her sexual deviance "could open up a black hole, a maelstrom that pulled in the sky" (12). Maxine's imaginary villagers resort to symbolic thinking: "The frightened villagers, who depended on one another to maintain the real, went to my aunt to show her a personal, physical representation of the break she had made in the 'roundness'" (13).

By settling on this version of a subversive woman listening to a "secret voice," Maxine metamorphosizes No Name Woman into a historical or past version of herself, and in doing so, she enters the stage of the wish-mirror. (8) In this stage, she 'wishes' in a way to be as subversive as No Name Woman, even if she does not want to share the same fate. At the same time, what she does not realize is that No Name Woman mirrors and reflects Maxine's own transgression. It is important to note at this point that throughout the book, the narrator remains nameless, like No Name Woman. Maxine is also the misfit in the family, uncomfortable with her role as a girl in a patriarchal family system. Like her aunt before her, Maxine deviates from the norm. But her subversiveness is subtler. For example, she refuses to fit in to the role of the obedient-but-still-unworthy daughter: "I refused to cook. When I had to wash the dishes, I would crack one or two" (47). Entirely 'ungirl-like', she claims that she wants to be "a lumberjack in Oregon" (47).

The already complex wish-mirror relationship between Maxine and No Name Woman becomes even more elaborate when one considers that Maxine's position as transgressor is culture--and family--specific. No Name Woman's violation is more cross-cultural and international in the sense that adultery is more or less universally acknowledged as a 'sin'. It is significant that Maxine is multicultural, being a Chinese-American, whereas No Name Woman is 'purely' Chinese. "Unless I see her life branching into mine," Kingston writes, "she gives me no ancestral help" (10). Maxine's imaginative vision of the story of No Name Woman forges the link between the two women. By imagining the motives and emotions of her aunt, Maxine places No Name Woman in family history, thereby reinstating a previously denied existence. However, Maxine says:

   My aunt haunts me--her ghost drawn to me because now,
   after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper
   to her ... I do not think she always means me well. I am
   telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself
   in the drinking water. The Chinese are always very
   frightened of the drowned one, ... [who] waits silently by
   the water to pull down a substitute. (16)

Does Maxine suggest that she could be this substitute? Can the wish-mirror be carried too far and can Maxine, who sees her partial reflection in the aunt, become No Name Woman because she has written about her? The answer to these questions can perhaps be found in another work by Kingston, China Men, a biography about Chinese-Americans. In one episode a mother in China writes to her neglectful Gold Mountain son: "If only I could list foods on this paper and chew it up, swallow, and be full. But if I could do that, I could write your name, and you'd be here" (175). This suggests that writing does not necessarily create existence. Hence, Maxine's fear of substituting her unnamed aunt has no basis in reality.

However, if she is not careful, Maxine could very well become unmentionable and 'forgotten' like her aunt. This realization, which comes to Maxine very early on, is driven home by her mother's warnings: "You wouldn't like to be forgotten as if you were never born" (5). Maxine's imagining No Name Woman's story is therefore an attempt to discover why she has been forgotten, so that Maxine can avoid falling into the same trap. What Maxine discovers in the version that she finally settles on, is that, along with her subversiveness, No Name Woman was silent, refusing to name the father of the child. Throughout the rest of the autobiography, through the use of her imagination, Maxine explores this concept of silence in relation to identity. She does not arrive at a whole understanding, however, until the final chapter of the book: "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe." The rest of the book explores the main themes introduced in "No Name Woman": gender, imagination, and identity.

In the chapter entitled "Shaman," Maxine talks about her mother in trying to come to terms with what she had already noticed before in "No Name Woman":

   She tested our strength to establish realities. Those in the
   emigrant generations who could not reassert brute survival
   died young and far from home. Those of us in the
   first American generations have had to figure out how the
   invisible world the emigrants built around our childhood
   fits in solid America. (5)

Maxine refers to her mother as "the emigrant," thereby separating herself, "the first American generations," from the talking-story parental, and more specifically maternal, establishment. There is a constant tension between the emigrants and members of Maxine's generation. "[The emigrants] must try to confuse their offspring ... who, I suppose threaten them ... always trying to get things straight, always trying to name the unspeakable" (5). This naming of the unspeakable appeared in Maxine's attempt to name her aunt, No Name Woman. It also appears in "Shaman," where Maxine tries to discover her mother's pre-American life.

