Father-Brainwasher to Warrior: Literal and Literary Representations of the Chinese American Female

By Cameron Conaway*

Divorce court for a twelve-year-old boy is a veritable labyrinth where with each turn or bend of the wall comes questions, choices, and unfounded assumptions. From hearing the tape recorder’s buzz as statements-through-tears were preserved by counselors that promised not to replay my answers to questions about my father, to sitting outside the door of a custody case and listening to the pleads and cries of my mother, I am just now - ten years removed - finding my way out. And it is now, at twenty-two years of age, as I write the final paper for my graduate level “Chinese Immigrant Literature and Film” class at the University of Arizona, that I realize upon reflection of my twelve-year-old self, how my thoughts toward the Chinese American woman my father came to marry are still correct, but the assumptions I made toward her race’s gender were contemptible.

Prior to dating his current wife, but after the disastrous divorce from my mother, - in that middle ground - my father turned the basement of the central Pennsylvania home where I visited him on the weekends into a workout room. Besides the pinch I felt on my palms when I tried to pick up his hexagonal dumbbells, what I remember with surprising clarity are the many Chinese American sex vixens ripped out of magazines and duct-taped to the basement walls. Used as motivation to lift more weight I’m guessing, I remember waiting until my father would be under the bench press bar to take a quick look at the women so he could not catch me in the act. In my pre-to-early teens, I was old enough to know that I wanted to see women’s bodies, but also old enough to know that there was something wrong about seeing them in this way. I remember the way their bronzed, oiled skin glistened in the basement lights, and the one in particular of a Chinese woman in the shower, soapsuds covering the parts a bikini would.

So when he came to date his current wife, I could not help but wonder if she was secretly like the women in the pictures. I came to learn shortly after they met however, that she was manipulative, secretive, scheming, and a shameless liar. And with this list of deplorable characteristics, I forgot about the soaped Chinese bodies (or let them sit in the backburner of my brain until now) and I painted Chinese American women in general with the same qualities that she embodied. I was gender specific. It stings to recall several moments where I met the mother of a friend who was Chinese American and felt scared to drink from the glass of water she gave to me.

Ironically, it was Bruce Lee that had been a father figure to me after my own father was brainwashed by his new wife. Bruce carried himself with absolute confidence both physically and mentally. He was aggressive when he had to be. He was philosophical and contemplative when he had to be. It is a balance - thanks in part to Bruce Lee during that critical stage in my life - that I continue to pursue to this day, the role of athlete and academic. I have not spoken to my father in nine years, but a roll-down cloth picture of Bruce still hangs to the right of me as I type.

Within a period of several months, my mind made the justified transition that the wife of my father - now considered my stepmother - was no longer a submissive sexual servant, but the brooding brainwasher she truly turned out to be. I will demonstrate some particular representations that Chinese American women have been given - as well as where I think they are currently going in contemporary American society - and how they have been portrayed on a larger, more literary scale. From the subservient pleasure provider - which is stronger than ever - to the generally assumed expectations of the “daughter,” to the contemporary warrior - in which I will refute what Maxine Hong Kingston said in an interview when asked about warriors; I am going to paint a brief portrait of the constantly changing and quite often transformative representations that Chinese American female characters have carried. Some of the works of literature I will be pulling from are: M. Butterfly, Picture Bride, ISLAND, Fifth Chinese Daughter, and The Woman Warrior.

We will begin with a work that represents my earliest stereotype of Chinese American women. The 1988 Tony Award Winner for Best Play, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. The play was so successful it was turned into a major motion picture from Warner Bros. and directed by David Cronenberg in 1993. To summarize, a male French diplomat has a twenty-year affair with a Chinese opera singer and actor while on assignment in Beijing. What the French diplomat (Rene Gallimard) does not realize is that his mistress is actually a spy for the Chinese government and a man playing the role of the subservient Chinese woman, what has come to be known as the “white man’s fantasy.” Gallimard feels so empowered by his relationship with this actor (Song) that the relationship is able to continue without true physical legitimacy being a question of major concern.

