Chinese Whispers
D.J. Enright
- The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
Picador, 186 pp, £1.50, March 1981, ISBN 0 330 26400 1 - China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston
Picador, 301 pp, £1.50, March 1981, ISBN 0 330 26367 6
The subtitle of Maxine Hong Kingston’s first book, The Woman Warrior (now published in paperback), embodies a pun: ‘Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts’ – that is to say, among Chinese story-ghosts and also among non-Chinese, who by definition are ghosts, if not demons. ‘Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.’ In her books Mrs Kingston comes near to suggesting that it is America which is invisible – populated by ghosts, the Mail Ghost, the Newsboy Ghost, the Garbage Ghost – while China, the China of her parents, or the China her parents told her about, is the solid world.
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