A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

[…] I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for
paradoxes. […] I moved like the trees in the wind” (24-9).
- Silence/Voice: One of the central motifs of The Woman Warrior, the linguistic and
experiential untranslatability of home and host culture, is at the heart of Asian American
explorations of silence. The reasons are manifold:
“The emigrants confused the gods by diverting their curses, misleading them with
crooked streets and false names. They must try to confuse their offspring as well,
who, I suppose, threaten them in similar ways – always trying to get things
straight, always trying to name the unspeakable. The Chinese I know hide their
names; sojourners take new names when their lives change and guard their real
names with silence. […] There were secrets never to be said in front of the ghosts,
immigration secrets whose telling could get us back to China. Sometimes I hated
the ghosts for not letting us talk; sometimes I hated the secrecy of the Chinese” (5,
183).
A silence that is both strategic and helpless is handed down. “When I went to
kindergarten and had to speak English for the first time, I became silent” (165). In the in-
group situation of afternoon Chinese school, voicing becomes practicable again: “There
we chanted together, voices rising and falling, loud and soft, some boys shouting,
everybody reading together, reciting together and not alone with one voice” (167). Yet
even the grown woman’s voice fails when confronted with intergenerational
untranslatability: “I shut my teeth together, vocal cords cut, they hurt so. I would not
speak words to give her pain. All her children gnash their teeth” (101).
I reserved the motif of art as play for the end of this digression, for it is the novel
The Woman Warrior as text that epitomizes the specific predicament of the Asian
American artist: Between necessity/familial and communal obligation/usefulness and
extravagance/individual vision/imagination, the artist searches for a balance or union of
both that justifies her occupation. Fa Mu Lan is conceptualized as a woman who bears her
parents’ grievances tattooed to her back and avenges injustices, strengthened by her time
of training: “The martial arts are ‘arts’ (play), but they are also ‘martial’ (work).” Martial
arts movements are “controlled exuberance” just like the dance that her vision reveals as
the essence of all things: “The dance is a fit metaphor for the ideal of a perfect union of
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