In ACT TWO, Scene Six, Gallimard explains why he wants to see Song naked, “- that it will remove the only barrier left between us” (60). Song’s reply seizes the moment and characterizes his representation of the Chinese American female, “No, Rene. Don’t couch your requests in sweet words. Be yourself - a cad - and know that my love is enough, that I submit - submit to the worst you can give me. (Pause) Well, come. Strip me. Whatever happens, know that you have willed it. Our love, in your hands. I’m helpless before my man” (60). “Helpless before my man” simultaneously gives Gallimard the power he wants, but it was so much power in his hands that he did not feel confident enough to use it. He never did strip Song.

Apparently, oral and anal sex replaces the traditional and Gallimard never sees Song completely naked - because of her stereotypical modest timidity - except at the very end of the play where he is finally able to step away (if only for a second) from the fantasy and see Song for the man he is. The story would come across as completely embellished to prove a point, but in the Playwright’s Notes before the story, Hwang provides the May 11^th, 1986 excerpt from The New York Times:

A former French diplomat and Chinese opera singer have been sentenced to six years in jail for spying for China after a two-day trial that traced a story of clandestine love and mistaken sexual identity….Mr. Bouriscot was accused of passing information to China after he fell in love with Mr. Shi, whom he believed for twenty years to be a woman.

Do I believe my father had a case of M. Butterfly fever? Yes. And as suggested in Darrell Y. Hamamoto’s article “The Joy Fuck Club: Prolegomenon to an Asian American Porno Practice,” he is definitely not the only one infected by this sickness. Though I do believe the article creates irrelevant and often times unsubstantiated claims about Wayne Wang’s Film, Eat a Bowl of Tea, Hamamoto talks considerably about the rising demand for Asian American women in the pornography business. The article’s tone presents the idea that the demand for Asian American women is truly about the attainment of power within the majority-dominant culture of the United States. White men (the dominant) have a particular infatuation with the stereotypically submission Asian American female. It is a simple way to have power. That is why some men - not just white - feel this way. Not everyone can be powerful in all aspects of life, but if a woman that has traditionally been viewed as quiet and subservient is presented, her weakness will be exploited and the level of power of the man will be raised.

M. Butterfly represents much more than some distant, exotic representation of “Yellow” women. The work is provocative in the sense that it attempts to bring fact to stereotype, merge cultural history with contemporary fantasy, and show the way power can easily fluctuate as to make it nearly impossible to understand who really is in control. Reader-response theory suggests that the reader brings a level of real existence with them when they embark on reading a text. Maybe it is for this reason that I was so moved by David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, the fact that some memories of my father exhibited this theme, the fact that I remember directly stereotyping a culture of women solely based on magazine pictures in the basement. It is frighteningly simple to construct stereotypes at a young age when they are all you know.

Another representation of the Chinese American female - and this on a much larger scale than the sexual misrepresentation - is of the role expectations and responsibilities of the daughter. Contemporary Chinese American poet, Cathy Song, has achieved worldwide acclaim for her ability to use poetry as the perfect muse to tell her stories. Picture Bride, her first book of poems, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 1982. Her position in the book is that of a daughter to Chinese American parents. Perhaps no other poem explores the bittersweet relationship of role expectations than her poem entitled, “The Youngest Daughter.” The tone of the poem is presented right from the beginning with, “The sky has been dark / for many years. / My skin has become as damp / and pale as rice paper” (5). However, as the poem progresses, so too does the mother/daughter relationship. The personal feelings of Song become an appreciation to and a sense of respect for her mother in the following lines to finish the first stanza, “and feels the way / mother’s used to before the drying sun / parched it out there in the fields” (5). Here, Cathy Song relates the way her own body feels with what her mother felt during the hours - more likely a lifetime - of working out in the field. In drawing the comparison she ultimately establishes from the get-go the respect, admiration, and empathy she has for her mother. Skipping to stanza three there is an intimate awareness towards the mother that only comes with unadulterated love. But certain words like “graveled,” “gruff” and “sour” simultaneously continue the underlying sense of bitterness felt about the task at hand. A task and a complex set of emotions that in reality would be terrible - if not impossible - to speak openly about in a culture where this is expected. But here, Cathy Song represents her torn feelings in the poem by inferring the emotion with tonality rather than blatant declarative statements…

This morning

her breathing was graveled,

her voice gruff with affection

when I wheeled her into the bath.

