1. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
  2. Formal experiments
    1. Post modern/deconstruction/magical realism
    2. Talk-story, magic realism;
      1. Imagination and reality; fantasy and history; talk story
    3. Paratactic style; round structure; moving around in time and space
      1. Ynez in eyes of Zapata; Tepeyac, Eleven--also Baldwin--from Virgina Woolf--her narrative stream of conscious narrative
    4. Three locations in space and time
      1. China village
      2. Immigrant community in Stockton
      3. Modern writer
        1. No-name woman--as if never born--Erasure and writing; remembering and forgetting; the writer's position
        2. Mother and daughter
        3. Ethnicity themes: individuality vs. community; present vs. tradition; roots and identity; rage, justice and forgiveness
    5. Construction of story or alternate versions is incorporated in text--pp. 6-9
      1. Her technique; mother's technique when she tells her stories later; traditional technique
  3. Documentary window
    1. Marriage to make sure they come back
    2. Contracts and stowaways
    3. Send money home
    4. Village and family
    5. Incest taboo
    6. Ancestor worship--the roundness
    7. Ghosts
    8. Sexual politics
    9. Position of women
  4. Tour de Force opening story--shocker
    1. Secrets--start with horror--beginnings--primal myth
    2. Villagers attack
      1. graphic description, horrific progress--like a great saw--destroying everything; dressed in masks--persecution and scapegoating--
        1. the Klan, Go Tell p. 68-9--behind the door
        2. the Nazis
        3. the villagers in Mexico Woman Hollering 104, 111
          1. Ynez as scapegoat--shirley Jackson Lottery
      2. killing animals
      3. spreading blood around the house
      4. family didnt lock doors--stare straight ahead
      5. ruining the peasant wealth --sobbing and scolding
      6. Curses: ghost. Pig 5
      7. Took sugar and oranges to bless themselves--Religion/Superstition--also rip off possessions while "cleansing" village
      8. Sewing up the rice sacks
      9. Aunt gave birth that night--jumped in well with baby--La Llorona--plugging up family well--gesture of ultimate destruction--suicide, killing baby, polluting family water supply
    3. Story told as warning by mother--you've started to menstruate...rite of passage; dont humiliate us...the villagers are watchful--control female sexuality
      1. Pregnancy; say nothing--unwanted pregnancy--"Walked the crooked path" cf. One Holy Night
      2. Irony--aunt is forgotten; that's punishment, but also rmembered as a warning
  5. Movement now to narrator in present--relation of past to present
    1. Dense reflection--the scary stories--"to grow up on"--tested strength, strength needed by emigrant families--they create invisible world--bible; religion; hosts--around their children
    2. Children have to figure out how it fits in solid america [not invisible]--her reaction to menstruate--blood, fertility, maturity, change
    3. Emigrants confuse the gods, misleading them with crooked streets and false names, to avoid curses
    4. They likewise confuse their offspring who threaten them in similar ways....trying to get things straight, name the unspeakable...be out front--use of confusion by parents
  6. Confusing things for chinese--cf. later confusing things about communists
    1. Addressing ethinic group--how do you determine what is Chinesse and separate it from poverty, insnaity, the peculiarities of individuals--what is tradition and what is the movies
  7. Generational differences
    1. Mother guided by necessity; kids do frivolous things--carnival ride, movies
  8. Reflection back to aunt; constructing the story
    1. Take 1--the rape
      1. Adultery is extravagance...the strict necessities of village life--vivid examples of eating everything...movement of the mind
      2. She will make up the story--mother wont tell--the book writing itself in her imagination of aunt
        1. Women in old China dont choose
        2. Man made her his secret evil--Malinche
        3. Maybe he joined the raid---betrayal
        4. His demand--emerging from imagination 6
        5. Imagining the marriage with man in next village 7--engagement by proxy with rooster; arranged by parents; lucky he was young
        6. Other man's orders--brutality--her fear--tells her she's pregnant--he organized the raid [we're amazed at the story as it emerges in her mind]
        7. Men give orders
      3. Essay on outcast table and Chinese marriage; inferences
