The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 20 (2009)

From the Woman Warrior to Veterans of Peace:
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Pacifist Textual Strategies
Naoko SUGIYAMA*I.

TOWARD PEACEFUL LITERATURE

Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1976 autobiographical The Woman Warrior:Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts has remained highly esteemed and has
been frequently used as a text for various subjects in U. S. universities. Itfeatures the Chinese legendary female hero Fa Mu Lan, who, disguised as aman, joined the emperor’s army and became a great general. The narrator’smother tells her daughter Fa Mu Lan stories and teaches her the chant of Fa
Mu Lan, and for the narrator, Fa Mu Lan becomes a role model who transgresses gender boundaries and is loved and respected for her achievements.1
Kingston, however, expressed her regrets later on, from a pacifist point ofview, for having used the woman warrior as a central figure in The Woman
Warrior.2 In an interview with Donna Perry, Kingston reflects that she shouldhave presented Fa Mu Lan not only as “a battle-ax-type woman” but also asa weaver and an artist, as she is in the original Chinese legend (175).3 In aninterview with Paul Skenazy, Kingston comments:
I have often regretted calling the book The Woman Warrior because I have become
more and more of a pacifist. Even as I was writing The Woman Warrior, I was
finding a lot of dissatisfaction with having a military general as a hero. So I end
the story with another mythic woman, Ts’ai Yen. I like her a lot better. (132)
Copyright © 2009 Naoko Sugiyama. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may
be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission
from the author.
*Professor, Japan Women’s University

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NAOKO SUGIYAMAIn her essay “The Novel’s Next Step: From the Novel of the Americas to the
Global Novel,” Kingston proposes the idea of “peace literature” as follows:
How to write a novel that uses nonviolent means to get to nonviolent ends? We are
addicted to excitement and crisis. We confuse “pacific” and “passive,” and are
afraid that a world without war is a place where we’ll die of boredom. A tale abouta society in which characters deal with one another nonviolently seems so anomalous that we’ve hardly begun to invent its tactics, its drama. There’s a creativewriting adage that the loaded gun in an early chapter has to go off later on. How tobreak that rule? . . . How to not shoot and not launch, and yet have drama? The
writer needs to imagine the world healthy, nurturing young Wittman [the protagonist of Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book as well as “Water” in The Fifth Book of
Peace] to be a good man, a citizen whose work improves life. (13)In this article, I examine how Kingston has tried to achieve this goal of promoting peace through her literary works. I begin with an overview of theimportance of representations of woman warriors and their cultural meaning
and then discuss how Kingston avoids equating warriors with heroes in her
works, from The Woman Warrior through China Men, Tripmaster Monkey,
and The Fifth Book of Peace.
II.

“WOMAN WARRIOR” AS METAPHORWomen warriors, both historical and mythic, have appeared in different
cultures, representing various ideas and ideals. Joan of Arc (1412–1431), a
woman warrior par excellence, and the allegorical image of Liberty Leading
the People by Eugene Delacroix (1830), for example, immediately come tomind.4 More recently, woman warriors have often been regarded as empowering role models for women who struggle against oppression. The historicalpresence of women warriors has been used as evidence of women’s potential,
and fictional women warriors have been regarded as representations of independence, physical as well as mental strength, competence, and leadership—
qualities that have been traditionally considered male virtues. Possessingthese qualities, woman warrior figures have, many argue, undermined genderstereotypes and encouraged women to take up traditionally male roles andoccupations. Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy, in their introduction toAthena’s Daughters: Television’s New Women Warriors, argue that woman
warriors of television series, such as Xena, Warrior Princess, challenge patriarchy by featuring female protagonists in the traditional plot of the male “justwarrior” fighting and dying for the greater good, which is arguably “the most

