Maxine Hong Kingston Languages and Silences of Being Chinese-American

Year 1995, Issue: 1, 57 - 63, 01.04.1995

Sibel Irzik

Abstract

Julia Kristeva has said that "it is only by translating the mother that we live: orphans but creators, creators but abandoned" 181 . In these general psychoanalytical terms, growing up is a painful movement away from the threat that the archaic mother presents, the threat of a total absence or loss of self. It is a liberating exile into subjectivity and language Nikolchina 233 . I believe that the same terms translation, orphanage, abandonment, exile are even more poignantly relevant to what we might consider a secondary process or a special case of growing up as it can be traced in the works of Maxine Hong Kingston: growing up into the hyphenated subjectivity of a Chinese-American self and into a language both primary and foreign, a native tongue that is different from the mother tongue. In this modified scheme of things, the mother is not only the actual and archaic one, but represents also a much more general sense of a lost origin that is both sought and feared, an origin that uncomfortably brings together the figures of the mother and the father within the more encompassing image of China. The movement away from China is a movement away from silence into voice, from a frozen past into the enabling openness of the present, from the erasure of self into a sense of individual identity.

References

• Kingston, Maxine Hong. China Men. New York: Knopf, 1980.
• ------. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. New York: Knopf, 1989.
• ------. The Woman Warrior. New York: Knopf, 1976.
• Kristeva, Julia. Soleil Noir: Depression et Melancolie. Paris: Gallimard, 1987.