        1. Aunt must have been sent back home--she would belong to in-laws
        2. A synonym in chinese for marriage is taking a daughter in law
        3. Make wrongdoers eat alone, not cast them out
        4. THEME--large family traditonal ruled by elders vs. nuclear family
    2. Take 2--the romantic rebel 8
      1. Father's sister was only daughter--males in family were restless; she was expected to keep tradition--aunt crossed boundaries also
        1. Difficulty of preserving tradition
      2. Imagine that it was a love story--delicate as a few hairs that she fancied on him, and rebellious--essay on romance as a product of lighting
      3. Entertaining the possibility she was free with sex, a wild woman, doesnt work--needs connection to self
    3. Take 3--the vain spoiled daughter 9
      1. Individuality of hair style, opposed to pragmatic blunt cut
      2. Reverie into depilatory grooming and then foot binding--female torture
      3. Paragraph ends bitterly with tits and ass man
      4. Digging out freckle with hot needle--female self-mutilation
      5. The work of women--bent backs--commonplace loveliness of standing straight 10
      6. Males leaving the crowded house not just because of poverty, but the never-said--incestuous desire
      7. Aunt becomes spoiled, precious, mirror gazing--she was beloved by her birth family rather than outcast
      8. Another version--father's father was crazy; put penis on the table laughing; traded baby boy for a girl; that's why father wouldn't go back
  9. Village social structure--eating habits and incest taboo
    1. Five generations lived under one roof--people shout
      1. Customs: shout at each other; silent at dinner table; pass food with both hands; moment of total attention
      2. Aunt is separate, special--doesnt name the man
    2. More on incest taboo--kinship never forgotten--only one hundred surnames--incest danger
    3. INTERLUDE--Her adolescent role and coping with sex techniques 12
      1. She used the mannerism--call boys brother silently--it hexed them, made them familiar and less threatening
      2. Refused to make herself American-pretty, because attraction was not selective; drew unwanted attention; therefore no dates
    4. Reflection on incest taboo--adopted siblings often marry; marriage turns strangers into friendly relatives
    5. Break in the roundness
      1. Analyzing village ideology--aunt punished for break she made in "roundness" 13--no private lives or secrets permitted
        1. Privacy and individuality vs. family
      2. Persecution of aunt resulted from hard-times, ghost plagues, bandit plagues, wars with Japan, floods....adultery became a crime when the village needed food 13--cf. Ynez--peasant culture; village [it takes a village]
      3. Roundness explored
        1. Keep descent line; sons to feed old and dead who in turn look after the family 13
        2. Superstition: break the house, because she broke the fabric of roundness
        3. Circling of events--their sense of power and culpability--deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars
  10. Back to the round circle of the narrative of the attack--the birth and death
    1. Family curses her--ghost, you've never been born
    2. Right into the aunts experience--about to give birth she runs out to fields; sees herself in stars--agoraphobic fear
    3. Her stream of consciousness 14--moments of togetherness vs. isolation
    4. Isolation of a tribal person alone--she feels better in the pigsty; there to deceive gods
    5. Birth and the beauty of the baby and nursing
    6. Both feel same raw pain of separation, a wound only the family pressing tight could close
    7. Final despair and suicide at thought of being abandoned by family and bringing such a child into the world--pain of childbirth out of wedlock--death 15
  11. Back to present author--present project 16...twenty years since I heard this story
    1. Doesnt know aunt's name--sees family's punishment as forgetfulness--ghosts punished as well as honored
    2. Compassion for the poor ghost
    3. Discussion of treatment of dead--offering s of paper houses and other forms of wealth through the descent line; importance of family and roots and the exchanges between generations 16 Aunt forever hungry
    4. Chairman Mao trying to break down that sense of family genetic ties
    5. Ghost haunts Maxine--she will offer it paper, not origami
    6. She's also wary of it drawing her down--the dangerous draw of ghosts of the past--pull down a substitute
      1. cf. Eli, Clemencia