Repudiation and reconciliation of two Woman Warriors: Brave Orchid and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Repudiation and reconciliation of two Woman Warriors: Brave Orchid and Maxine Hong Kingston
To many, China is an exotic country with mysteries and riddles that haven’t yet been solved. In The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kinston reveals true China to readers through her collection of “talk-stories” from a Chinese mother to her daughter. Through her talk stories, Brave Orchid extends Chinese tradition into the lives of her American children and enriches their imagination. While Brave Orchid's storytelling is educational and informative, it also reiterates patriarchal and misogynistic messages of traditional Chinese culture. Moreover, as Brave Orchid does not explain her stories, Kingston interprets her mother's stories and becomes a storyteller herself. While Brave Orchid tells her talk story to her daughter Kingston, she tries to shape an ideal Chinese woman. Yet Maxine Hong Kingston interprets the talk story with American values and develops her distinctly mixed American and Chinese ideas.
Brave Orchid is in a way a woman warrior, a ‘word-warrior’ who struggles for self-definition and fights ‘ghosts’ in her life. In “Shaman”, Brave Orchid transforms from a traditional woman to a respectable doctor who in a way is a woman warrior. After the deaths of her two children, Brave Orchid decides to leave her uneventful life to study medicine in Canton, the capital of the province. In the medical school, Brave Orchid earns outstanding grades and summons the courage to challenge the “Sitting Ghost”. She volunteers to spend a night in a haunted room in the dormitory and defeats the ghost as it tries to attack her, then organizes the whole student body to participate in her exorcising ritual. This confrontation with ghosts is in a sense Brave Orchid’s struggle and battle with the limits of traditionalism. She is fighting to become more than just an ordinary woman by becoming a doctor, a male occupation. Back in her village, Brave Orchid uses her intelligence to establish herself as a renowned doctor. Just like legendary swordswoman, Brace Orchid becomes a woman warrior as she “has gone away ordinary and come back miraculous, like the ancient magicians who came down from the mountains”. Although she abandoned her occupation, later when she moves to America, her fight with ‘ghosts’ has not stopped. In order to extend Chinese tradition and heritage to her children, Brave Orchid transforms into a ‘word-warrior’ and tells talk stories, her own personal voice, in order to fight ghosts in America, thus make her American daughter an ideal Chinese woman.