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powerful and influential story” in Western culture (1). In Tough Girls: Women
Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture, Sherrie A. Inness argues
that the “tough girl” image in mass media “suggests that a greater variety ofgender roles are open to women” and “can offer women new role models”(5). In The Woman Warriors: A History, David E. Jones enumerates historical“woman warriors” and goes so far as to state that it is useful for women tohave these role models because power, choice, and control are the prerogatives of the warrior, without which the grandeur of any virtue is undermined;
for example, gentleness, when not accompanied by these qualities, may beconsidered a reflection of timidity (xi).
On the other hand, many people, both men and women from Aristophanes
on, have assumed that war is men’s business and that women do not, or
should not, have anything to do with it. Thus, as in the case of
Aristophanes’comedy Lysistrata, the argument goes that there will be no war
if women have political power. Some feminists have considered pacifism to
be a feminist issue and have been its ardent advocates; Virginia Woolf, in her
feminist-pacifist polemic, Three Guineas, argues that in order to prevent wars
we should encourage women to have gainful occupations, and thus economic
independence and direct political influence, because women, if given a
choice, would oppose wars. More recently, Cynthia Enloe, in Maneuvers:
The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, sees war and militarism as patriarchal and argues that the acceptance of women as warriors in
the patriarchal social order only signifies the militarization of women andshould not be celebrated as a feminist gain.
Some critics who favor woman warrior figures as positive role models for
women do discuss this problem. For example, Early and Kennedy state that“a woman’s efforts to participate in [the ‘just warrior’ story] are deemed dangerous because they place the liberated woman in the service of patriarchy,
violence, and sadism” (2). It seems, however, that their main concern tends tobe whether the women are represented as independent, assertive, and as competent as men or are represented as weaker and less competent than men, or
are apparently tough and independent but are in fact controlled by male authority and still confined within a traditionally female stereotype. The ethicallegitimacy of acquiring independence, self-assertion, and power by killing or
hurting other people is seldom put into question.
Even when the question of the moral legitimacy of the female “just warrior” rises, the optimistic assumption that the equal participation of women in
military organizations will change the nature of militarism prevails. Some of
the articles included in Athena’s Daughters deal with this issue, but they tend

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to conclude, rather optimistically, that woman warriors that offer positive rolemodels for women and young girls also alter the traditional “just warrior”
plot by questioning the legitimacy of state-sanctioned violence and by offering alternative definitions of such words as “warrior” and “hero.” For example, Early, in her essay on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer,states that the program “endeavors to call into question aspects of just warriorism by weaving a pacifist subtext into plot structures” (64). Inness’s
Tough Girls concludes that female heroes, representing tough—that is, assertive, strong, and independent—women deconstruct gender hierarchy and add
new meanings, such as cooperation, compassion, and nurturing, to toughness. Mary K. DeShazer, in “‘Sisters in Arms’: The Warrior Construct inWritings by Contemporary U.S. Women of Color,” states that for U.S. women of color such as Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, Gloria Anzaldúa, andMaxine Hong Kingston, for whom confronting violence is often not a matterof choice but a daily reality, a warrior identity does not signify “a necrophiliczest for destruction but an ongoing commitment to radical change” and “apowerful force for global transformation” (353–54).
Enloe, however, warns that it is too optimistic to expect that women’s participation will change militarism. She opposes the idealization of woman
warrior figures as part of the maneuver to militarize women, pointing out thatin various cultures heroic woman warrior stories have been used to inspirewars (244).
Kingston obviously shares Enloe’s concern that presenting women warriors as positive role models may promote women’s militarization. It is also
obvious that this concern has led her to make strategic narrative moves to notequate women warriors with heroic female role models. Her oeuvre begins
with the woman warrior figure, but she goes on to other images to represent
heroism. Reading Kingston’s major works as pacifist polemics, starting with
The Woman Warrior, is not only possible but is, in fact, necessary in order tounderstand the plot and character choices that she has made in her writings.
III.

