The Woman Warrior Significance and Analysis

The Women Warrior

Significance and Analysis:
In Maxine Hong Kingston’s book, The Women Warrior, men characters are intentionally absent. Obviously, the book, The Woman Warrior, is focus on female characters. Compared with other Asian American writers, Maxine Hong Kingston’s writing works put more emphasis on Chinese women figures. Diverse Chinese female character presented in myth, history, talk-stories, or biography shapes the Kingston’s self culture identity about both Chinese and American figures. Though the depicting of different women, the stories in the book presents one theme about Chinese women’s struggling in traditional society.

The first story, No Name Woman, presents the small conservative village with strict manners. The woman, who is not intentional to be pregnant, faces the punishment from not only her family but also the whole village. Those serious condemnations cause her death indirectly. The more significance of this story is that her family tends to hide the woman’s name just because of her shameful behavior. This story, No Name’s Woman symbolizes silent denouncement against the pitiless of Chinese traditional society.

The story of Fa Mu Lan, apparently it can be seen as a peaceful story with a successful ending. However, essentially the story is ironical to Chinese patriarchal tradition. The question why Mu Lan needs to pretend as a man that she can be accepted by the society reveals disdain for Chinese women.

The third story of Kingston’s mother, Brave Orchid, presents the issue of disadvantages women faces. In addition, it also reveals the marginalization of being immigrants. The disadvantage of gender and the marginalization of immigrants push her mother, though she is the successful doctor, into the predicament.

The story of her sister, Moon Orchid, reflects the helpless of Chinese women. Though her sister’s has the patience and loyalty to her husband, the final response of her husband is just the indifferent rejection. The context of peremptory of Chinese men and helpless of Chinese women in the immigrant society highlights the story without talkative words.

The final section is from Kingston’s recollection to her releasing mind. Actually this part can be seen as Chinese women’s elasticity for fixing themselves to the Chinese tradition and the immigrant society.

The Women Warrior punished in 1975 not just inspirits feminism of Chinese women but also help Chinese American find their cultural identity. The connection between past and present, legend and reality, or story and biography colors Kingston’s literature work. However, this technique of writing also accentuates the themes in the book. The introspection on Chinese women not merely arise the feminism for generation but bring the recollection for immigrant Chinese. To make a conclusion, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is the significant literature work in Asian American history.

Writers-David Henry Hwang

David Henry Hwang

1957	He is the son of immigrant Chinese American parents and Born on August 11 in Los Angeles, California.
1975-1979	Attends Stanford University, graduates with a B.A. in English.
1978	First play, FOB, produced at Stanford.( Growing up in California as a Chinese American made him politically conscious during his college years in the late 1970s; this interest in his Chinese roots is evident in the central conflicts of FOB, which focuses on a Chinese immigrant’s relationship with two Chinese American students he meets in Los Angeles.)
1979	Teaches at a high school in Menlo Park, California.
1980-1981	Attends Yale University School of Drama.
1980	Wins Obie Award for FOB.
1981	The Dance and the Railroad and Family Devotions (Chinese American life) produced in New York City.
1983	The House of Sleeping Beauties and The Sound of a Voice (tales of Chinese American immigrants and themes of race and assimilation to stories about tragic love based on Japanese materials)produced off-Broadway; publishes Broken Promises: Four Plays; awarded Rockefeller Fellowship.
1984	Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
1985	Awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
1986	Rich Relations produced off-Broadway; As the Crow Flies produced in Los Angeles.
1987	My American Son, a television drama, airs on Home Box Office.
1988	M. Butterfly produced on Broadway and wins the Outer Critics Circle Award, Drama Desk Award, John Gassner Award, and Tony Award; establishes the American Playwrights Project; 1000 Airplanes on the Roof produced in Vienna, Austria.
1989	Publishes 1000 Airplanes on the Roof.
1990	Publishes FOB and Other Plays.
1991	Bondage produced.
1992	Face Value and The Voyage (libretto for opera) produced.
1997	Seven Years in Tibet (screenplay for film).