The term "Shaman" itself brings to light some interesting connections. According to Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, a shaman is "a priest or priestess who uses magic for the purpose of curing the sick, divining the hidden, and controlling events," and "an unseen world of gods, demons, and ancestral spirits" responds only to the shamans. With this in mind, one can see that Maxine cast her pre-American mother in the role of the shaman.

Brave Orchid tells her own story, which is passed down to the reader through Maxine. Perhaps the most interesting, or at least the element most pertinent to our study in "Shaman" is that of ghosts, a theme that can be traced throughout The Woman Warrior in several crucial moments. Brave Orchid talks about the ghosts she encountered in her career as both a medical student and a certified doctor. Ruth Y. Jenkins suggests that Kingston appropriates "ghosts and spirits to authorize female voice" (2). This statement becomes more pertinent when one points out that "Shaman" is an almost male-free chapter in The Woman Warrior. It is about the mother during a time when Maxine's father was already in America. The only characters who are represented as male are, significantly enough, some of the ghosts that Brave Orchid encounters.

The most prominent ghost that appears in "Shaman" is Boulder, a sitting ghost that Brave Orchid fights off in medical school. When Brave Orchid's roommates engaged in "scare orgies," she took great care in scoffing at their fears, while she was equally careful not to deny the existence of ghosts. Although she quite successfully puts on the mask of being unafraid, she cannot hide her curiosity about the phenomenon of ghosts. She asks:

   "How do we know that ghosts are the continuance of
   dead people? Couldn't ghosts be an entirely different
   species of creature? Perhaps human beings just die and
   that's the end ... What would you rather be? A ghost who
   is constantly wanting to be fed? Or nothing?" (65-66)

Brave Orchid resists identifying with ghosts as a sort of continuum that comes into existence after her own death. She refuses to become the Other, (9) in this case, what is non-human. She is, as Maxine asserts, "a practical woman," who does not want to be associated with the unspeakable, be it No Name Woman or ghosts.

The air of bravado and practicality that Brave Orchid wears leads her to be the appointed ghost-buster of the all-women's medical school. A fascinated Maxine imagines her mother at this juncture: "During danger she fanned out her dragon claws and riffled her red sequin scales and unfolded her coiling green stripes" (67). This fantastic vision of the mother turns into a wish-mirror when Kingston's awe is coupled with her realization that "I am really a Dragon, as she is a Dragon, both of us born in dragon years" (109). The awe is the wish and desire to be like the mother, while the identification with her, which comes after she leaves home and lives an independent life, is the reflection of the mirror.

Brave Orchid's encounter with the ghost follows up on several themes in the book. Waiting for the ghost to appear, Brave Orchid reads aloud, hoping that her voice would either "evoke" it, so that she can face it, or "disperse" it so that she can rid the school of it. When the ghost finally appears, its arrival, as one critic puts it, "suggests a partially repressed rape memory," thus identifying the ghost as a male violator of the female (Outka 10). Kingston breathlessly tells us: "Cringes of fear seized her soles as something alive, rumbling, climbed the foot of the bed. It rolled over her and landed bodily on her chest. There it sat. It breathed airlessly, pressing her, sapping her" (68-69). After trying to physically push the ghost off of her, Brave Orchid resorts to her original strategy: voice. She talks to the ghost, Boulder, and warns him that the medical school is properly equipped to exterminate him. She informs him that she is not ignorant; indeed, he is not a "mystery" that can terrify her with the unknown, which would leave her in horror of the ghost. She then mocks the ghost for not being "clever" enough, and taunts him: "You are a puny little boulder indeed. Yes, when I get my oil, I will fry you for breakfast" (71). She survives through the night by chanting her lessons. This raises the argument that female voice, when it is articulated, can be seen as potent enough to either face down or chase away aggressive maleness. This brings us to the realization that Maxine's insistence on finding her voice through her imagination is based on her determination not only to establish an identity, but also to escape a Chinese patriarchal social system.

