Book of Changes

By Paul Gray

THE WOMAN WARRIOR

by MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

209 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Exiles and refugees tell sad stories of the life they left behind. Even sadder, sometimes, is the muteness of their children. They are likely to find the old ways and old language excess baggage, especially if their adopted homeland is the U.S., where the race is to the swift and the adaptable. Thus a heritage of centuries can die in a generation of embarrassed silence. The Woman Warrior gives that silence a voice.

Subtitled Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, this astonishingly accomplished first book by an American-born Chinese woman haunts a region somewhere between autobiography and fiction. Yet it hardly matters whether the woman who tells (or muses) the book's five stories is literally Maxine Hong Kingston. Art has intervened here. The stories may or may not be transcripts of actual experience. They are, unquestionably, triumphant journeys of the imagination through a desolation of spirit.

Brave Orchid. "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." The stalk of this simple theme sends out a profusion of memories. Most are contributed by Brave Orchid, the indomitable mother who lost two children in China, came to America at age 45 and produced six more offspring. Although her husband's laundries fail on both coasts of the U.S., her growing family maintains a beleaguered survival. To Brave Orchid, all non-Chinese are "ghosts," alien, powerful presences who are otherwise beneath consideration. Her new life consists of uneasy dealings with "Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts." She is even suspicious of her children, her daughter notes, "because we had been born among ghosts, were taught by ghosts and were ourselves half ghosts." So she "talks-story" incessantly, trying to fill her daughter's head with a usable past.

She tells the girl about Fu Mu Lan, a legendary woman warrior. The daughter mystically imagines herself undergoing 15 years of martial training, raising a peasant army of millions and deposing a cruel emperor. The role does not fit her new reality: "To avenge my family, I'd have to storm across China to take back our farm from the Communists; I'd have to rage across the United States and take back the laundry in New York and the one in California." There are other reasons why the old customs cannot be embraced. She will not endure the subjugation of women they require: "When one of my parents or the emigrant villagers said, 'Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds,' I would thrash on the floor and scream so hard I couldn't talk."

Family Tree. She feels closest kinship with an aunt who once disgraced her village by bearing an illegitimate child, then killing herself and the baby. This interest is rebellious, for the aunt's name has been stricken from the family tree. Yet this woman without a name dared to defy the village by acting and suffering alone. Her niece--50 years later and in another country--knows that she must live similarly alone. "I'm going away," she finally lashes out at Brave Orchid. "And at college I'll have people I like for friends. I don't care if their great-great-grandfather died of TB. I don't care if they were our enemies in China 4,000 years ago."

Though it is drenched in alienation, The Woman Warrior never whines. Author Kingston avoids rhetoric for a wealth of detail--old customs and legends, the feel of Chinese enclaves transported to the California of her childhood. Even at their most poignant, her stories sing. Thousands of books have bubbled up out of the American melting pot. This should be one of those that will be remembered. Paul Gray

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