M.Butterfly by David Henry Hwang

M.Butterfly by David Henry Hwang

The background of the story was from 1960 to 1980. The story had happened in real lives. David Henry Hwang directed the movie according to Giacomo Puccini’s famous opera “Madame Butterfly”. The French diplomat, Rene Gallimard,who went to see the opera “Madame Butterfly” and the important role was acted by Song Liling, who was actually a man masquerading as a woman. And he fell in love with Song. In fact, Song was a spy from Chinese and he wanted to get some information from Rene. When they were having sex, Song always took Chinese tradition for an excuse to deceive Rene for fear that he, in fact, is a man. In others words, Rene had never seen Song’s naked body and Song even lied that he was pregnant. And then, he divorced his wife Helga because he loved Song so much. After that since Rene has been sent back to France, Song was no longer useful to the Chinese government and was put in a reeducation camp for being an artist. Song came to France and reunioned with Rene. Song used their son for an excuse, so Rene had no choice but to be a spy. Finally, Rene was convicted of treason and imprisoned. At that time, Rene found the woman he loved was actually a man. He was not able to accept the truth and eventually committed suicide in jail.

Analysis:

We think that Song can completely realize Rene’s mental desire, so he can deceive Rene and made him fell in love with “her”. In other words, western men want their women to be obedient to them and take their husbands’ needs for the most important one. For western men, eastern women are mysterious, conservative and traditional. These are the reason why Song can deceive Rene for so long time. Actually, Rene loved the image of Chinese they thought rather than Song. In cultural aspects, men always took the role of women in Chinese operas. Apparently, Rene did not understand Chinese culture. In the end, the reason why Rene committed suicide is that he was totally mental disorders about genders and frustrated him because of his thought – men were everything for women. However, the “perfect woman” he devoted and loved was a man.

Gallimard’s confession

There are two scenes in the end of the film that expressed Gallimard’s dilemma. One is after the judgment on Gallimard and Song, Song said he was still Gallimard’s Butterfly and asked Gallimard to say that he loves him. However, Gallimard said he didn’t love Song, what he really loved was the illusion of eastern imagination. Another is Gallimard dressed him self into Madama Butterfly in the jail. Although he had said that he didn’t love Song, he confessed that he gave all his love to the Asian illusion. Gallimard committed suicide due to his ridiculous passion toward the mysterious illusion of eastern women. It may not just feel ashamed, also Gallimard refused to believe his illusion was wrong. In Gallimard’s mind, the relationship with Song might be the best moment of his lie. Once his belief had been destroyed, he felt worthless of his entire life. While other people could not understand his love, he rather chose to die with dignity in order to protect his belief.

Who is the real M. Butterfly?

In the first conversation between Gallimard and Song, Gallimard said Madame Butterfly was a pure sacrifice. Song said that because it is an oriental woman kills her self for a white man then Gallimard found it beautiful. If it was a blond western woman killed her self for a short Japanese businessman, he would say she was an idiot. It is a contrast with Gallimard’s death. The truth is, Gallimard is the butterfly who killed him self instead of the Asian woman in Madame Butterfly version. When Gallimard realized who he had deeply loved was a man, his self identification was totally destroyed. Gallimard could not stand what he had loved was not he imagined, and then he chose not to face the truth forever. However, Song did not kill him self in the film. Hwang has reversed the stereotype of races and genders in the story and also showed prejudice in favor of Asian people. It could be considered as Hwang’s expression of Asian American’s self-identification. When the second generation of Asian American fell into a dilemma of self-identification, it might be the same situation with Gallimard. In M. Butterfly, Hwang may imply his self-identification that his Asian identity is more valuable than American.

Asian American Cinema

Definition of Asian American Cinema

Broadly Defined:

All films and videos produced by filmmakers who are Asian descents in the United States

Narrowly defined:

Independently produced films that evince an Asian American sensibility (perspective) and/or Asian American subject matter.

History of Asian American Cinema

The very beginning of Asian American Cinema can be traced back to early twenty centuries. Before that, most of the movies made non-Asians performed the oriental concepts by using racialized make-up, settings, and costumes. The film productions in early times, most Asian-American actors’ roles were limited to the background and in offensive roles. Not until 1920s there are two actresses- Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa became veritable superstars. However, in the dominance of Hollywood, many Asian origins were frustrated because there were still very few works available in American films or they can only play supporting roles for white people in yellow face.

In 1960s, little had changed. Asian-American theaters started to prosper and its growth in the 1970s coinciding with the decline of the Hollywood studio system, all that began to change with the rebirth of Asia-American Cinema. The first socially aware Asian-American theatre company, East West Players, was founded in 1965. And then in 1970, Visual Communications was established, which is the oldest community-based media arts center in the US today. This organization held Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival annually after 1983. Frank Chin founded the Asian American Theater Workshop in San Francisco in 1972 to encourage plays focused on the lives of Asian Americans. Two of Chin’s movies- Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and Year of the Dragon (1974) are the first Chinese American produced movies that focused on the complexities of Asian identity in America.

