The Woman Warrior

“‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you.” 

The first line of The Woman Warrior presents a paradox. In reporting her mother’s interdiction, Kingston immediately breaks it. This will be a story about a refusal to remain silent.

“Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She tested our strength to establish realities. Those in the emigrant generations who could not reassert brute survival died young and far from home. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fit in solid America.” 

Brave Orchid’s storytelling is a way of acculturating her children. In writing this book, Kingston uses the power of story both to preserve and critique her mother’s teachings. Storytelling is presented as a method of survival right from the start.

“In a commensal tradition, where food is precious, the powerful older people made wrongdoers eat alone. Instead of letting them start separate new lives like the Japanese, who could become samurais and geishas, the Chinese family, faces averted but eyes glowering sideways, hung on to the offenders and fed them leftovers.” 

Food and eating play a deeply symbolic role in The Woman Warrior. Food is not just nourishment but a way of drawing and maintaining social boundaries. Here, inclusion in food-sharing can even be a way of establishing exclusion.