She was in a good humor,

making jokes about her great breasts,

floating in the milky water

like two walruses,

flaccid and whiskered around the nipples.

I scrubbed them with a sour taste

in my mouth, thinking:

six children and an old man

have sucked from these brown nipples.

I was almost tender

when I came to the blue bruises

that freckle her body,

places where she has been injecting insulin

for thirty years. I soaped her slowly,

she sighed deeply, her eyes closed.

It seems it has always

been like this: the two of us

in this sunless room,

the splashing of the bathwater (5-6).

“This morning,” because of the present tense, immediately displays a certain level of familiarity and regularity with bathing her mother. Line three of this stanza, “her voice was gruff with affection,” balances perfectly between the rawness of bathing another fully-grown human being and the loving statement that such an exchange between mother and daughter creates. The mother making jokes about her breasts lightens the mood and strikes the reader as humorous yet incredibly realistic, but it is followed up in line eight with how her breasts float in the water like “two walruses.”

In using a simile outside of the realm of the bathtub, field, or experience scene, Cathy Song purposefully pulls the reader with her into an outside world. Poetry workshop classes often frown upon using simile and metaphor in a context that does not seem appropriate in relation to the poem, but on this occasion, Cathy Song makes use of this technique precisely for that reason. She shows the reader that during this experience of bathing her mother her mind drifts, it must, because it is the only way of dealing with the fluctuating emotional memories about her mother and the deep-rooted bitterness she feels as the daughter that by unwritten rules must perform the task. “I was almost tender,” in line fourteen, further explores her inability to fully feel one emotion or the other. She is not tender. The line suggests that something is holding her back from feeling tender.

The polar emotions on Cathy Song’s continuum - from sweetness to bitterness - during a moment that probably lasts no more than an hour total, can be viewed as why she struggles with the ability to feel purely one way or the other about her own existence or this situation. Upon a second reading, the “milky water” in line seven seems exactly the way to describe the purity, or lack thereof, of her emotional groundedness and her Chinese American blend. What Cathy Song was able to display with poetry has more often been spread out over the length of a novel.

The exploration of the Chinese American daughter was the prominent theme in Jade Snow Wong’s highly successful memoir Fifth Chinese Daughter. So acclaimed and distinguished was her book, that she states the following in the Introduction to the 1989 Edition:

In 1953 the State Department sent me on a four-months’ grant to speak to a wide variety of audiences, from celebrated artists in Kyoto to restless Indians in Delhi, from students in ceramic classes in Manila to hard-working Chinese immigrants in Rangoon. I was sent because those Asian audiences who had read translations of Fifth Chinese Daughter did not believe a female born to poor Chinese immigrants could gain a toehold among prejudiced Americans (viii).

As the title suggests, Fifth Chinese Daughter is about the struggles and triumphs of growing up as not only a daughter to traditionally Chinese parents, - born immediately to lower expectations than a boy - but also the fifth girl in the family. Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Jade Snow Wong portrays some of the significant moments of the first twenty-four years of her life. There are moments of racism and familial struggles that can occur within any family in the United States, but it was when Jade Snow Wong graduated high school that the categorical term of “Chinese American daughter” really began to take shape. After high school Jade Snow wanted to attend college. She had worked exceptionally hard and after much pensiveness, she decided it was what she wanted to do. Her choice severely cut across the grain of what was expected of her. At the most, high school was plenty of schooling for a woman to be a good wife to a man; this was the original view of her traditionally Chinese family.