The growth of Asian-American theaters provided an amount of film works for Asian Pacific American Actors. As a result, Asian-Americans started to appear on TV and films in increasing numbers, playing roles that occasionally challenged the stereotypes and bit parts they'd been relegated to in mainstream America.

At the same time, in 1970s, more than 130,000 refugees arrived to America from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, drastically changing the make-up of the Asian-American population, challenging the mid '60s-born concept of Asians as "the model minority. The next 30 years, the number of Asian American continued increasing gradually.

With those efforts and factors, Asian American cinema has been budding since then. It took off in 1980s, and by the '90s, the scope of Asian-American Cinema broadened considerably. This trend still continued in the 2000s.

Year of the Dragon

<Brief information about Frank Chin, the writer ofYear of the Dragon>

Background

During 1970s, Frank Chin is one of most influencial theatric writers. He has two well-known movies: Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and Year of the Dragon (1974) which pushed people focusing on the lives of Aisan American. After examing the two plays, we have more interested in Year of the Dragon.

About the writer

According to Oxford Encyclopedia Theatre and Performance, Frank Chin founded the Asian American Theater Workshop in San Francisco in 1972. Two years later the workshop became the Asian American Theater Company, the first theatre dedicated exclusively to the production of plays by and about Asian America. Besides, Chin's early workshops received encouragement from San Francisco's American Conservatory Theatre, and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles sponsored Chay Yew's Asian Theatre Workshop. At the end of the twentieth century Asian-American theatre companies could be found in virtually every urban centre in the United States.

About the story

The play tells the story of Fred Eng, 30-something tour guide who lives at home in Chinatown with his parents and younger brother, Johnny. Fred is frustrated because ten years earlier he had given up his dreams of being a writer to help his cancer-stricken father run the tour guide business. Yet, not only is his father still alive, he also has no respect for Fred's desire to be a writer and mocks Fred for dropping out of college, even though Fred did so to help him. Fred also hates working as a tour guide, as he must act out the white tourists' fantasy of what Chinese people are like, unable to make them understand that Chinatown is not China and that its residents are Americans too. Fred is also frustrated that his brother Johnny, in addition to running with a bad crowd, is not interested in leaving Chinatown for a better life, but wants to become part of the family business.

The conflict of the play centers around a Chinese New Year celebration when Fred's sister, Sissy, comes to visit with her sinophile white husband, Ross. Sissy has been on tour promoting a Chinese cookbook that she and Fred have written; the indignity of being reduced to writing food porn as his only marketable outlet for writing further upsets Fred. On the same day that Sissy and Ross arrive, Pa's first wife (and Fred's biological mother) arrives from China, thanks to the new immigration laws that allowed Chinese women to immigrate to the USA to join their husbands. The arrival of "China Mama" creates conflict between Pa and his current wife, Hyacinth, who feels betrayed by his decision to bring his first wife over after he had promised not to and by the fact that she herself had risked losing her citizenship by marrying Pa. It also becomes clear that Pa wants to split the family in two as he nears the end of his life, favoring his "Chinese" family over his "American" one.(cited from wikipedia)

Review

From The New York Times, the critics wrote "The year of the Dragon barges through comfortable stereotypes of the Asian American— the quiet, hardworking contented character who keeps to himself, rarely bothering white community. It is not an ‘easy’ play. The language is frequently strong, and the bitterness, even when wrapped in some very funny comedy, is unrelenting. … But as a portrait of Asian American’s furious struggle for identity, the play is a searing statement, a powerful cry. ”

More Information

http://books.google.com.tw/books?id=vwgBrkxLfv4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Chickencoop+Chinaman&source=bl&ots=xT_FkbOfHR&sig=lAzIE9ZPHwsDXCVlHoH2c6oQRgI&hl=zh-TW&ei=_rDyS63xONGHkAXN7Y3KDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

And the Soul Shall Dance

About writer
Wakako Yamauchi (born in 1924) is a Nisei Asian American female writer. She is also one of the most distinguished contemporary Asian American women writers. Though she paints and writes prose as well as poetry, she is especially known as a playwright and for her theatre loving .
(Picture is from Bookcover of Songs My Mother Taught Me, by Wakako Yamauchi. Reproduced by permission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York. )

About story
Acoording to University Minnesota's website, it is a story talks about two farming families who are challenged with surviving the Great Depression. In several interviews, Yamauchi explains that she had only to remember and re-envision her own experience with farm life to craft the details of the lives of the characters in the play. The two mother-father-daughter families struggle with adjusting to American life without forsaking their Japanese traditions.

