Maxine Hong Kingston & the New Horizons of American Memoir
Richard Goodman | September 2022
Richard Goodman, Maxine Hong Kingston
In the 1960s in America, there emerged the idea that the self—any self, including yourself—could be the subject of a book. Before that, writers who wrote books about themselves were almost inevitably famous, or notorious, or both. You wrote about yourself if you had done something. You were a Benjamin Franklin, a Frederick Douglass, a Lindberg, a Maya Angelou, any number of generals, US Presidents, movie stars, or baseball players. Nobody wanted to read the memoirs of an everyman or everywoman—even if they existed. What for? Can anyone think of a book written by your basic ordinary person, about his or her life, written before 1960? There might be a few, but not many.
Two books changed that. With Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes in 1968 and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior in 1976, you have, if not for the first time, then certainly very early on, books by two people, two Americans, who had no reason to write their stories other than the simple fact that they both felt they merited being told. Not only that, both authors had the radical confidence that they could turn those stories of personal history into literature, into art. And, specifically, into what would become labeled as memoir as we know it today. Neither was famous, and now Exley is all but forgotten. Some would argue that Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, published in 1967, should be included here as a milestone of memoir. It’s a wonderful book, but it’s about adolescence and young adulthood, and I see it more as a later influence on writers who would take up that same subject—for example, Tobias Wolff in This Boy’s Life, published in 1989, and Susanna Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted, published in 1993, among others. There’s nothing wrong with books about adolescence, of course, and some are brilliantly written. But I don’t see Stop-Time as having the sweep of Exley’s book and, most especially, of Hong Kingston’s book.
Exley and Hong Kingston have as their subjects themselves and their relationships with their present and past. A Fan’s Notes is a roller coaster ride of Exley’s ups and downs, the latter due mainly to his excessive drinking. It is wry, aggressively confessional, skillfully written, funny, and, at times, cloying. I think one of the reasons that, despite its literary virtues, A Fan’s Notes hasn’t had the staying power of Hong Kingston’s book is that Exley’s light shines too brightly on Exley while Kingston’s illuminates far more, especially the women in her past and present. Hong Kingston simply takes on more than Exley. Exley’s life was not extraordinary and neither was Hong Kingston’s—at least up until the books were published. That is, nothing either of them did in their personal lives before they published their books affected history or society in a broad, public way. In fact, when John Leonard rapturously reviewed The Woman Warrior in The New York Times in 1976, he wrote of the author:
Who is Maxine Hong Kingston? Nobody at Knopf [her publisher] seems to know. They have never laid eyes on her. She lives in Honolulu, nicely situated between Occident and Orient with a husband and small son. She teaches English and creative writing. There is no one more qualified to teach English and creative writing.1
What sets these writers apart is a desire to make meaning of their lives through the act of writing about them. Part of the pleasure and reward of these books is the act of seeing the narrator as a character learning where he or she is going—or trying to go—and why. Without these two books, representing the masculine and feminine side of this search, I don’t think we would have had many of the memoirs that have subsequently been published—or they wouldn’t have been written the way they were. The gates these two books unlocked are probably responsible for a lot of bad memoirs as well, but that’s the price we pay when something groundbreaking is introduced. Quantity often follows quality. Just think of YouTube.
Of the two books, I believe The Woman Warrior is far more significant and influential. I am not alone.
As The Washington Post’s book critic Jonathan Yardley wrote in 2007:
Though memoirs by three younger men (Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, Willie Morris’s North Toward Home and Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes) had been published in the late 1960s, the received wisdom was that memoir was an older person’s—an older man’s—genre.
Precisely when and why this began to change—not to mention whether the change was for the better—is open to debate, but a strong case can be made that the decisive moment was in 1976 with the publication of The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston.2
Yardley goes on to say that The Woman Warrior “is a book of unusual originality and power.”3 Through the years, others have joined him to praise the book, including memoirist Mary Karr, author of the acclaimed The Liar’s Club.
I agree wholeheartedly with Yardley about The Woman Warrior’s originality and power. We need to have longer memories when it comes to literature and the groundbreakers, so I appreciate Yardley’s nod to Hong Kingston. Has there ever been a more exciting opening of a memoir, then or now:
“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.”4
Then, in a transparent act of the imagination, Hong Kingston’s prose takes off to create a flight of the possible, not of the actual that she does not know.
