Western Exposure: The Anxieties of Translation and Transition

Occasionally interspersed in the narrative of Woman Warrior are parenthetical asides that tell the reader what a particular word would mean in Chinese, such as: “How impolite (“untraditional” in Chinese) her children were” (121). Why would Kingston want to include these asides? They don’t exactly clarify anything, not making the used word any more precise. Instead, it is an exercise in the problems of translation, showing that sometimes a word in English does not necessarily mean the same thing as the word in Chinese. An approximately equivalent sense can be translated into English, but it is rare that the whole meaning—with its system of connotations and contexts—comes through. It is in this sense that Kingston uses translation as a metaphor demonstrating the difficulties of placing anything from one culture into another. In the process of transition, something is always lost and what exists in the foreign culture is nearly always an imperfect approximation.

Extend this metaphor to the characters of Woman Warrior, specifically Brave Orchid and Moon Orchid. Both sisters are, in a sense, translated from Chinese culture into American culture. Brave Orchid seems to have adjusted to her new environment well enough, but as we see when Moon Orchid arrives, Brave Orchid still maintains some cultural ideas that do not fit into her current surroundings. Her scheme to install Moon Orchid back into her husband’s life takes the form of a comical farce because it is so unlike, so foreign to, any ideas of marriage existing in American culture. Brave Orchid says, “The children will go to their true mother—you. That’s the way it is with mothers and children” (125). Her particular phrasing—that’s the way it is--shows that this idea is so deeply ingrained into her culture that it has been carried over and preserved in a way that much of her other “Chineseness” hasn’t. Under the duress of American culture, it seems hard for first generation immigrants like Brave Orchid to completely acclimatize and live free of any cognitive dissonance in between the two cultures—it seems impossible to fit in a way that second and third generations do.