Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Moon Orchid and Dissolution


            What are we to make of the fate of fragile Moon Orchid? Transported to America by unconventional means (sister rather than husband), she arrives to an uncertain welcome and impossible future. Chinese women, we have been instructed, are moved by men, Brave Orchid herself brought to America by her husband. But although the traditional Chinese gender roles which have played such a central role in Woman Warrior must be examined, the same mistake of limitation regarding Chinese femininity must not be made once again in a critical analysis of the novel. Moon Orchid’s frightening dissolution must be examined in relation to class and the immigrant experience as well as gender.
            Moon Orchid is a transnational figure of dislocation from her very introduction, departing for the “Gold Mountain” (the United States) from Hong Kong. Hong Kong, often characterized as a place where East meets West, was under the sovereignty of the British until 1997, when control was officially handed over to China. However to this day the island exists as part of yet apart from China. Returning to the topic at hand, how can Moon Orchid hope to be “Chinese” once more when she has been something else, something in between, for decades?
            Like a child watching adults, Moon Orchid follows her sister’s children around the house, studying and narrating their movements: an attempt to learn to be again. Near seventy, however, Moon Orchid is no child, and her move to America, like Brave Orchid’s has involved a significant loss of class position, from a life of ease, servants, and allowance to a life of hard labor and toil. Once again, Hong Kingston reminds the reader of a feminine freedom in the East which remains unrealized in the West. To come to America, Moon Orchid has given up her freedom, sold the room of her own—and for what? America has not lived up to its promise, life in the “Golden Mountain” in actuality harder than that of the village, as Brave Orchid continually reminds the narrator: “‘you have no idea how much I have fallen coming to America’” (77), “‘human beings don’t have to work like this in China’” (105), and, finally, “‘I can’t stop working,’” (106). It is alluded to that Moon Orchid’s daughter has suffered at the hands of a “rich and angry man with citizenship papers…a tyrant” (128). Mother, once free, is pushed towards the domestic subservience that has trapped her daughter in the West. Moon Orchid, once a free woman provided for by a husband across an ocean, faces a new life of brutal labor in the laundry, of servitude, of feminine duty. Should we be surprised at her madness?   

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