The story that Brave Orchid tells her classmates the next day is not whittled down to the bare facts, as is the story of No Name Woman that she tells her daughter. Instead, her encounter with the ghost takes on mythic proportions, where physical struggle leads to her death: "At about 3 A.M. I died for a while" (72). For ten years "I lost my way." But no creature "flew ahead to guide me to my natural death. Either I would die without my whole life or I would not die. I did not die" (73). She fascinates her classmates with her adventures and her story breathes enough courage into them so that they can burn out the ghost. As they burn the haunted room, Brave Orchid and her classmates chant taunts at the ghost, again defeating it not only with fire, but also with female voices.

Brave Orchid relates her experiences as a midwife in China to her daughter, telling her about babies born in pigsties to fool ghosts and gods. She tells her about deformed babies left to die in outhouses, and girl-babies killed at birth. And in the telling of these experiences, she tests, as Kingston asserts, "our strength to establish realities" (5). Responding to this test, Kingston imagines "nightmare babies" (86). What is interesting is that Kingston's nightmares occur in the Chinese language: "To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories" (87). By making a connection between the impossible and deformed with China, Kingston clarifies the dichotomies present in her search for a coherent identity. Imagination, dreams, the dark, and impossibility are Chinese, while reality, consciousness, light, and normality are American. Kingston's position is an amalgamation of both. She uses imagination to find her self and uses logic to explain it, thereby mixing both 'Chinese' and 'American' qualities to forge her unique self.

Perhaps the most controversial chapter of The Woman Warrior is "White Tigers." In this chapter, Kingston 'falsifies' Chinese myths, according to her critics. It is also here that the idea of the wish-mirror is most prominent. The well-known Chinese mythical Fa Mu Lan is directly identified with Maxine, as Maxine relates her own rendition of the story in the first person singular. Significantly, she begins the narrative in the wish mode: "The call would come from a bird ... The bird would cross the sun ... I would be a little girl of seven ... The brambles would tear off my shoes ... but I would keep climbing" (20). As soon as she reaches her destination, a little thatch hut on the peak of the mountain, Maxine's narrative becomes more concrete and, instead of being in the wish mode, the rest of the story is told in the mirror mode as showing us something that actually happened: "The door opened ... They gave me an egg ..." (21). However, the concept of the wish-mirror can be applied to this sequence on several different levels.

At the beginning of the chapter, "White Tigers," Maxine tells us how Brave Orchid could teach her the power that lies behind story telling, just as a white crane had taught a woman fighter a new martial art:

   ... I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power,
   my mother talking-story ... 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 was once mine, given me by 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 the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. (19-20)

Faced with this choice that Brave Orchid's talking-story offers: between slavery and heroism, Maxine decides that she "would have to grow up a warrior woman" (20). She is taught many different lessons by her mother, and some of the lessons contradict each other in motive and moral. In the first chapter, "No Name Woman," Brave Orchid stresses that chastity allows a woman to be given an identity in a necessarily patriarchal society. In the second chapter, "White Tigers," the message is more confusing. Brave Orchid offers Maxine two future visions: slavery, which is grounded in reality--as it appeared in the third chapter, "Shaman," in the context of a 'true story'--and heroism, which is connected to imagination, and related through the chanting of a myth.

This is where Kingston's 'distortion' of the myth becomes significant. Viewed symbolically, the elaborations Maxine adds on to the Fa Mu Lan legend become the mirror of Maxine's life, albeit with obvious differences. For example, the girl's retreat into the mountain can be seen as Maxine's adventures in school. Both in the tale and in reality, Maxine scores high marks and moves on to different stages in her life: vengeance and independence. Fa Mu Lan's teachers allow her to have a vision of her parents in a water-gourd. But when she calls out to them from the mountain top, "they were in the valley" and could not hear her. This can be interpreted as Maxine's unsuccessful struggle to voice her thoughts to her mother in the fifth and last chapter, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe." Thus, "White Tigers" becomes a key to Maxine's understanding of her mother and her identity.

