Katie Patterson Hulett, Dixie State University
English, Literary Studies emphasis
In the last pages of her memoir, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston tells the story of the Chinese poetess Ts’ ai Yen, a woman captured by
a barbarian culture and expected to adapt to their ways. But rather than adapting she resists, which causes her loneliness and resentment toward the barbarians for many years. Yet over time, she finds a way to connect her culture to theirs, which shifts her understanding of a previously “barbaric” culture. Kingston concludes her memoir with Ts’ai Yen’s story in order to emphasize the importance of questioning the notion of barbarism, because of how the concept proved destructive in her own life. She demonstrates the futility of labeling others as “barbaric” by showing how Ts’ai Yen’s rejection of the barbarians widened the distance between them, which not only increased their foreignness in her eyes, but also increased her foreignness in theirs. In her own life, Kingston saw tragedy result from the resistance to a new culture. Like Ts’ai Yen, Kingston’s mother resisted understanding the realities in America. By fiercely holding on to her Chinese heritage, she became barbarous in the eyes of Americans, who, in turn, labeled her as barbarous for not assimilating. Kingston herself was caught between both cultures, which made her childhood tumultuous as she tried to sift through the “realities” each presented to her. Only through a new understanding of reality-that it shifts depending on individual perspective and personal experience-could Kingston understand how to accept and finally love her dual cultures and see them both with compassion. My research for this essay focuses on how the short story of Ts’ai Yen and the barbarians embodies the central theme of Kingston’s memoir, allowing her to translate her beloved Chinese culture, which was previously indecipherable, to a Western audience.