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pylduck.livejournal.comHi all! Now that the semester has gotten underway, I will likely be posting biweekly (every other week?) reviews about teaching particular texts in my Asian American women writers course. Just completed this week is the canonical The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston.
I'd never taught the entire book before, and it seems to have gone over pretty well in my current class. (I've taught the first two chapters in an American literature class, focusing on the proliferating interpretations that the narrator offers of talk-stories her mother tells her.) With this book in particular, but with Asian American literature more broadly, I always try to push against common approaches that take the text as an unmediated, autoethnographic account of Asian American experience. It still boggles my mind how people can even read this text as a straightforward rendering of Chinese culture and its clash with American society because it seems to me like the narrator is consistently challenging that kind of dichotomy by contradicting her own claims and undermining any simple sense of the difference between Chinese and American (especially Chinese feminine versus American feminine).
Anyways, reading through the whole book again was a nice surprise since I only ever remember the first couple of chapters and then the last one. The middle chapters dealing with the mother's medical school years and the arrival of Moon Orchid were like new to me! I have such a bad memory.
In class, I tried to emphasize all the moments where the narrative gets disrupted--whether the narrator addresses the audience directly, switches verb tense into that strange "would" almost-subjunctive tense, or explicitly announces that what she has just laid out before was (almost) entirely imagined. It's nice that the publishers are now marking the book as "fiction/literature" rather than "nonfiction/literature" so that I can base discussion of the text on genre expectations and the "truth value" of memoirs versus fiction. But the newer copies, though now labeled fiction, still have blurbs and notes about the book as an award-winning nonfiction book that REALLY GETS AT CHINESE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE.
We also talked, of course, about silence and speech. I mentioned my personal interest in the sounds that lie outside of either silence or speech, too, like the descriptions of the narrator's voice that sounded like a duck (the hanging duck carcass squeezed).
As expected, the questions students tended to ask were along the lines of, "Does this really happen in China?" Like, "Do they still bind women's feet?" They are never as interested, without prodding on my part, in the unreliability of the narrator and the way she totally makes up things and also multiplies possible explanations and interpretations, more interested in creating realms of possibility than identifying a singular truth.
What do you all think of The Woman Warrior? If you are teachers, how do you teach it?
Yesterday, I showed some clips from Disney's Mulan to explore the different kind of feminist heroine presented. Tomorrow we read King-kok Cheung's "The Woman Warrior vs. the Chinaman Pacific" essay that tackles the thorny split between Chinese American feminism and masculinist cultural nationalism.
I'm also writing this post to avoid finishing up a personal statement I had planned on wrapping up this morning. Meh!
I'd never taught the entire book before, and it seems to have gone over pretty well in my current class. (I've taught the first two chapters in an American literature class, focusing on the proliferating interpretations that the narrator offers of talk-stories her mother tells her.) With this book in particular, but with Asian American literature more broadly, I always try to push against common approaches that take the text as an unmediated, autoethnographic account of Asian American experience. It still boggles my mind how people can even read this text as a straightforward rendering of Chinese culture and its clash with American society because it seems to me like the narrator is consistently challenging that kind of dichotomy by contradicting her own claims and undermining any simple sense of the difference between Chinese and American (especially Chinese feminine versus American feminine).
Anyways, reading through the whole book again was a nice surprise since I only ever remember the first couple of chapters and then the last one. The middle chapters dealing with the mother's medical school years and the arrival of Moon Orchid were like new to me! I have such a bad memory.
In class, I tried to emphasize all the moments where the narrative gets disrupted--whether the narrator addresses the audience directly, switches verb tense into that strange "would" almost-subjunctive tense, or explicitly announces that what she has just laid out before was (almost) entirely imagined. It's nice that the publishers are now marking the book as "fiction/literature" rather than "nonfiction/literature" so that I can base discussion of the text on genre expectations and the "truth value" of memoirs versus fiction. But the newer copies, though now labeled fiction, still have blurbs and notes about the book as an award-winning nonfiction book that REALLY GETS AT CHINESE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE.
We also talked, of course, about silence and speech. I mentioned my personal interest in the sounds that lie outside of either silence or speech, too, like the descriptions of the narrator's voice that sounded like a duck (the hanging duck carcass squeezed).
As expected, the questions students tended to ask were along the lines of, "Does this really happen in China?" Like, "Do they still bind women's feet?" They are never as interested, without prodding on my part, in the unreliability of the narrator and the way she totally makes up things and also multiplies possible explanations and interpretations, more interested in creating realms of possibility than identifying a singular truth.
What do you all think of The Woman Warrior? If you are teachers, how do you teach it?
Yesterday, I showed some clips from Disney's Mulan to explore the different kind of feminist heroine presented. Tomorrow we read King-kok Cheung's "The Woman Warrior vs. the Chinaman Pacific" essay that tackles the thorny split between Chinese American feminism and masculinist cultural nationalism.
I'm also writing this post to avoid finishing up a personal statement I had planned on wrapping up this morning. Meh!
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