THE WOMAN WARRIOR AND CHINA MEN: PACIFIST CONTRADICTIONSAND HEROES

In The Woman Warrior, the narrator tells the story of Fa Mu Lan. In her
version, Fa Mu Lan is welcomed by her family and neighbors when she returns from the army as a renowned general. The narrator then goes on torecollect:FROM THE WOMAN WARRIOR TO VETERANS OF PEACE135

I went to college—Berkeley in the sixties—and I studied, and I marched to change
the world, but I did not turn into a boy. I would have liked to bring myself back as
a boy for my parents to welcome with chickens and pigs. That was for my brother,
who returned alive from Vietnam. (56)Observing her brother’s return from Vietnam, it seems to the narrator that heis loved by the family for his participation in the U.S. military, and she can’t
help but feel that going to and being welcomed back from war is a privilege,
as well as a duty, allowed only to men, as it was in ancient China.
The Fa Mu Lan story her mother told her as a child, however, helps her tohave self-respect. The narrator feels that she would be a failure if she did not
become something other than “a wife and a slave,” which is all that is expected of Chinese women, and that she “would have to grow up a warrior
woman” (24). Even though she detests all kinds of violence and is active in
the anti-Vietnam War movement, and therefore unable and unwilling to imitate Fa Mu Lan by joining the military, she still seeks approval from her family and a sense of self-worth by comparing herself to Fa Mu Lan.
The narrator tries to solve this contradiction in three ways. First, her version of the Fa Mu Lan story emphasizes Fa Mu Lan’s stoic self-restraint andphysical and mental skills as a martial arts expert rather than her triumphs asa war general. Although Fa Mu Lan eventually becomes a general who leads
troops, much of the Fa Mu Lan story presented in The Woman Warrior depicts her training years, and there are only two occasions in which Fa Mu Lanactually fights and kills her enemy. Moreover, one of these combat scenes ismythic and symbolic rather than realistic. In this scene, the enemy is a giant,
and when Fa Mu Lan cuts off his head, his true form of a snake is revealed,
and he slithers away (45). His soldiers, freed from the snake’s spell overthem, stop fighting and pledge their loyalty to Fa Mu Lan.
Second, the narrator also presents heroic women who are not warriors,
implying that they are as worthy role models as the woman warrior archetype. One of these heroic women is the poet Ts’ai Yen, who, while being held
captive for twelve years during wartime, composed lyrics, which she sang to
the accompaniment of an indigenous reed pipe. Ts’ai Yen does not sing about
battles or war heroes, but about China and her family. Another heroic woman
figure is the narrator’s mother, who was a licensed doctor in China, and who
has survived immigration and many hardships in the United States. She isalso a storyteller who passes on to her daughter the power of talk-story. Both
Ts’ai Yen and the narrator’s mother are depicted heroically as survivors andcreators. Both of them create and pass on songs and stories even while living

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among “barbarians” and “ghosts.” After unsuccessfully trying to imitate thewoman warrior by finding an aggressive means of political resistance thatwould fit her own needs, the narrator, by creating and passing on stories,
chooses Ts’ai Yen and her mother as her role models.
Third, the narrator extends and tries to transform the definition of “warrior” by comparing her own pacifist activities to Fa Mu Lan’s achievements.
Although she admires the legendary Fa Mu Lan, the narrator becomes apacifist and antiwar activist and courageously confronts racism and sexism ineveryday situations. When she works as an office clerk and typist, she speaks
up against the employer’s racist remarks and practices; she points out to her
employer that the word “nigger yellow” is not appropriate when describing apaint color, and she refuses to type her employer’s invitation letter to a business banquet because the restaurant he chose for the occasion is being accused of discriminatory practices by African American organizations (57–58). She then goes on to say:What we [she and Fa Mu Lan] have in common are the words at our backs. The
idioms for revenge are “report a crime” and “report to five families.” The reportingis the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. (62–63)

Here, she redefines the word revenge to include verbal activities, and thus
attempts to stretch the concept of warrior to include, not just literal soldiers
and warriors, but also people like herself—those who attempt to change theworld by using words—and concludes that “[t]he swordswoman and I are notso dissimilar” (62).
However, the contradiction still remains. She tries to prove that she, as awriter and peace activist, is as worthy as her brother, a Vietnam veteran, by
claiming that the swordswoman and she “are not so dissimilar.” But if her
worthiness is measured against her brother’s contribution to the Vietnam
War, which she is against in principle, and to the woman warrior’s successfulcareer as a military general, she has fallen into a dilemma by trying to demonstrate her worthiness through being a warrior. She presents military activities, which she understands in reality as “fighting and killing” that “have notbeen glorious but slum grubby,” and to which she is wholeheartedly opposed,
as highly valued criteria of “worthiness.” As Yuan Shu argues in “Cultural
Politics and Chinese American Female Subjectivity: Rethinking Kingston’s
Woman Warrior,” Kingston presents Fa Mu Lan in The Woman Warrior as awoman successful “in the same patriarchal terms against which [Kingston
herself] has tried to rebel” (202). By comparing her antiwar struggle to Fa