Hana Murata . . . Carol A. Honda
Murata . . . Ron Nakahara
Masako . . . Roxanne Chang
Oka . . . Norris M. Shimabuku
Emiko Oka . . . Dawn A. Saito
Kiyoko . . . Yuko Komiyama


Review

Review wrote by Stephen Holden ( March 25, 1990 )

''And the Soul Shall Dance,'' Wakako Yamauchi's Depression-era drama, remembers the time when California law forbade Japanese immigrants to own their own land. Farmers who had come to the United States in search of a better life were obliged to sign two-year leases on the property they cultivated. Many families found themselves moving from farm to farm eking out a subsistence living. Their treatment as second-class citizens was profoundly demoralizing; added to the language and cultural barriers they faced, it made social and economic assimilation extremely difficult.

Ms. Yamauchi's play had its premiere in Los Angeles in 1977 and was brought to New York two years later by the Pan Asian Repertory Theater, which is reviving it at the Apple Corps Theater. Her drama is an acutely observant study of how these social pressures affect two neighboring farm families in California. Murata (Ron Nakahara), his wife, Hana (Carol A. Honda), and their 11-year-old daughter, Masako (Roxanne Chang), are the hardier of the two families. Hana, who holds the family together, is a fussing, clucking matriarch with impeccable manners and a stern sense of discipline, who has deferred her own aspirations so her daughter can assimilate and have a better life.

Their neighbors are not so resilient. Oka (Norris M. Shimabuku) and his wife, Emiko (Dawn A. Saito), coexist in a state of undeclared war. After the death of Oka's first wife before she could join him in America, her family married him by proxy to her rebellious younger sister, whom they sent abroad against her will.

As portrayed by Ms. Saito, Emiko suggests a Japanese-American answer to one of Tennessee Williams's haunted wraiths. The only things sustaining her are her memories of Japan and her determination to return. A secretive, mercurial woman perpetually drunk on sake, she tiptoes unsteadily about the stage in a trancelike state of suppressed rage and dreamy longing for the past. The marriage explodes when Kiyoko, Oka's 15-year-old daughter by his first marriage, comes to live with them. The tiny nest egg that Emiko fantasized would subsidize her own departure goes to pay for the girl's movie magazines and permanent waves.

Although the drama offers sketchy information on the social and legal status of its characters, it is predominantly a psychological study of people struggling to adapt to the stringent traditions and laws of two worlds simultaneously: one they have left and one in which they are trying to forge a new identity. In the playwright's even-handed vision, Oka and Emiko are the largely helpless victims of the squeeze between the two. And the most compelling scenes are those in which the couple's bottled-up feelings explode in violence, followed by excruciating guilt and masochism.

Under Kati Kuroda's direction, the actors give psychologically detailed performances. Ms. Honda and Ms. Saito are especially impressive in their representation of opposed philosophies, one brutally practical, the other crazily romantic. Even the complicated relationship between the two second-generation Japanese-American daughters is carefully elaborated.

The production's main flaw is a lack of momentum, especially in the second act - which peters out in a final scene that seems at once abrupt and tentative. One senses that the production's admirable attempt to be accurate in many small ways inadverently subverted its overall dramatic sweep.

More information

http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/yamauchi_wakako.php

The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club--fan trailer



Background

Although "Joy Luck Club" was finished in 1989, which is not at the time we discussed(1970s). However, the whole story was stating the time during 1970s and 1980s that Chinese American struggling in the United States. As a result, we categorize this film into our subject.

About the film

It focus on four Chinese American immigrant families in San Francisco, California, who start a club known as "the Joy Luck Club, " playing the Chinese game of Mahjong for money while feasting on a variety of foods. The book (same as the film) is structured somewhat like a mahjong game, with four parts divided into four sections to create sixteen chapters. The three mothers and four daughters (one mother, Suyuan Woo, dies before the novel opens) share stories about their lives in the form of vignettes. Each part is preceded by a parable relating to the game. The stories which the film shooted also states the struggling for their identity in the US, which can found in the conversation between Rose Hsu Jordan and his husband's mother. She thinks that Rose is Vietnamese while Rose thinks herself an American. The movie revealed the view point of the society, the lives of Asian American and some cruelty behind each story. Moreover, according to Amy Tan's (the writer of this film)official website, the film won shortlisted BAFTA Film award, best screenplay adaptation and shortlisted WGA Award, best screenplay adaptation.