When Fa Mu Lan considers whether she will stay with the old couple who will teach her to become a heroine, they tempt her with the thought of immortality: "You can be remembered by the Han people for your dutifulness" (23). This solves the problem posed by the possibility of being forgotten, as if she "had never been born" (3), as Brave Orchid had warned her in "No Name Woman." However, the solution is not as simple as turning into a warrior-woman. As the myth unfolds, it becomes clear that it is for her filiality and "dutifulness" that she will be remembered. Towards the end of this chapter, however, Maxine suggests a scenario alternative to the revised myth, in which the women she frees from the baron's house become female avengers in the true sense of the word, not bound by filial duty, wreaking havoc on males everywhere:

   They ... rode as women in black and red dresses. They
   bought up girl babies so that many poor families welcomed
   their visitations. When slave girls and daughters-in-law
   ran away, people would say they joined these
   witch amazons. They killed men and boys. (44-45)

The difference between these women warriors and Maxine/Fa Mu Lan lies in the amazons' refusal to submit to patriarchal rules that dictate, for example, that women have to be disguised as men if they are to be warriors. Women who run away from their homes in fighting men are a threat to society. Moreover, instead of merely seeking vengeance for actual crimes against families or villages, and instead of fighting for a national cause, the amazons indiscriminately kill males.

Maxine herself realizes the impossibility of translating these imaginary women warriors into real life, and does not identify with them on any level. Instead, she doubts their existence: "I myself never encountered such women and could not vouch for their reality" (45). This suggests that she could vouch for her other imaginings, which, in contrast, emerge through the wish-mirror. Sidonie Smith points out that these "'witch amazons' are figures of all that is unrepressed and violent in ways both sexual and textual, in the narrator herself as well as in the social order" (as quoted by Wong 66). It is because they are so 'unspeakably' powerful that Maxine cannot vouch for their reality.

But the wish-mirror is not always adequate to experience since by

   ... refusing to cook, breaking dishes, screaming impolitely
   as maxims are mouthed, defiantly telling her parents'
   friends that she wants to become a lumberjack, bringing
   home straight A's ... She adopts ... the cultural postures
   of a "son" by generating signs imitative of male selfhood.
   But her efforts to be the phallic woman do not earn the love
   and acceptance of her mother and community, as they do
   Fa Mu Lan. (67)

Maxine recognizes the limitations and dangers of identifying too closely with myth and imagination. The difference between myth and reality can be clarified if we recall that Maxine has personalized a narrative and not given us the 'original' myth. Maxine refuses to fool herself with a false identification with the imaginary even though the limitations and boundaries of the imaginary are ones that she herself has freely drawn.

The final chapter of the novel, however, brings Maxine much closer to a myth with which she can more honestly identify. The story of the poetess Ts'ai Yen is probably the strongest example of imagination as a wish-mirror in The Woman Warrior. At the beginning of the chapter, Maxine tells us about knot-makers in China:

   Long ago, in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons
   and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so
   complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an
   emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could
   not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have
   been an outlaw knot-maker. (163)

This passage is significant in that it is an admission by Kingston that she complicates things. Knot-makers used to create complicated things out of a simple piece of string, and Kingston creates multi-layered tales, complete with motives, emotions, and symbolism out of the bare facts of a story. For example, in one context, she creates an entire movie-like episode on the basis of Moon Orchid's arrival in America in search of her husband. Maxine's version is' more complete than that of her brother, who was a witness to the story.

But the significance of the passage about the knot-makers goes much deeper than that. The knot-makers kept making more and more complicated knots, until they hit upon a knot "so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker." This reflects Maxine's own story-telling, which sometimes becomes so complicated, laden with so many meanings and so much symbolism, that Maxine is 'blinded' by them--to the point that by getting overly involved in her stories, she is unsuccessful in finding a world with the right combination of imagination and reality. She wants this world to have enough imagination to brighten up her disappointing "American life" and yet enough reality to inspire her to believe in and strive for it. She suggests her failure to create the perfect wish-mirror world at the beginning of "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," the final chapter in the novel.