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Mu Lan’s achievement as a war general and to her brother’s participation in
the military, the narrator “militarizes” her own activities rather than successfully changing the concept of militarism.
Kingston’s use of the woman warrior image contains a contradiction that
aptly reflects the contradiction that state-sanctioned militarizing maneuvers
force on citizens, especially ethnic minorities and women; in a society thatvalues military activities as virtuous, acceptance into the military may appeal
to marginalized groups as a way to earn full citizenship, or full recognition,although, in reality, it also means participating in a system that oppresses
ethnic minorities and women, often by physical violence. Kingston, after The
Woman Warrior, gives up her use of the warrior figure as a metaphor forheroism and struggle for just causes. In China Men, which is more directly
related to the Vietnam War, Kingston chooses not to depict this contradiction
and offers noncontradictory alternative role models.
China Men, which is considered to be a companion piece to The Woman
Warrior, consists of the stories of men in the narrator’s family.5 She presents
no heroic warrior figure, either male or female. The men are immigrants who
work in the cane fields, the gold mines, railroads, and laundries. None ofthese men fantasize about or identify with legendary Chinese warriors. Thereis a brief mention of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, when the narrator’s
grandfather goes to see a theater production of it in Sacramento and, recognizing his favorite characters such as Guan Goong, feels “refreshed and inspired” (147–48). But what the grandfather is most impressed with is the“Peach Garden Oath” of the three characters to be brothers, not with Guan
Goong’s achievement as a just warrior (147–48).
The only warrior figure in China Men is the narrator’s brother, who servesin the Navy and goes to Vietnam. This brother, however, being a schoolteacher and a pacifist, is reluctant to join the military. He does so because theonly alternative for him would be to flee to Canada, where he does not know
anyone and would have to live as a fugitive for the rest of his life. After hecomes back from Vietnam, he is so traumatized by his war experiences that
he is unable to function for three years.
Although he is not a conventional warrior who fights a just war, the brother is depicted as brave and heroic in his effort to teach hostile high schoolboys the concept of pacifism, telling them that “[t]he military draft is not an
American tradition. Protest against it is a longer tradition” (285). Trying tosurvive the war years as best he can, he makes a resolution:[In] the Navy he would follow orders up to a point short of a direct kill. He would

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not shoot a human being; he would not press the last button that dropped thebomb. But he would ride the ship that brought the bombs, which his taxes had already paid for. If ordered to shoot at a human target, he would then go AWOL to
Canada or Sweden. But up until then, he would be a pacifist in the Navy rather
than in jail, no more or less guilty than the ordinary stay-at-home citizen of thewar economy. (285)

His heroic achievement is his persistent pacifism and his determination tosurvive without killing anyone (305).
Another heroic male figure in China Men is a farmer in Hawaii, depicted
in a short chapter “The Hundred-Year-Old Man.” At the age of one hundredand six, answering a reporter’s question as to what has given him the mostjoy, he says, “What I like best is to work in a cane field when the young green
plants are just growing up” (307). When asked how to stop the war, he answers, “Let everybody out of the army” (307).
Kingston, thus, presents alternative ways for men to be brave and heroic
without imitating famous warriors. The Woman Warrior represents female
strength and independence using a warrior metaphor that transgresses genderconventions. China Men represents male strength and independence by depicting men who cherish pacifism, education, and nurturing, without using awarrior metaphor, which also transgresses gender conventions. Pacifism in
The Woman Warrior is a feminist issue. In China Men, Kingston emphasizes
that it is a men’s issue as well.
IV.

