A Structuralist View of Woman Warrior

As a first generation (I think that’s what we decided?) Chinese American, Kingston is in an interesting place. She is fluent in both Chinese and English, but she obviously struggles with the translation of meaning between the two languages. It is easy to translate words—the word might be different (the signifier), but the object (the signified) is theoretically the same: a tree is theoretically always a tree. However, Kingston struggles with this: objects (simple signifieds) are easy enough to translate, but concepts and meanings and contextual, implicit, understood meanings cannot be translated. In their blog post, someone mentioned the disconnect of translating the two languages: “What’s the main idea? ‘I don’t know the Chinese words for it.’”

I think this translation difficulty is seen in one of the most common words in the novel: “talk-story.” Kingston does not use the word “story” or “oral history, which I think many people in the class would resort to, but rather uses this clearly un-American word “talk-story.” However, the way Kingston seems to understand the stories, it would be insufficient to merely call them a story or an oral history: it wouldn’t quite encompass the meaning or the importance of these spoken narratives. They are more than just talking or just stories: they are both narratives and lessons, and there seems to be no word in English which Kingston can use to as effectively explain the implicit significance she finds in these stories. Though I don’t know structuralism very well, I would think that it would argue that there is no English signifier for a “talk-story,” and that this Chinese concept / act is something unique to that culture which we, as English speakers, have a hard time understanding out of context. As a result, Kingston is required to find the words best able to describe the concept…but I doubt that we, as native to the US, will ever truly understand it. In many ways, we are incapable of ever truly understanding where Kingston is coming from—but in the long run, I think Kingston does a good job of trying to get us as close as possible.

Last, there is the theme of the power of words in the chapter “White Tigers.” Kingston seems incapable of fighting against the petty racism of her bosses, but she draws strength from words; she explains that “the reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words.” The power of words to exact revenge most powerfully is clear; however, it’s also clear that Kingston is struggling with the words: she claims to have “so many words—‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words too—that they do not fit on [her] skin.” The structural harshness of these words alone—especially in the English language, with the hard k sounds and single syllables—is shocking, racist, and powerful. However, Woman Warrior is her act of vengeance: a written narrative exacting a permanent revenge. In her revenge, Kingston is so overwhelmed by the power of these words that she cannot etch them into her skin as Fa Mulan has, for she has too much to say: thus, we see one of what are probably many purposes in the development of this novel, in which Kingston attempts to find the peace that Fa Mulan achieved by returning home.

- Cari

PS: Apologies for the tardiness of this post.