What do we have here? A public betrayal of a secret between a mother and a daughter. She’s not only telling someone, she’s telling everyone. These words engender intense curiosity in the reader about what the secret is; there is a palpable sense of daring on the page at the start. All in fifteen words! Hong Kingston gives us permission—the story has been published, after all—to listen to this secret unfold. It goes on:
In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.5
Everything after this lives up to the dramatic promise of those opening lines. That first chapter is a blaze of terrifying lyricism, a brave and honest search for an aunt the author will never know. In the end, Hong Kingston chooses to defy her mother’s strict order because, as she says at the close of the chapter, “But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment. And I have.”6 She is seeking not just atonement. She wants to raise her aunt from the dead. But how?
If I want to learn what clothes my aunt wore, whether flashy or ordinary, I have to begin, “Remember Father’s drowned-in-the-well sister?” I cannot ask that. My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She will add nothing, unless powered by Necessity, a riverbank that guides her life.7
What does it mean to be Chinese American, is the great question in The Woman Warrior. It’s the age-old story, heightened by the immigrant’s dilemma—who am I? “Chinese-Americans,” Hong Kingston writes, “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?”8
This unrequited search of Hong Kingston’s is one of the matters that supplies her book with a kind of literary solar power that has kept fueling its readers’ interest and empathy for over forty-five years.
Hong Kingston even addresses what has become one of the main controversies of memoir—how much, if any, of a story can you make up? Her answer is: tell the reader what she is doing and then do it wonderfully well. She never tries to hoodwink the reader. The aunt Hong Kingston’s mother tells her of is married in China to a man who leaves for America to find work. Two years later, that no name aunt, as Hong Kingston calls her, becomes pregnant. Of course the absent husband couldn’t have been the father at that point. When the aunt begins to show, the villagers notice. One night, in masks, the villagers storm the house where Hong Kingston’s mother and aunt live. They destroy everything in a scene that’s right out of the Manson murders, replete with blood splattered on the walls. Hong Kingston, hearing this story years later from her mother, renders it all with horror and helplessness on the page. Soon after, the aunt delivers her baby in a pig sty and drowns both of them in the family’s well. After that—silence. Hong Kingston’s father forbids anyone to speak of this. That is, until her mother disobeys and tells her daughter the tale of this woman and her child. This she does with florid, startling language, told through the eyes of her mother, who was there:
On the night the baby was to be born the villagers raided our house. Some were crying. Like a great saw, teeth strung with lights, files of people walked zigzag across our land, tearing the rice. Their lanterns doubled in the disturbed black water, which drained away through the broken bunds. As the villagers closed in, we could see that some of them, probably men and women we knew well, wore white masks. The people with long hair hung it over their faces. Women with short hair made it stand up on end. Some had tied white bands around their foreheads, arms, and legs.9
Then, in a transparent act of the imagination, Hong Kingston’s prose takes off to create a flight of the possible, not of the actual that she does not know. She imagines the man who rapes—Hong Kingston thinks it must have been rape—and impregnates her no name aunt who himself would remain unknown and blameless:
Perhaps he worked an adjoining field, or sold her the cloth for the dress she sewed and wore. His demand must have surprised, then terrified her. She obeyed him; she always did as she was told.10
Then we have the neighbors’ raid. Hong Kingston asks, “I wonder whether he masked himself when he joined the raid on her family.”11 She takes one final, daring step: “He organized the raid against her.”12 She has no proof of this. It’s all speculation. But we know it’s speculation. Hong Kingston does this openly, with a surreal lyricism. She never claims she knows these things as matters of fact. Why shouldn’t we be able to add imagination to the cadre of tools we use to try to understand our lives through words as long as the reader knows what we’re doing? Think of Hong Kingston doing this forty-five years ago, when the genre hardly existed, something perhaps artistically akin to Picasso’s radical turn to cubism.