TRIPMASTER MONKEY AS “PEACE LITERATURE”

Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, Kingston’s only work to date that canbe appropriately called a novel, is set in the Vietnam War era in California. Its
protagonist is would-be poet and playwright Wittman Ah Sing, a fifth-generation Chinese American and a Berkeley graduate. Inspired by his formerclassmate and actress, Nanci Lee, Wittman writes and successfully produces
a play that involves numerous multicultural characters. While the play isbased on such Chinese classics as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Outlaws of the Marsh, and The Journey to the West, it develops into an “Anti-War
Bond show” (270). The theater offers a festive, exciting but nonviolent spacefor everyone involved (270).
As in China Men, Tripmaster Monkey presents a pacifist, Wittman, as hero.
While planning to produce his play (the title of which is not given in thenovel), he persuades a whole variety of men and women of various ethnic,

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class, and occupational backgrounds to come together and work for peace.
Thus, he is not only “the present-day U.S.A. incarnation of the King of theMonkeys” but also a modern American version of Sung Chiang, the leader ofthe one hundred and eight outlaws in the original Marsh (33). Unlike Sung
Chiang, Wittman’s achievement is not militaristic but peaceful. Participatingin his production, “friends, friends’ friends, and family” join together with“archenemies” (276) to celebrate friendship. Wittman includes battle scenes
in his play, with loud noises and explosions, but they turn out to be illusions,controlled by Wittman, who is “not crazy” but who thinks that “what’s crazyis the idea that revolutionaries must shoot and bomb and kill, that revolution
is the same as war.” Producing a fake war in this way, he aims at displacing
the real one and creating a festive community of friends (306). The performance ends not with tragic battle scenes or deaths as do Three Kingdoms andMarsh but with a wedding ceremony.
Just as the one hundred and eight outlaw characters of Marsh are good at
one skill or another, mostly handling weapons or martial arts, all of the characters in Tripmaster have some unique skill or technique for survival. Whilethe expertise of the outlaws is related to martial arts and violence, however,
Wittman and his friends have nonviolent skills useful for survival and helping
one another. For example, his friend Lance Kamiyama is a fast-track civil
servant, good at making business connections. He is also good at storytellingand karate demonstrations. Wittman’s wife Taña is an insurance adjuster andalso a painter. She is good at reciting poetry as well. His mother Ruby-LongLegs and her friends are former Vaudeville dancers, and some of them aresuccessful businesswomen. His father Zeppelin, besides being publisher of anewsletter called Find Treasure, is skilled at finding useful things in the garbage. His grandmother was a dressmaker for the theater, and her husband
Lincoln Wong, a rich retired businessman, is a former lumberjack who still
likes riding a tree in stormy weather (266). An old Chinese American man
Wittman meets at the department storage section turns out to be a former“Yale younger poet.” The hilarious assortment of cast members reminds usthat creating unity among a variety of people does not have to depend on oraim at militarism. Tripmaster Monkey features pacifist characters, as does
China Men and thus demonstrates that heroes do not have to be warriors.
Unlike China Men, however, Tripmaster Monkey presents famous Chinese
warriors, both men and women, as characters in Wittman’s play—Lui Pei,
Gang Goong, and Chang Fei from Three Kingdoms and Lee Kuey fromMarsh—to name just a few. These well-known characters are, however, notpresented as the great heroes they are widely known to be. Their skills as