This final chapter concludes Maxine's search for her voice and her identity. It does so by creating the perfect wish-mirror myth, that of Ts'ai Yen, a Chinese poetess who was kidnapped by 'barbarians'. The chief of the barbarians took her as his mistress, and Ts'ai Yen had two children by him. She lived with the barbarians for twelve years, unable to communicate with anyone, not even with her own children, because of the language gap between her and everyone else. Maxine tells us how Ts'ai Yen was disturbed by the barbarian reed pipes and hid from their sounds. Then one night,

   ... out of Ts'ai Yen's tent, which was apart from the others,
   the barbarians heard a woman's voice singing, as if to her
   babies, a song so high and clear, it matched the flutes. Ts'ai
   Yen sang about China and her family there. Her words
   seemed to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood their
   sadness and anger. Sometimes they thought they could catch
   barbarian phrases about forever wandering. Her children did
   not laugh, but eventually sang along when she left her tent to
   sit by the winter campfires, ringed by barbarians. (209)

This short, but powerful story ends The Woman Warrior.

The story of Ts'ai Yen is an example of Maxine's wish to be articulate among those who do not understand her. Throughout "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," Maxine struggles with her voice. The fact that Ts'ai Yen's song "translated well" signifies Maxine's arrival at the ability to make her voice heard. Her preoccupation with voice starts when her mother tells her that she cut Maxine's frenum when she was a baby: "Sometimes I felt very proud that my mother committed such a powerful act upon me. At other times I was terrified-the first thing my mother did when she saw me was to cut my tongue" (164). Maxine is fascinated with this act that her mother performed, especially since, to her knowledge, she is the only one whose tongue was cut. When she asks her mother why she cut her tongue, her mother replies: "I cut it so you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language ... You'll be able to pronounce anything" (164).

But what Maxine discovered when she went to American schools was that her cut tongue did not help her "pronounce anything." She struggled to speak in a 'normal' voice. When she did speak, "little squeaks" came out. Significantly, during her silence in American schools, she produced artwork completely covered with black paint. The predictable reaction of her American teachers--calling in her parents--is juxtaposed against Maxine's own intriguing explanation:

   I painted layers of black over houses and flowers and
   suns, and when I drew on the blackboard, I put a layer of
   chalk on top. I was making a stage curtain, and it was the
   moment before the curtain parted or rose ... [I] pretended
   the curtains were swinging open, flying up, one after
   another, sunlight underneath, mighty operas. (165)

This description immediately brings to mind Maxine's own life as depicted in The Woman Warrior. Here, Maxine's external, disappointing "American life" hides her internal, personal myths and imagination, just as the black curtains cover "mighty operas." But what Maxine has yet to realize is that just as the paintings were "so black and full of possibilities," her own life, even without the fantasy, was also full of possibilities. She does not arrive at this realization, however, before she completes her search for voice.

Perhaps one of the most painful, and certainly one of the most vivid, episodes in the book takes place towards the end in "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe." In this scene, Maxine tortures a fellow classmate. This girl is, like Maxine, a silent Chinese girl in an American school. One critic describes her as being "Maxine's doppleganger, a silent body onto which she projects her worst fears in a furious, violent effort to give birth to her own voice by confronting what keeps her silent" (Outka 18). She pinches the girl, pulls her hair, and shouts at her, trying to get her to speak. She threatens her with the same threat that Brave Orchid used to teach Maxine chastity: "And you, you are a plant. Do you know that? That's all you are if you can't have a personality. You'll have no personality and no hair ... Nobody's going to notice you" (180-181). This warning recalls the first chapter, "No Name Woman," where Brave Orchid threatens Maxine with non-being in the case of sexual transgression. Thus, Maxine's hate for the quiet girl stems from a different version of the wish-mirror. She fears, rather than wishes, to become as plant-like as the girl, and, at the same time, she realizes that the girl's silence reflects her own inability to produce a 'normal' voice that does not sound like "a crippled animal running on broken legs" (169).