It was without question that if Jade Snow wanted to attend college, she would have to do so while finding a way to come up with her own financial assistance. The family did not have a lot of money to begin with, and coupled with the fact that they were far less than enthusiastic about having their daughter attend college, she worked several jobs while scrapping for scholarship money and putting her heart and soul into her studies. An unwritten rule was “silence while eating,” but it was precisely at the dinner table that Jade Snow, daredevil and trailblazer that she was, went for it:

Jade Snow considered whether to break the silence. Three times she thought over what she had to say, and still she found it worth saying. This was also according to family precept.

‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘I have made up my mind to enter junior college here in San Francisco. I will find a steady job to pay my expenses, and by working in the summers I’ll try to save enough money to take me through my last two years at the university.’

Then she waited. Everyone went on eating. No one said a word. Apparently no one was interested enough to be curious. But at least no one objected. It was settled (122).

Imagine coming to one of the biggest, life-changing moments of your life - to attend college - and having it be a bigger decision whether or not to break the news to your family. And imagine, when you have finally garnered the willpower to do so, being greeted with complete, continuous silence after sharing the news. It seems comparable to a homosexual breaking the news to their homophobic, conservative family in contemporary society; no other comparison seems to reproduce the intense thought process, the vulnerability, and the speechlessness. The comparison might feel completely unjustified; however, the emotional similarities depict what I have personally heard in many stories from those “coming out of the closest.”

Shortly after the decision to attend college came what must be considered the most profound moment in the book. The moment happened after Jade Snow felt stimulated by a lecture given by her sociology instructor concerning how, “Today, children are viewed as individuals…” (125). Jade Snow nearly repeated her instructor verbatim while presenting the words to her father:

That is something you should think more about. Yes, I am too old to whip. I am too old to be treated as a child. I can now think for myself, and you and Mama should not demand unquestioning obedience from me. You should understand me. There was a time in America when parents raised children to make them work, but now the foreigners regard them as individuals with rights of their own. I have worked too, but now I am an individual besides being your fifth daughter (128).

It was at this moment that Jade Snow Wong’s life began to unfold. Soon she was presenting speeches, finding jobs, and challenging herself as a contemporary woman in the United States, all the while slowly prying respect - a thread linking most literary representations of a Chinese American daughter - out of her parents. From Jade Snow Wong’s self-given independence and choices came accomplishments and praise. Epitomizing her familial acceptance as an American and as a Chinese American, once again comes from the bonding experience at the dinner table as her father says:

Everywhere I went to purchase groceries today, my fellow countrymen were congratulating me, and saying, ‘We are reading in the papers that your fifth daughter has won great honor in the American world. You must be very satisfied to have your family name so glorified by a female.’ I tell them that you have done it all yourself. But even I must now add my congratulations to those you have already received! (196).

Jade Snow Wong comes to realize later in the book that what makes her truly happy is pottery. Working with the hands is something respected by her father and it is in the center of a storefront window in San Francisco’s Chinatown that Jade Snow Wong sets up her wheel - with the help from her father - and works at a job that combines one of the most ancient Chinese traditions with the most contemporary American “empowered female” personas. Ultimately, she chose the path of her inner happiness over what may have been forced on her by cultural expectations. And in the end, it could not have worked out better. Literally, (through her speeches and in her writings) as well as in her actions, Jade Snow Wong provided a voice for the Chinese American woman that has been suppressed for countless centuries.

Poetry, or any narrative text for that matter, recorded from the perspective of Chinese American women is unfortunately a very contemporary phenomenon. The book, ISLAND: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940, is a history-making selection of verse pulled from the barrack walls of Angel Island out in the San Francisco Bay, where thousands of potential Chinese Americans were detained as they awaited immigration documents and medical examination results prior to entering the United States. The poetry explores the prison-like conditions of these barracks, the longing for family, the longing for a place to call home and for something to happen. Many of these immigrant “inmates” were often left waiting for years and years. In the introduction in ISLAND, we are told:

Regrettably, none of the collected poems were written by women. Women once detained on the island have referred to poems on the walls of the dormitory. Given the fact of the great preponderance of male immigrants and also the fact that during that period most women did not have many opportunities to become educated, it is doubtful whether there were ever many works by female detainees (25).