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fighters and war generals are never graphically described; rather, their stories
are presented as antiviolence and pacifist cautionary tales. For example, Lee
Kuey, or the Black Tornado, one of the most popular characters of Marsh,
always carries two huge hatchets and declares that he likes nothing better
than slaughtering people. He is usually presented as a skillful fighter, a simple-minded but lovable fellow, and the most loyal follower of Sung Chiang.
But Wittman’s play does not present him as such. None of his slaughtering
scenes, which abound in the original text as exciting highlight scenes, arepresented in Tripmaster. The episodes that involve Lee Kuey, rather, present
him as a brutal troublemaker who “made too much trouble for his own side”(257); he kills a female singer because her song interrupted his talk, and because of his poor decision making, his mother is left in the mountains byherself and is killed by a tiger.
Liu Pei, Gwan Goong, and Chang Fei, the famous characters from Three
Kingdoms, are also presented not as superheroes but as tragic figures who
cause unnecessary war and confusion because of their arrogance and stubborn militarism. Gwan Goong is captured and executed by Sun Chü’an because he refuses Sun’s offer of brotherhood and marriage between theirchildren. Liu Pei attacks Sun Chü’an in revenge, but this strategically unwise
move ruins his chance to defeat his rivals and to unite and bring peace andorder to the whole of China. The night before combat, Chang Fei is assassinated by two of his own men who had been whipped and humiliated by him.
Wittman’s choice of these episodes rather than the more well-known battle
scenes emphasizes the pacifist nature of his production.6
Unlike these male warriors, woman warrior characters such as Lady Sun,
the wife of Lui Pei, and Night Ogress, one of the outlaws, are depicted asbrave, independent, smart, and physically well trained, but nonetheless nonviolent, in Wittman’s production. They all persuade and sometimes threaten
their enemies in order to achieve their purposes, but they do not resort to violence. One exception is a supernatural woman warrior who wears an extravagant costume and leads the navy; she is a character Wittman fabricates inorder to meet the request of the women in the cast. Told sarcastically, however, this is a revision of the Fa Mu Lan story, explicitly critical of presenting
a woman warrior as a liberating role model:
Unfortunately for peace on Earth, the listening ladies were appeased, and Lance
had run out of plowshare ideas. Nanci and Taña and Sunny and Judy thought that
if they were allowed to play war women, they were liberated. The time of peace
women, who will not roll bandages or serve coffee and doughnuts or rivet air-

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planes or man battleships or shoot guns at strangers, does not begin tonight.
(148)

Here, a third-person narrator juxtaposes a heroic fighting beauty, female factory workers, nurses, and housewives, highlighting that, although those whoare “liberated” and those who support men in traditionally feminine ways areoften perceived as binary opposites, all women who participate in war-related
activities are trapped in the state military system, just in different slots.
Wittman, after successfully producing the play full of warriors and wars—
however fake they may be—determines to be more of a pacifist (340). For
Wittman and for Kingston, cautionary tales full of warrior figures and actions
are not pacifist enough. Along with her essay “The Novel’s Next Step,” Tripmaster Monkey is Kingston’s declaration of her search for peace literaturethat features “peace woman” as a role model.
V.

THE FIFTH BOOK OF PEACEThe Fifth Book of Peace, Kingston’s most recent work, consists of three
nonfictional sections and one fictional one. The first and second parts, “Fire”
and “Paper,” are rather short descriptions of Kingston’s search for the supposedly lost Chinese three “Books of Peace” and her experience in the Oakland firestorm of 1991, in which the manuscript of her own “ Book of Peace”
was destroyed. “Water” is a sequel to Tripmaster, in which Wittman, Taña,
and their son, Mario, leave California and settle in Hawaii. “Earth,” thebook’s final section, is an account of Kingston’s involvement as an organizer
and instructor of a series of writing workshops for war veterans, which eventually resulted in the anthology she edited, Veterans of War, Veterans ofPeace.
The Fifth Book of Peace is Kingston’s attempt to produce the “peace literature” that she proposed in “The Novel’s Next Step.” In order to accomplish
this, she critically comments on her own use of the Fa Mu Lan story and proposes an alternative reading of the legend. Contemplating her previous writing on Fa Mu Lan, Kingston states, “I have told her story as a women’s liberation story, and as a war story. But I now understand, it is a homecoming
story” (390). Quoting the traditional chant of Fa Mu Lan (transcribed as “Fa
Mook Lan” in this book) Kingston emphasizes that Fa Mook Lan was originally a weaver and a healer. After the war, she comes back to resume her life
as a beautiful woman and to show her troops that “it is possible for a soldier
to become feminine” without losing respect and status; the story illustrates,

