Monday, April 2, 2012

As one continues to read the Woman Warrior, the gender inequality in the novel, once merely presented as fact, becomes a deeper issue as the effects of this traditional imbalance begin to manifest through the representation of certain characters and events. The narrator informs readers that her mother, although assuring her she would only become “a wife and a slave,” also teaches her the “song of the warrior woman” (20). The amount of work and responsibility in fulfilling the roles of both a wife and slave seems to be an unrealistic amount to expect a woman to account for. Indeed, the Chinese women in the novel carry a great deal of responsibility, a large part of their burden being the expectation that they will “keep the traditional ways,” while “brothers” and husbands, “now among the barbarians,” were free to “fumble [them] without detection” (8). This double standard regarding the upkeep of Chinese tradition seems inherently unfair. While the men are free to abandon tradition the “heavy, deep-rooted women were to maintain the past against the flood,” “the work of preservation demand[ing]” that they keep the “feelings playing about in one’s guts” from ever being “turned into action” (8). Comparing pictures of her mother and father, her mother in China, her father in America, the narrator recalls how her mother was “not smiling,” that she didn’t have “smiling eyes,” that her “mother’s face will not change anymore, except to age” (58-59). On the other hand, her father’s snapshots (readers are told there are no snapshots of her mother) feature him “smiling and smiling in his many western outfits,” and “always laughing” (59-60). This is while the mother is getting to live the daydream of having privacy and only being responsible for herself for once. “Free from families,” her mother enjoyed a meager “two years without servitude” (62). Despite becoming a successful doctor, having “gone away ordinary and come back miraculous,” Brave Orchid left to America upon the request of her husband, abiding by tradition, she could not know how much she would fall “coming to America” (76). Later on in her life, Brave Orchid expressed her regret to her daughter saying, “In China, I never even had to hang up my own clothes. I shouldn’t have left, but your father couldn’t have supported you without me. I’m the one with the big muscles” (105). Her big muscles have been developed because she has shouldered so much responsibility, the responsibility of maintaining Chinese tradition, and the corresponding hope of return to China have prevented her from making a home in America, viewing everyone else, even her own American-born children, as ghosts, foreign. The work that always needs to be done furthers her responsibilities; raising her eight children she also holds responsibility for the man that dragged her away from success. “In China families married young boys to older girls, who baby sat their husbands their whole lives;” with all of these responsibilities placed upon her by tradition, it is no wonder that not only does Brave Orchid find herself incapable of making a home in America, she also seems disjointed from time, looking at her daughters or sister (and subsequently herself, since looking at Moon Orchid is said to be like looking into a mirror for her) she cannot understand how the amount of time reflected in the changes in these faces could actually have passed. For these reasons, I tie the tale of Fa Mu Lan provided to Brave Orchid, as Fa Mu Lan takes on the responsibility of seemingly everyone in the story, taking her father’s spot as a warrior, birthing her child, maintaining tradition in her obedience to her husband and his family, she fulfills every role asked of her. When confronting the Baron, she accuses him of “taking away her childhood,” which seems reminiscent to me of Brave Orchid’s muddled sense of time. After all, she does tell her daughter she “would still be young if we lived in China” (106). I also find it interesting how personally Brave Orchid takes the ordeal with her sister reconnecting with her husband. The fact that he is a doctor complicates things. What Brave Orchid is truly upset about, I think, is the loss of tradition all around her. She is the only one keeping it going. The family in China has been essentially wiped out, giving them no home to return to in China, her children have no interest in returning to China or being any less Americanized, and the last straw is Moon Orchids’ husband departing from tradition. That he has succeeded as a doctor in America, where she, formerly a successful doctor (in China) has not been able to may make the gender imbalance in her tradition too repugnant to ignore. Success upon reaching the Gold Mountain is only for men, not women. Now, years later, she is merely an elderly woman, without a true home, working in a steamy Laundromat.

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