Vivian Gornick, on the other hand, chose not to discuss the role her imagination played in the composing of Fierce Attachments, her acclaimed memoir published in 1987. That is, until she was cornered by Salon.com and NPR. In what has now become a well-known exchange, she vehemently defended her choice to alter the exact reality of the events she describes in the book.13 The controversy embodied in that decision is alive and well today. There are many schools of thought about what the memoirist is or isn’t allowed to do, and how they might confront and shape the facts. There is no Supreme Court of Memoir to render a decision. Hong Kingston, with her artistic full disclosure, sets what I believe should be the standard in dealing with the unalterable facts: if you are going to supplement what is known, make it clear to the reader this is what you’re doing. Make it clear this may have happened not that it did happen.
Hong Kingston, with her artistic full disclosure, sets what I believe should be the standard in dealing with the unalterable facts: if you are going to supplement what is known, make it clear to the reader this is what you’re doing.
More importantly, we should ask ourselves, would Fierce Attachments, with its theme of betrayal and its raw, exhausting battle between mother and daughter, exist without The Woman Warrior? Would Michael Ondaatje have written Running in the Family, his search for the lost lives of his parents in Ceylon? Would Gornick have written as openly and bravely about the mortal struggle between her and her mother in a Bronx tenement, each planted firmly in different worlds yet trying to cross into the other’s? Would Ondaatje have recreated his parents’ Gatsby-like partying with such fanciful immediacy? Would Mary Karr have written as forthrightly and candidly as she did in The Liar’s Club? Let’s allow Karr herself to answer that question. She devotes an entire chapter to The Woman Warrior in her book, The Art of Memoir, “The Visionary Maxine Hong Kingston.” This chapter is worth reading, as Karr confirms the book’s staying power. “While I couldn’t directly copy Hong Kingston’s method in my own first book,” Karr writes, “studying her gave me the courage to use the Texas tall tales I’d overheard from my daddy and his gambling buddies.”14
Mary Karr says she has taught The Woman Warrior for “three decades.” I have as well. At times, I introduced the book to students who had never heard of it—graduate students in the two MFA programs I’ve been a part of. I was grateful to be able to have them see for themselves the power and the glory of Hong Kingston’s writing. Inevitably, they marveled at Hong Kingston’s bravery and her artistry.
I would say the list of books beholden to Hong Kingston goes on and on. And will continue to go on and on. Writers—and readers—will continue to be beholden to her courage and to her craft, and to how, as Mary Karr puts it, her “ethereal vision helped forge the genre of memoir as we know it.”15 In 2019, The New York Times published “The 50 Best Memoirs of the Last 50 Years.” They placed Fierce Attachments number 1. They had the wisdom and good taste to place The Woman Warrior number 2.16 I could protest and say they’ve got the order wrong, but that would be querulous. They ranked The Woman Warrior at the very highest level, and they were right. In its assessment of Hong Kingston’s book, the Times critic Jennifer Szalai writes, “This book is more than four decades old, but I can’t think of another memoir quite like it that has been published since. True stories, ghost stories, ‘talk stories’—Maxine Hong Kingston whirs them all together to produce something wild and astonishing that still asserts itself with a ruthless precision.”17 Mary Karr writes in her appreciation that The Woman Warrior is “a timeless monument to memoir’s possibilities.”18 Truer words, as they say.
Richard Goodman is the coeditor of The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing and the author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France.
Notes
1. John Leonard, “In Defiance of 2 Worlds,” review of The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston, New York Times, September 17, 1976.
2. Jonathan Yardley, “‘Woman Warrior,’ A Memoir that Shook the Genre,” Washington Post, June 19, 2007.
3. Ibid.
4. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 3.
5. Ibid., p. 3.
6. Ibid., p. 16.
7. Ibid., p. 6.
8. Ibid., pp. 5–6.
9. Ibid., pp. 3–4.
10. Ibid., p. 6.
11. Ibid., p. 6.
12. Ibid., p. 7.
13. Maureen Corrigan, “Book Critic Maureen Corrigan,” NPR, August 5, 2003, https://www.npr.org/2003/08/05/1385848/book-critic-maureen-corrigan.
14. Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 109.
15. Ibid., p. 103.
16. “The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years,” New York Times, June 26, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/books/best-memoirs.html.
17. Ibid.
18. Karr, p. 110.
