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Chapter 2 “You Say with the Few Words and the Silences” The Woman Warrior’s Traces of a Dialogue with China Men Duality in The Woman Warrior and China Men “The Brother in Vietnam” was the first story that Maxine Hong Kingston wrote for her intended family saga, but it ended up as the last section of China Men.1 The last story her father wanted told was “No Name Woman,” yet it became the first tale to lead off The Woman Warrior. With the gender division of her narratives into two separate books, the women’s stories took precedence over the men’s; and when The Woman Warrior appeared in 1976, it read as a neat feminist parable that the women ordinarily heard last would come first and the men accustomed to come first would go last. However in 1980, the year that China Men followed as the male narrative sequel to The Woman Warrior, the author cautioned her readers against reading the order of publication so simply. She argued pragmatically that “given the present state of affairs, perhaps men’s and women’s experiences have to be dealt with separately for now.” Yet she did not want The Woman Warrior emphasized over and above China Men, or seen as an afterthought and hoped, as Elaine Kim explained, that the two books would be read together “as two parts of a whole.”2 Not only did she write much of the material in the two books simultaneously, she also projected a narrator who could not always keep the stories straight and separate in her mind or “tell the difference” between them (WW, 180) and who was prone to the troubling double reads of intertextuality.3 Critics have usually interpreted the narrator’s confusion as it reflects the double vision of a Chinese American girl who is raised in the shadow of Chinatown and who grows up with the contradictions, half-truths, and ghetto mentality of its elder immigrant generation (Kim, 199–200). As a female minor, she is caught in the racist and sexist crossfire that emanates from both the ethnic minority group into which she was born and the white society to which she must conform. As she matures into womanhood, she 67 must learn to live with the pain, the paradox, and—her final insight—the poetry of her Chinese American identity. Sau-ling Wong has shown how the narrator of The Woman Warrior is brought face to face with her racial double when she bullies the quiet classmate of Chinese descent who personifies hated and rejected aspects of this dual identity (Reading Asian American Literature , 77–92). The intertextual logic of The Woman Warrior and China Men, however, requires the reader to seek “multiple entry” into the two books and to traverse repeatedly the simplistic binary divisions that have been arbitrarily set up between high and low, Chinese and American culture, between male and female experience, the singular “I” projected in autobiography and the dialogical points of view gathered together in the memoir.4 Indeed, Kristeva argues that such a traversal is a “truly great ‘literary’ achievement” because “the word ‘traverse’ implies that the subject experiences sexual difference, not as a fixed opposition (‘man’/’woman’) but as a process of differentiation .”5 In other words, intertextuality gives nuance to the definition of the double so that it can include not only “opposing selves” who result from the internal splintering or splitting of the personality, but also dyadic figures who exist separate from the self yet who may not, after all, be all “that different ” from the narrator—such as the opposite sex.6 Although Leslie Rabine argues that the members of the opposite sex created by Hong Kingston are more often than not “shadow creatures in the world and in the book of the other sex” (“No Lost Paradise,” 475), this view can encourage the reader to pay little attention to the faint traces of the men in The Woman Warrior or the cameo appearances of the women in China Men and conclude that they have no hermeneutic importance in each other’s book. An intertextual reading of the two books allows us to envisage these women warriors and China men as actively shadowing one another and leading parallel lives that occasionally intersect or surface in the textual narratives of their gender opposite. The figurative traces of these dual lives may contradict or complement—and will certainly complicate— the reader’s perceived...

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