But we do hear the voices of several women years later during an interview of the events that happened during this time. Mrs. Chin was nineteen-years-old during her 1913 detainment at Angel Island and she had this to say:

I was interrogated one day for several hours. They asked me so much, I broke out in a sweat. Sometimes they would try to trip you: ‘Your husband said such-and-such and now you say this?’ But the answer was out already and it was too late to take it back, so I couldn’t do anything about it. If they said you were wrong, then it was up to them whether to land you or not. Later, upon landing, I noticed a white man kept coming around to my husband’s laundry and looking at me through the glass window. That was how they checked you out to make sure you didn’t go elsewhere (117).

The quote struck me because of the lack of trust the woman felt when she communicated her thoughts. And judging by the fact that not a single poem on the wall can be credited to a woman, it seems that women at the time were either holding emotions inside or letting them out in other ways. Hopefully memoirs or unpublished diaries of women during this time and beyond will surface and give a glimpse into the unheard voices of Chinese American women. The future of this happening was given a little boost of energy when Mrs. Chan, twenty-three-years-old during the time of her 1939 stay at Angel Island, had this to say: “It was like songs people would sing. It was very common. I didn’t write on the walls, but I did compose some poems, crying at the same time” (136).

Maxine Hong Kingston won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction for her 1975 memoir, The Woman Warrior. Highly controversial for the way it blurs the line between nonfiction and fiction, The Woman Warrior is so commonly taught at the university level that there are actually books such as, Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. Much of the “fiction” in the book comes through “talk-story.” Talk-story is basically stories and tales told by elders to the young. The story of Fa Mu Lan is “the girl who took her father’s place in battle” (20). The magical story was told by Kingston in first person without any set-up or warning. It just began immediately. It is a tremendously fantastical tale in which unrealistic events, such as viewing life in other places by looking into a water gourd, reveal the “who” and “where” of Kingston’s character-building quest for revenge. That a woman is a warrior stands in direct contrast to the way Chinese American women have been portrayed and represented in works of film and literature.

As Kingston reflects on her mother teaching her the Fa Mu Lan chant, “She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman,” (20) Kingston, as Fa Mu Lan, learns to become a warrior through her interactions with nature while she is nurtured by an unknown old man and woman. Even during this time, the theme of “voice” surfaces yet again as Kingston’s (Fa Mu Lan) first lesson out in nature, “‘The first thing you have to learn,’ the old woman told me, ‘is how to be quiet.’ They left me by streams to watch for animals. ‘If you’re noisy, you’ll make the deer go without water’” (23).

The theme intensifies in the final chapter, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.” Shortly after Kingston was born, her frenum was cut by her mother. Kingston can’t remember the act, only being told about it. The following dialogue ensues as Kingston questions her mother about this act:

Why did you do that to me, Mother?

I told you.

Tell me again.

I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language. You’ll be able to speak languages that are completely different from one another. You’ll be able to pronounce anything. Your frenum looked too tight to do those things, so I cut it.

But isn’t ‘a ready tongue an evil.’

Things are different in this ghost country (164).

This “frenum scene” serves as a metaphor for the different values Chinese women have played. In China, the quiet, timid female was the role society forced women into. However, in America, the Chinese American woman advances in life through the power of the word. It is a complete shift and Kingston’s mother has evolved to the point where she realizes this “ghost country” does things a little differently. This interaction serves as a contrast to the battle tested and weapon-wielding traditional views of “warrior” presented earlier in the book. Words can win wars. Language in today’s ever-evolving society is far more instrumental than weapons. The lesson did not sink in immediately though. It took some time. It took an embarrassing lesson of recitation in class that she had prepared and perfectly memorized. Despite her work, Kingston says, “When it was my turn, the same voice came out, a crippled animal running on broken legs. You could hear splinters in my voice, bones rubbing jagged against one another. I was loud, though. I was glad I didn’t whisper” (169). The book ends with Kingston acknowledging the power of her voice and the gift of talk-story that her mother gave to her: “Here is a story my mother told me, not when I was young, but recently, when I told her I also talk story. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine” (206).

