Chinese American Women’s Silence-Breaking In The Interactive Dynamics Of Gender And Race:a Study Of Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

Except the painful experience of being second sex, Chinese American women, tend to unconsciously struggle between their foreign living experience and their imposed Chinese heritage, facing a painful dilemma of establishing themselves as American locals while responding to the expectations of their authentic ethnicity. With uncanny sensitivity and abundant intensity, Maxine Hong Kingston explores the dual existential identity dilemma of Chinese American women resulting from their interactive dynamics of gender and race in her autobiographical novel, The Woman Warrior, which presents us the unyielding efforts concerning silence-breaking made by Chinese American women.This study explores the great efforts of Kingston in describing Chinese American women living experience from the perspective of gender and race, and also analyzes the suffocating silent living pattern of Chinese American females presented in the book. Also, this study makes a detailed textual analysis to probe how Kingston/heroine, as a Chinese American daughter, confront the reality or fiction of her Chinese ethnic heritage and the equally paradoxical reality of her American birth, education and growing, thus examining bow Kingston fights against with silence and transforms herself from a silent schoolgirl into a woman warrior writer with verbal weapons.Furthermore, this paper conducts a dialecvic research on the limitations of Kingston about not completely subverting patriarchy and Orientalism. In short, how Chinese American women who suffer from the double identity dilemma of gender and race successfully transcend the limitations set by traditional socio-cultural factors and how they finally break the silence is a major issue that is being closely explored in this research. Feminism and Orientalism are the main literary Criticism theories involved in this research.The tentative research hypothesis of this preliminary study is that: First, except being worsened by their gender dynamics, Chinese American women’s existential identity formation process has also been straitened by imposing external stereotypes and limitations brought by their inborn conflicting cultural backgrounds. Secondly, they need to make a conscious compromise with mainstream American culture while freeing themselves from the negative part of their Chinese ethnic heritage, striking a balance to accommodate their authentic gender and ethnic belongings. Thirdly, the new identity they should develop is one in which their Americanness and Asianness can harmoniously coexist and more importantly one into which they can consciously melt as a complete and speaking self instead of only as a silent woman. Most importantly, breaking silence and being heard is the crucial first step for Chinese American women to build new identity. However, whether this kind of identity is necessary and realistic to modern Chinese American women or not is still a research issue that needs to be further studied.Except its theoretical values, this research also has certain realistic significance for Chinese American women and the Chinese Diaspora community in terms of building identities and breaking silence. This study aims to help Chinese Diasporas, especially Chinese American women, to conduct self-reflection on their seemingly imposed dilemma, to reconstruct and reconceptualize their understanding of gender, ethnic background and Chinese cultural heritage. Besides, along with the overwhelming trend of transmigration and transnationalism, Chinese American community has gradually evolved into a transnational group that is no longer confined to or defined by cultural parochialism, ethnical and gender particularism. Accordingly, this research on Kinston’s The Woman Warrior may serve as a mirror held up to contemporary Chinese American women, helping them open minds to the possibility that they can exist as diasporic figures who see global as local with the celebration of cultural translatability and moral cosmopolitanism—they can absolutely choose a moral cosmopolitan identity as a potential living paradigm, instead of suffering from the harsh silence and being entangled with their identity dilemma.