Speak or forever hold your peace

A rather large chunk of the final chapter in The Woman Warrior, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”, was devoted to the narrator fervently and passionately shouting at a girl in her sixth grade class who refused to speak.  No matter how hard she yelled and screamed, and no matter how hard the little quiet sister cried, she still would not speak.  This section frustrated me, because I wanted the little quiet sister to speak so badly, to just stand her ground and tell the narrator to buzz off and to leave her alone, that she would speak when she wanted to and it didn’t have to be around her.  But then I realized something: one of those age-old sayings, “children should be seen and not heard.”  Now although this saying isn’t mentioned in the novel, it sums up quite a bit of this section, especially when considering the customs for Chinese girls.  Girls and women are expected to be silent, a tradition which the narrator obeyed while in her early youth.  However, as she began to grow older, she developed more of a voice in her story.  She began to ask questions, sometimes only in her mind (this section took a few reads to understand the talk-story and the reality difference) about why things occurred, etcetera.  Since this was frowned upon in Chinese culture, she became defensive about her voice when she would be accosted for her behavior and for speaking out of turn.

This section got me thinking about why Chinese culture hasn’t, at this point in time in the novel, adjusted its rigidity in tradition.  Surely they had seen by that point that other cultures all around China had grown to accept even the existence of women, and they had certainly proven their worth, which could be reported when Chinese people went to work in America, for example.  Women had a voice in America, which frightened the Chinese culture, so when the little girls went to Chinese school, they’d have to reverse their thinking from American grade school to Chinese customs and traditions while in school.  If this were my situation, I’d have no clue where my main source of influence was coming from, and this would result in a lot of identity confusion, which the narrator grapples with throughout the novel.