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The Intertextual History of The Woman Warrior and China Men This work sets out to read The Woman Warrior and China Men with heightened awareness of its intriguing intertextual history, for, as Maxine Hong Kingston has repeatedly pointed out, these two very distinct works were first conceived as one “big novel about men and women” and were drafted simultaneously. Hong Kingston’s original ambition was to create an extended family saga with a grand narrative reach “from ancient feudal times up to the Vietnam War and past that.”1 The writing that eventually led to the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976 and China Men in 1980 also reached a long way back into the author’s personal past and replayed her halting developmental journey from childhood to adulthood. Hong Kingston was a late bloomer who, by her own admission, spent twenty-five years searching for her voice and did not publish her first full-length work, the female bildungsroman, The Woman Warrior, until the mature age of thirty-six.2 Yet, she says that she began the struggle to find the right words and literary form to convey her epic vision of a far-flung network of Chinese ancestors and kin as a young child. In fact, the earliest stories she remembers composing sometime between the age of eight and ten were China Men stories, not the stories of a mixed-up young girl who would make up The Woman Warrior (Bonetti, 34). Indeed, one of these short stories, “A Brother in Vietnam,” was the first segment that went into her intended saga and would become the last section of China Men (Bonetti, 35; Pfaff, 16). Nevertheless, although her artistic vision of “our larger human family” has remained constant (Hoy, 53), the center of her “one big book”—what I will call her book of life—did not hold, and Hong Kingston found that the women’s and men’s stories naturally “parted into two volumes.”3 Hong Kingston’s subsequent explanations for this split suggest that she felt these stories had a gender life of their own. In a 1986 interview with Kay Bonetti, she alluded to the subliminal pressures and aggressive drives that forced her hand. “The books seemed to fall into place as two separate 16 Chapter1 The Case for an Intertextual Reading of The Woman Warrior and China Men books because the power in The Woman Warrior has so much to do with a feminist vision and feminist anger, and so it became a coherent work without the men’s stories. The men’s stories were sort of undercutting the women’s stories” (35–36). She speaks here of The Woman Warrior as if it were a defense against disruptive and competing male forces posing a threat to the coherence of her women’s stories. A writer who draws on not only feminism, but also psychoanalysis and Buddhist spirituality, for her insights, Hong Kingston has analyzed the inner dynamics that accounted for the sexual division of The Woman Warrior from China Men. She consciously wrote The Woman Warrior “with the privacy of writing a diary” (Seshachari, 197) because she was trying to take her readers inside the mind of an adolescent who is wrapped up in herself. Initially, Hong Kingston perceived this young first-person narrator as someone stuck in the developmental phase of early narcissism and primary identi fication with the maternal feminine. As a consequence, she “only knows herself as she knows women, and . . . has very little sympathy or interest in knowing what men are like” (Bonetti, 36). In 1996, she told Eric J. Schroeder , “Writing has to do with how to get out of one’s own narcissism and solipsism in order to imagine another human being and the rest of the universe .”4 Hong Kingston’s remarks indicate the psychological challenge facing the young woman narrator who ties herself up in knots in The Woman Warrior. The girl’s convoluted history of women is symbolic of not only her cognitive narcissism, but also the sociolinguistic umbilical cord in which she is entangled. This cord has bound her emotionally to the stories circulated by the women in the family, especially those told by or revolving around her mother. Indeed, her narrative often reads as if this cord is still wound tight around her throat, making speech painful and difficult, most particularly the language enabling differentiation of self and others—what Freud would call the “reality principle.”5 The woman warrior...

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