Let's see what Amy Tan said about this story

Mainly, we can see three points:
*It comes from her own experiences-----11:08~11:23
*Her mother influences her very much(eg. metaphor & warning)-----04:40~04:58, 21:22~23:00
*Using her imagination-----23:00~23:20
As a result, the story came with well formed and truely touching.


Director: Wayne Wang

Characters

Mothers
Suyuan Woo
An-Mei Hsu
Lindo Jong
Ying-Ying "Betty" St. Clairv
Daughters
Jing-Mei "June" Woo
Rose Hsu Jordan
Waverly Jong
Lena St. Clair

About Writer

Amy Tan (Chinese: 譚恩美; pinyin: Tán Enmei) (born February 19, 1952) is an American writer of Chinese descent whose works explore mother-daughter relationships. In 1993, Tan's adaptation of her most popular fiction work, The Joy Luck Club, became a commercially successful film.
Tan has written several other books, including The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, and The Bonesetter's Daughter, and a collection of non-fiction essays entitled The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. Her most recent book, Saving Fish From Drowning, explores the tribulations experienced by a group of people who disappear while on an art expedition in the jungles of Burma. In addition, Tan has written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series airing on PBS. She has also appeared on PBS in a short spot encouraging children to write. (cited from Wilipedia, 2010)

Review

The review is wrote by James Berardinelli, 1993:
The Joy Luck Club, as stated in the movie's opening narrative, is a collection of four aging Chinese women bound together more by hope than joy or luck. The four women - Suyuan (Kieu Chinh), Lindo (Tsai Chin), Ying Ying (France Nuyen), and An Mei (Lisa Lu) - came to America many years ago to escape China's feudal society for the promise of the United States' democracy. Now, however, Suyuan has died and the three surviving members of the club invite her daughter June (Ming-Na Wen) to take her place. June belongs to the "new" generation, those of Chinese heritage who grew up speaking English and learning American customs. Also of roughly the same age are Waverly (Tamlyn Tomita), Lindo's daughter; Lena (Lauren Tom), Ying Ying's daughter; and Rose (Rosalind Chao), An Mei's daughter. The Joy Luck Club tells of the varied difficulties and tragedies involved in these mother/daughter relationships.

Co-writer Ronald Bass (who, along with Amy Tan, adapted from Tan's novel) says that there are sixteen separate stories in The Joy Luck Club. Since I didn't count, I can't verify this statement, but it sounds about right. Taken as a whole, these vignettes combine to lend greater meaning to the whole. The Joy Luck Club is the sum total of its parts with common themes giving solid grounding and greater resonance to the overall film. As Bass comments, "I saw all the mothers' and daughters' stories as facets of the same experience. Put together, they formed a mosaic. That's the genius of the book, and if we cut it down to just a couple of stories it would be like any other movie."

The stories are not related in such a manner as to seem pared down or truncated, nor is their presentation confusing, thanks to a cleverly-orchestrated framing scene with the principal characters gathered together. However, it is apparent that a lot more could have been told, and we're left wondering about all that we didn't get to see. The characters are mostly well-developed, but it's tantalizing to consider how much fuller some of them could have been with a different plot structure.

The Joy Luck Club is clearly - perhaps too clearly - an adaptation of a book. The dialogue is often too poetic to be real, and the story too clearly plotted to be acceptable as anything more than an imperfect reflection of the world we live in. The line between drama and melodrama is a fine one, and, while The Joy Luck Club most often successfully navigates the tightrope, there are times when it slips and comes across as heavy-handed. This film is no stranger to moments of manipulation.

The characters are The Joy Luck Club's real strength. Many are played by more than one actor (as children then adults, for example), but all transitions are smooth and seamless. It's as easy to accept both a little girl and the beautiful, sophisticated-looking Tamlyn Tomita as Waverly, and that's because the characters transcend the performers portraying them.

It's fascinating and satisfying the way the diverse threads are knitted together into a single tapestry. The Joy Luck Club's message is one of hope -- that catharsis and emotional fulfillment often come through tragedy. Sure, a lot of bad things happen during the course of this film, but at the end, the tears are of happiness and new beginnings, not loss.