Talk Stories of the Woman Warrior July 01, 2003 | Ac n Chan, Lai San As defined by American writer Maxine

e Hong Kingston, talk-story is "an oral tradition of history, mythology, genealogy, bedtime stories and how-to stories that have been passed down through generations, an essential part of family and community life. (...) (It) is actually part of the 'low' or 'small' Chinese culture" (1). However, her talk-story is not only an attempt to keep alive her Chinese ancestry, but also a way to maintain a dialogue between both the Chinese and American societies from which her "Chinese-Americanness" emerge as a hybrid. Strongly criticized by Chinese American writers and critics, who believe she has tampered against genuinely Chinese folklore in her stories, she retorts that "we have to do more than record myth. (...) The way I keep the old Chinese myths alive is by telling them in a new American way" (2). And that mix of old Chinese myths and a new American way to retell them is what make the "oral stories change (...) according to the needs of the listener, (...) of the day, the interest of the time, so that the story can be different (...) to keep ambiguity in the writing all the time" (3). So, Kingston's talk story is a conscious attempt at creating ambiguity and multiplicity in her texts to produce a dialogue with other texts, and strategies she employs to blur the distinction between past and present, reality and fantasy, fact and fiction. Among the methods Kingston uses to talk-story The Woman Warrior are (4): Narrating parallel stories of different women from different time lines and places. Creating her own versions of both Eastern and Western fables. Presenting multiple, mutually exclusive versions of female ancestors. Dreaming up purely fantastical accounts. The Woman Warrior is an example of this new Chinese American trend of storytelling and a story written and narrated by and about women from different time lines, but similar stories. Each of the five chapters reveals different traits of Chinese and Chinese American women, of real and imaginary women, of women both dead and alive, as well as the traits of different narrators and characters, of children and adults and, finally of the writer, Maxine Hong Kingston, who functions as both storyteller and autobiographer. Those many binary pairs produce instances of what could be termed intertextuality, that is, a dialogue between many different texts. The woman warrior seems to be Maxine Hong Kingston, an individual whose process of maturity and individuation is seen in the novel through the prism of other female texts. On the one hand, the protagonists Brave Orchid, No Name Woman, Fa Mu Lan, and Ts'ai Yen, and, on the other hand, secondary characters like her aunt Moon Orchid and the village madwoman are all integral parts of Maxine's personality. In one way or another, all these women contribute as intertexts to the making of the individual Maxine Hong Kingston, whose childhood, girlhood, and adulthood are the product of a dialogue among female texts. The female characters are intertexts in the sense that each woman is to be read through the light of other women. The multiple experiences of Maxine, Brave Orchid, No Name Woman, Moon Orchid, Fa Mu Lan, and Ts'ai Yen are meaningful within a more general context, a synchronic time and a space in which all of them coexist. They are characterized by two sets of traits that might both appear in the same character in different periods of time: one set sheds light on feminine stereotypes like weakness, passivity, compliance, and voicelessness, and the other refers to strength, action, power, and voice. While one set alludes to women with the potential to become warriors, the other set refers to women who have already achieved the status of warriors. Under this premise, women warriors are not born; they must undergo and survive a process of transformation, a rite of passage, a series of ordeals during which the potential warrior might even show signs of weakness or imperfection. However, her inherent contradictions, along with the process in which she eventually faces and overcomes her imperfections and flaws, might well raise her to the status of a woman warrior. Throughout the novel, Kingston balances both sets of female traits, showing women who are, of who have been, both weak and strong.

Hence, pluralism and multiplicity are key concepts that help us to understand both groups of women because they help us gauge the work of production, the continuous process of transformation that is going on in each woman as a text. As intertexts, women warriors are not different individuals, who can be easily discerned one from another, but different prefigurations of the model of the woman warrior and, therefore, they make up one single person who is constantly changing, a female prototype of a community. A. Female Intertextuality (5) According to Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, no text can be read outside its relations to other, already extant texts; neither the text not its reader can escape this intertextual web of relationships (6). As a signifying practice, intertextuality deals with an active transformation of meaning which, in turn, transforms the single act of reading into a double act of reading and rewriting. As a dialogue of texts, intertextuality reveals a relationship between a particular text and a general (con)text. Whenever somebody reads a text, there is/are (an)other text(s) inserted within, either negating or reaffirming the text, so that both authority and transgression coexist in the same space. In the context of this analysis, the term "text" will refer not only to actual written texts, but also to female characters who can be read and interpreted, and who are transformed by their interactions of dialogues with other texts. Kristeva's concept of intertextuality emerges from her reading and interpretation of Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism. While the latter was more interested in the struggles between the centrifugal and centripetal forces of language that resulted in social stratification, that in turn, subverted the monologic world of ideological unification and centralization as represented by the dominant language, the former set out to analyze the concept of writing as a signifying practice, as the transformation and production of meanings, and as the construction and deconstruction of meanings. Chinese American literature, like so many other ethnic literatures, is prone to be read intertextually precisely because of the bicultural and even multicultural values and modes of living characteristic of peoples of marginal ethnic groups living in the United States. In this context, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is an example of a literary discourse in which cultural intertexts, heteroglot subjects, variations on a story, and multiple characters are all mixed in a fragmentary yet pluralistic literary structure, which is intended to break with the monologic nature of hegemonic literature. The act of storytelling becomes, then, a female act of creation in which not only the imagination but also the senses play important roles in undermining patriarchal authority. Trihn Minh-ha points out in Woman, Native, Other that as "Great Mothers" women have traditionally been the ones who keep and transmit oral stories, the ones with creative powers:
The world's earliest archives or libraries were the memories of women. Patiently transmitted from mouth to ear. body to body, hand to hand. In the process of storytelling, speaking and listening refer to realities that do not involve just the imagination. The speech is seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. It destroys, brings into life, nurtures. (7)

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