Wednesday, 23 May 2001. An interview with Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976)
I. Introduction.
I plan to divide the lecture hour into two parts. In the first part I will conduct an interview with Professor Kingston; during the last 15 minutes of class I’ll open the interview to the students and Teaching Fellows
Salient biographical details about the author:
Born 27 October 1940, Stockton CA
1st language a dialect of Cantonese: MK adapts and deploys the
prosody of this dialect in her narrative
Scholarships to UC Berkeley, BA 1962
Married 1962 and moved to Hawaii, 1965; teacher in high schools
Chancellor’s Professor of Creative Writing UC Berkeley, 1990-
The Woman Warrior 1976 / China Men 1980 (orig 1 manuscript)
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989)
II. REPRESENTATIONS OF SPEECH
I. On Style. MHK has described the problem of representing the speech of characters in her books The Woman Warrior and China Men:
“One of the problems … was to figure out what to do with the language. So many people [in the book] are not speaking English or they speak it with an accent. They use Chinese words; and they aren’t just speaking Chinese-Chinese. They are speaking Chinese with an American change in the language and they are speaking the dialect of one little village. So what are you going to do…? That’s an example of the artistic problems you encounter with a culture that has not adequately been portrayed before.”
[Interview with Arturo Islas, Women Writers of the West Coast, ed. Marilyn Yalom (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1983), p. 12]
—A passage that illustrates this point?
DM suggests: Talking to aunt Moon Orchid, 132-134
Talking in school, 166-167
Sound of voice, 168
II. My second question is about thinking in TROPES, what I have been calling in this course “literary thinking”:
MHK on how she wants to be read by students— by us:
“I want them to read well and accurately. I don't want them to speed read or skim, which is a condition at college, I guess. I want them to have their hearts and their minds and their eyes open as they are reading it and to read with their feelings. It's not just an intellectual book. They have to let the images come inside of themselves for the images to do their work. Something amazing happens with images and metaphor: we see these pictures, and they go inside of our imaginations, and our imaginations change. So I hope that people will allow themselves to change as they are reading the books.”
[from "Maxine Hong Kingston" by Donna Perry/1991, reprinted in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin, Mississippi UP, 1998, p. 185. SEE COURSE WEBSITE, “Biography”]
-- Is there any particular passage in the book that contains an image you particularly wanted to “do the work”?
If not, here’s my favorite: THE NARRATOR AS KNOT-MAKER (pp 163-4: 2 paras)
Brings together:
1) Tasseled horse, p. 35 (vision of glory)
2) Cut tongue, p. 197ff (confesses to mother to ease pain)
) “Filiality” as transmission from mother to daughter, pp. 206ff
Latin filius –a = son, daughter relationship;
possibly from Latin: filare, spin; filum, thread?
Re no-name aunt: “a child with no descent line…would only trail after her, ghost-like, begging her to give it purpose” p. 15