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“The beginning is hers”: The Political and Literary Legacies of and Amy

Helena Grice

“Amy Tan has been chosen to perform the Asian American spokeswoman/figurehead function once assigned to Maxine Hong Kingston.” Sau Ling Wong and Jeffery Santa Ana, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (1999: 25:1 220)

“I want to change the world through artistic pacifist means.” Maxine Hong Kingston, Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998: 222)

In 1989, Maxine Hong Kingston expressed her pleasure at the blossoming of Asian : “Something wonderful is happening right at this moment…Amy Tan published The Joy Luck Club, and Hisaye Yamamoto published Seventeen Syllables, has a collection of short stories, and I think maybe Ruth-Anne Lumm McKunn just came out with her book on Chinese families. Jessica Hagedorn’s in the spring, and Bharati Mukherjee is in the fall. She won the National Book Circle Critics Award. Something great must be going on” (Chin 1989, 98). In 1990 she acknowledged that “I do think I probably helped to inspire it” (Fishkin 1990, 167). Some fourteen years later, her long awaited fifth book, appropriately entitled A Fifth Book of Peace, already promises to spawn as much critical debate, even controversy, as her earlier work. Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular – and controversial – writers in the Asian American literary tradition. Kingston’s development as a writer and cultural activist in relation to both ethnic and feminist 34 Helena Grice

traditions, occurs across the range of her expanding œuvre: her two novels, her occasional writings and her two-book life-writing project. How do we account for the phenomenal success of The Woman Warrior – the most widely read title in American universities today –a success that not only propelled Kingston into the mainstream literary limelight, but also precipitated a vicious and ongoing controversy in Asian American letters over the authenticity, or fakery, of Kingston’s cultural references? Why is it that Kingston’s critics have so often solely concentrated on this dimension of her work? In this essay, I will suggest that the debates over the veracity, or otherwise, of Kingston’s cultural sources, and the vast body of critical material on the feminism-mother/daughter nexus in The Woman Warrior, has simultaneously obscured other, perhaps more pertinent and abiding preoccupations in Kingston’s work, and has ultimately been suggestive of a closer literary relationship between Kingston and Amy Tan than can actually be identified. The twinning of Kingston and Tan as the literary purveyors of Chinese American mother-and-daughterhood has long since been ossified in delineations of the development of Asian American women’s writing. The success of each writer on the basis of their contributions to and participations in American matrilineal discourse, is all the more remarkable given the gap of some thirteen years between the publication of their key narratives The Woman Warrior and The Joy Luck Club respectively. By 1989, when The Joy Luck Club was published, The Woman Warrior was still on the trade paperback bestseller list. Obviously, there are similarities between Kingston and Tan beyond their success as Chinese American women writers. For instance, both writers have suffered from the contradictory reception of their first books: both were largely lauded for their work by mainstream reviewers and critics but at the same time received far more cautious reactions – and in Kingston’s case some famously hostile ones – from Asian American writers and critics. In her seminal 1990 study, Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry, Amy Ling reads the first novels of the pair together, and describes The Joy Luck Club as “in parts an echo and a response and in parts a continuation and expansion” of The Woman Warrior (Ling 1990, 130). The persistent focus upon mothers and daughters in both texts is clearly a similarity too tempting for many critics, who, like Wendy Ho, have noticed that “Tan’s book can fruitfully be