Immediately after this scene, Maxine contracts a mysterious illness that lasts for one and a half years: "There was no pain and no symptoms, though the middle line in my left palm broke in two ... It was the best year and a half of my life. Nothing happened" (182). After her illness, Maxine begins to actively search for the secret of voice. She defines the concepts of sanity and insanity in terms of voice: "I thought talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn't explain themselves" (186). From this point on, Maxine considers the possibilities of being the family's "crazy girl," and her mental fantasies play a large part in her self-diagnosis:

   ... there were adventurous people inside my head to
   whom I talked. With them, I was frivolous and violent,
   orphaned. I was white and had red hair, and I rode a white
   horse. Once when I realized how often I went away to see
   these free movies, I asked my sister, just checking to see
   if heating voices in motors and seeing cowboy movies on
   blank walls was normal, I asked, "Uh," trying to be casual,
   "do you talk to people that aren't real inside your
   mind?"

   "Do I what?" she said.

   "Never mind," I said fast. "Never mind. Nothing."

   My sister, my almost-twin, the person most like me in all
   the world, had said, "What?" (189-190)

Imagining the grave condition of insanity she must be heading towards, Maxine resolves not to be the "crazy one" (190).

Seeking sanity, she makes a list of all the things she had to tell her mother, "so she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat" (197). The pain Maxine feels in her vocal chords becomes a physical manifestation of her struggle with silence. It is only through articulation that this pain can be stopped. (10) After many failed attempts, Maxine succeeds in breaking through the silence, and starts telling her mother how she had killed a spider and wished for a horse. Planning her confessions carefully, Maxine schedules two or three every evening, until one night, her mother's patience wears thin: "'I can't stand this whispering,' she said looking right at me, stopping her squeezing. 'Senseless gabbings every night. I wish you would stop ... Whispering, whispering, making no sense. Madness. I don't feel like hearing your craziness'" (200). By identifying insanity with voice, Brave Orchid succeeds in silencing her daughter. Yet because Maxine's own search has proved otherwise, this silence cannot prevail. One night, at dinnertime, her "throat burst open" (201). She stands up and blurts out all the confusions she has been harboring, all her feelings, all her plans for a logical 'American' life. The dam between Maxine and her mother bursts, and it becomes a shouting match: Maxine accuses her mother of lying and confusing her, and Brave Orchid faults her for not being able to "even tell real from false" (202).

The violence of the scene is misleading. Despite the shouting and accusations flying about, this is a moment of revelation for Maxine. She discovers the real interpretations behind her mother's previously inexplicable actions. Furthermore, the fight brings about the opportunity Maxine needs to find order within her world by creating a break with her family, when her mother tells her to leave home:

   I had to leave home in order to see the world logically,
   logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries
   are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete
   pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways
   and side-walks ... Shine floodlights into dark comers: no
   ghosts. (204)

By rejecting her imagination, Maxine also temporarily rejects the Chinese half of her identity: "I've stopped checking 'bilingual' on job applications" (205).

After this original rejection of the imagination, Maxine enters another, more mature stage, where she tries to understand rather than deny her boundary-line identity: "I continue to sort out what's just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living" (205). She expresses a wish to travel to China to search for the truth. At this juncture, she tells us the final myth, the story of Ts'ai Yen; and it is through the telling of this story that her maturity and wholeness become evident. Ts'ai Yen's ability to make herself understood by the barbarians reflects Maxine's success in finding her voice. Like Ts'ai Yen's song, which "translated well," Maxine's own narration of the story is clear and simple, unlike her previous imaginary tales, which went through several versions or several modes of narration before she settled on a final rendition. The story of Ts'ai Yen's clarity stems from its being the perfect example of the wish-mirror, where Maxine's wish to be as understood as the poetess comes true, and her reflection does not waver in the mirror of Ts'ai Yen's story.

Conclusion

   How reconcile this world of fact with the bright world of
   my imagining?

   --Helen Keller

Kingston's main contribution in her search for self-hood and identity is The Woman Warrior itself. By writing down her own interpretations of No Name Woman's story and other myths, she goes through the process of picking out the versions that best suit her, and by doing so, she learns who she is. Maxine's No Name Woman, Fa Mu Lan, and Ts'ai Yen are merely metaphors for her, and exist first in her mind, and then in her writing. Kingston points out in the book:

   The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my
   people understand the resemblance soon so that I can
   return to them. 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)

The words in The Woman Warrior therefore become Kingston's instrument of vengeance on confusion and an undefined identity. Brave Orchid's stories, for example, are in themselves a starting point from which Maxine launches into story-telling in order to divert the course of her life away from confusion.