In an excerpt from “The Woman Warrior Versus the Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose Between Feminism and Heroism?” by King-Kok Cheung, Kingston is documented saying in an interview about The Woman Warrior:

I don’t really like warriors. I wish I had not had a metaphor of a warrior, a person who uses weapons and goes to war. I guess I always have in my style a doubt about wars as a way of solving things (316).

I felt that Kingston’s quote concerning wars is spot-on and was a natural response that most people would share. However, in her brief definition of a warrior, she took the easy way out and represented warriors - who are human beings like the rest of us - in the most “traditional” view imaginable. I put quotation marks around “traditional” because even that definition is wrong. Traditionally, as far back as time can go, a warrior began as a hand-to-hand combatant to protect family and land. The characteristics a warrior embodied dealt with a strong body, sure, but also the determination to pursue, the willpower to fight when exhausted and starving, the mental capacity to remain alone without interaction for weeks on end, and the delicate balance between being tender to a child and ruthless in defense. From this point, as weapons began to revolutionize warfare, the understanding of the warrior began to change as well. The ability to think positive in any situation, the ability to embrace being uncomfortable, the ability to find reason and happiness in everything, and the ability to overcome became trademarks of the spirit of a warrior. Physically, spiritually, and mentally, a warrior had to be prepared, for a faulty link in any of those paths could prove disastrous in the battlefield that is life. So I believe that Maxine Hong Kingston was absolutely wrong in her assessment of what a warrior is. Yet I believe she was absolutely correct in the naming of her novel because as a child growing up she dealt with many of the same issues a warrior of anytime would deal with. She overcame them and continued to improve herself. That is a warrior.

It says something about contemporary America when even the older generations are coming to understand that everyone’s voice has a right to be heard. Although steps concerning the modern Chinese American woman are being taken backward via the shady business of the porn industry, on the grand scale of things, that is very negligible. The cultural awareness that works of literature are creating, that women in general are pursuing degrees and that women in general are finally starting to be paid the same amount as men for doing the same job, are all benefits to the Chinese American female. The accomplishments of women as a minority - regardless of ethic makeup - has an effect on every individual listed under its umbrella. We are a year away from the 2008 presidential elections and Hillary Clinton is a serious frontrunner. But it is thanks to authors like David Henry Hwang, Cathy Song, Jade Snow Wong, and Maxine Hong Kingston - and the publishers that publish them - that we are able to move a cultural identity forward through an understanding that is first necessary for stereotypes to be smashed. Through their words and their presence in the literary world, these warriors are transforming the Chinese American woman from stereotypical pacifists to persevering modern-day warriors.









* Cameron Conaway is the Poet-in-Residence at the University of Arizona and a member of the 2008 Johns Hopkins CTY "Crafting the Essay" instructional staff.

Works Cited

Cheung, King-Kok. "The Woman Warrior Versus The Chinaman Pacific: Must A Chinese American Critic Choose Between Feminism And Heroism." Asian American Studies: A Reader, eds. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000. 316.
Hamamoto, Darrell Y. "The Joy Fuck Club: Prolegemenon to an Asian American Practice." Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism Edited by Darrell Y. Hamamoto and Sandra Liu. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.
Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Plume, 1989.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. Vintage International Edition. New York: Random House, 1989.
Lai, Him Mark, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung. ISLAND. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1980.
Song, Cathy. Picture Bride. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983.
Wong, Jade Snow. Fifth Chinese Daughter. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1989.

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