"Warrior Woman" and what's on your reading list this year?

I'm in the mood for tales of rebellion; I'll give you my recs if you give me yours

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Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

Over the winter break I read the classic memoir “The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston. One of the many gaps in my American education is that I was never introduced to Kingston until I was in grad school.

The first story in the book, “No Name Woman,” is about one of her aunts who was impregnated while her husband was away, then shunned by her family and community and forced to commit suicide with her baby. It blew me away the first time I read it.

The family story takes place in 1924 in China—precisely 100 years ago— but it feels very relevant to America in this moment, especially as we just passed the 51st anniversary of Roe this week.

In the memoir, Hong Kingston wrestles with and tries to make sense of the undisguised sexism she was exposed to regularly as a child of Chinese immigrants in California. She hears the Chinese sayings “Girls are maggots in the rice,” and “Better to raise geese than girls” regularly.

Her mother warns her, or prepares her for the reality of adult life, by telling her that she will be “a wife or a slave” as a grown woman, as though the roles are one and the same.

For Kingston, telling her aunt’s story is an act of rebellion because her mother tells her never to repeat it. In her retelling, she tries out different possibilities for the aunt’s narrative to fill in facts that she can never know.

It’s very possible that she was raped while her husband was away in America to earn money. If so, she was the one to suffer the consequences, rather than the man who raped her, writes Hong Kingston. A man could choose her to be “his secret evil,” and she could not disobey. Who would she tell? No one would believe a woman’s testimony over a man’s.

Alternately, Hong Kingston imagines the aunt as a rebel indulging in a forbidden love who “gave up everything for sex” and was exercising her own forbidden sexual agency.

But any way Hong Kingston imagines it, it’s the story of a culture where men pay no price for sex, while women and their children pay dearly.

No Name Woman feels especially relevant as we pass into 18 months without Roe, and as Jessica Valenti reported yesterday, new research just released from JAMA Internal Medicine has found that there have been 65,000 rape-related pregnancies in anti-choice states since they passed abortion bans. 65,000.

Researchers looked at 14 states where abortion was banned, and used data from the CDC, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and FBI Uniform Crime Reports and released the research report yesterday.

All of this puts me in a mood for stories of female rebellion and female revenge.

The Chinese idiom for revenge is the same as “to report a crime,” Hong Kingston notes, and that works for me.

My favorite story in “The Woman Warrior” is White Tigers, in which Hong Kingston imagines herself as Fa Mu Lan, a woman warrior and swordsman from Chinese legend that she and her mother used to sing about. Called by a bird who leads her to mystical mountains when she is only seven, she trains in martial arts with an old couple for 15 years learning "dragon ways” until she can run with the deer, and jump over the house from standing, and wield the mighty “sky-sword.”

Then she returns home to lead her own army and save her community and family from bandits and barbarians and corrupt “barons” who have terrorized her people abducted their children. Before she rides her white horse out to battle, her parents tattoo all of the family names and grievances into her back, turning her body into a sort of text: “Wherever you go, whatever happens to you, people will know our sacrifice,” says her mother.

Then she does battle and frees the evil baron’s captive wives, and returns the children to their families, and the woman warrior returns to her village to make a home and raise her own babies in safety.

This story is so satisfying—who among us hasn’t dreamed of such powers in some way? Like us, Hong Kingston expresses frustration that she grows up to realize that she does not have the ability of Fa Mu Lan. But she takes refuge in the idea that words are the revenge, and like her mother who “talks story” of Fa Mu Lan, and the no-name aunt, she uses words to get her revenge. Like the woman warrior, she has many words, so many words to fight with, “more words than can fit on her skin.”

Fittingly, Hong Kingston writes, the Chinese god of war and the Chinese god of literature are one and the same.

And on that note, I’m compiling my reading list accordingly. I’m fortifying myself with stories of women, preferably tales of rebellion, revenge, and “dragon ways” of various sorts.

Here are my book picks so far, and I would love to know yours.

These first few are from my bestie Shauna, a book editor here in New York who curates many of my favorite book recs for me. If you’ve read my previous book rec lists, you know that she has not let me down for great female-forward reads. You can follow her at @shaunalinka on Instagram.