Albert E. Stone, in his book Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts, claims that autobiographies "resist closure" (4). Maxine, although she has apparently been reconciled with herself, cannot resist telling us the story of Ts'ai Yen. This resistance reminds us that this book is an autobiography, and that the story is yet to finish. However, it does end, and this in itself tells us that although it is an autobiography, it is also representative of only a phase of its writer's life. On this writing, Stone claims that "[a]n autobiographical act, therefore, makes a writer at once the creator and the recreator of his or her personal identity" (4). The emphasis on creation here is crucial.

By closely studying the role of imagination in what is popularly thought of as an almost journalistic genre in its purpose of truth-telling, we have come to the conclusion that there are no neat statements that cleanly define autobiography. Too many questions continue to pose themselves: how can we differentiate fiction from autobiography? What is, after all, fiction? Is it not the inner workings of the mind? Can we ever decide what truth is in autobiography? Frank Kermode believes that "the honest truth, insofar as this suggests absolute fidelity to historical fact, is inaccessible," so how can critics argue about an autobiographical work's allegiance to truth? (1) Finally, why is there an insistence on separating imagination from truth, as if the two were opposite poles of the same spectrum? The observations made in this article may not answer any of these questions, but they do lead to an understanding of a universal element in every search for the self. We cannot fail to realize that what may sometimes seem to be the most insubstantial part of a life is very often the defining factor in the identity of the self.

Notes

(1) This would suggest that autobiographical 'truth' could only exist in modern times, when the video camera can record events instantaneously. But even that is disputed, because of the camera's bias. Anyone attuned to the news as portrayed by the media knows that pictures and live recordings do lie.

(2) This recalls Jacques Derrida's own statement: "The ear of the other says to me and constitutes the autos of my autobiography," thereby also assigning the reader--or hearer the task of categorizing. He goes on to claim that a "text is signed only much later by the other," suggesting that the 'real' author of a text is actually the reader (51).

(3) Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) is a Chinese-American writer whose parents immigrated separately to America in the first half of the twentieth century. Maxine was born nine months after her mother's arrival in the United States. Her works include China Men (1989), which was written as a sort of prequel to The Woman Warrior (1976), and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1990). She graduated from the University of California in Berkeley with a B.A. in English Literature in 1962. She is currently teaching in the same university. In this article, I use the last name, Kingston, when referring to the author, and the first name, Maxine, when referring to the narrator in the autobiography.

(4) In a more sweeping statement, the Russian poet Tyutchev once said, "All thought, once expressed, is a lie" (As quoted by Coe 81).

(5) The impressionistic lie would be, according to Hudgins, the author saying, "It feels like this" (8).

(6) The literary feud I have in mind here is that between Colley Cibber and Alexander Pope, as outlined by Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the English Poets.

(7) Frank Chin's criticism was part of a larger debate on Asian-American culture and the measure of authenticity in art created by Asian Americans. For more on this issue, see Helen Zia's Asian American Dreams. For a deeper understanding of the tradition out of which The Woman Warrior was written, see Xiao-huang Yin's exhaustive research on Chinese-American Literature since the 1850s.

(8) For an interesting study on the relationship between women and mirrors in literature, see Jenijoy La Belle's book Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass.

(9) The identification of ghost as the Other is best exemplified by the application of the title 'ghost' to all non-Chinese. In America, Brave Orchid and her family have to deal with Garbage Ghosts, Teacher Ghosts, Jesus Ghosts, Black Ghosts, and so on. Even Maxine's generation, so strange to the parents, is considered half-ghost because of their constant association with the ghosts in the American school.

(10) This concept of the urge to verbalize can also be seen in China Men, when Maxine's grandfather organizes a "shout party" to protest the unfair rule of silence during the work-day that the sugarcane plantation owners have enforced. Like Maxine, her grandfather develops a psychosomatic illness--a cough--because of his forced silence, and it is only when he talks during the day that his cough is relieved.

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