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thus, that it is also possible for a veteran to return without becoming homeless (390). Kingston detests the fact that The Woman Warrior is being used asa text at the United States Air Force Academy, because “[i]t gives a mythos
to the women military students,” and she admits that her attempt to expand
the concept of the word “warrior” to mean the nonviolent “one who wars
against confusion” has ultimately failed (49). She refuses to be identified asa warrior woman, and when one of her friends comments that she was striding like a warrior, Kingston responds, “Oh, no, I’m not a warrior. I don’t walklike a warrior,” even though her friend explained that she meant that she had“a strong, purposeful walk” (256).
Having thus articulated her reason for not featuring a warrior woman as ahero and a role model in her later work, in The Fifth Book of Peace Kingston
presents pacifists as heroes as she does in China Men and Tripmaster Monkey. In “Water,” Wittman and Taña decide to move to Hawaii so that Wittman
can dodge the draft (which is thought to be easier there). While theirs is at
first a rather low-key, uneventful everyday life among aloha-spirited Hawaiians, the couple becomes involved in the antiwar activities that take placearound the U.S. military base. They join a church-based antiwar community
called Sanctuary that protects deserters, and also help two young deserters byoffering their home as shelter. As in Tripmaster, Wittman and Taña are notwarriors. They are war resisters, abandoning their secure life in California inorder to resist the war and then risking their citizenship and even their lives
in order to prevent themselves and other Americans from participating in the
Vietnam War. Their triumphant moment comes when Mario, when graduating from high school, reveals his own pacifist creed and tells military recruiters that he is not interested in joining the military (237).7 By dodging thedraft, supporting deserters and assisting them to flee to Canada or Sweden,
and raising his son to be a pacifist, Wittman is in fact putting into practice theadvice given by the old man in China Men, that is, to let “everybody out of
the army” in order to put an end to all war. Wittman produces a play called
Viet Rock at Sanctuary that involves everyone, just as he does in Tripmaster.
As a more consciously pacifist production, however, it involves no battle
scenes and no warriors and ends with an explosion that kills all the characters. In Tripmaster, explosions in the drama that Wittman produced represented exciting battle scenes, while in Viet Rock the explosion symbolizes
total and meaningless destruction. Here, Wittman as a producer is more careful than he was before not to present war scenes as enjoyable and exciting.
“Earth” presents participants in Kingston’s writers’ workshop as heroic
characters. The participants consist not only of Vietnam veterans but also of

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civilians with war experience and former antiwar activists. Kingston explains
this decision in her introduction to Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, statingthat the definition of “veteran” developed to include, not only former servicemen and servicewomen, but also deserters, peace activists, refugees, survivors of domestic violence, and former street gang members, because everyone of them is affected by war (2). Because of their traumatic experiences, allof them have difficulties fitting back into society, and many of them still suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder. They try to rebuild their shattered lives
by writing about their experiences and by informing others about how terrible
war can be through their writings. Their war experiences, revealed to us sporadically through direct quotes from the participants’ writings and speeches,
are devastating, and by no means heroic stories of a “just war.” It is in theireffort to survive the pain, and to create and share new insights even when in
pain, that Kingston presents them as heroic.
At one of the most difficult moments, for example, in which veterans express their still-present hostility toward peace activists, whom they consider“traitors,” one of the participants speaks up, explaining that peace activists,
including himself, also “made sacrifices, went to jail, got kicked out of thefamily” and risked their lives (395). The veterans thus learn to perceive thepeace activists not as “the peaceniks” who “partied at college while [they]
were doing the grunt work, and sacrificing [their] lives” but as fellow“resister[s]” (394–95). The words veteran and resister are used to replace
warrior as a terms for a courageous and heroic person. The emphasis, whenusing these terms, however, is on survival and a shared determination to bepacifists, and not on the ability to defeat others.
In terms of its purpose of promoting pacifism, The Fifth Book of Peace
contains contradictions, as does The Woman Warrior. “Earth” reveals someof these contradictions most explicitly; this is the section in which the actual
descriptions of the Vietnam War are presented as the lived experiences of theworkshop participants. While their descriptions of the meaningless sufferingsand deaths are nightmarish enough to turn anyone pacifist, it also proves, as
Polly Shulman sarcastically comments in her New York Times Book Review
article, that “hell makes better stories than heaven.” It also reveals the strong
allure of war as a symbol of just purposes and comradeship. When the workshop participants and Vietnamese veterans of the war have a meeting together, the U.S. and Vietnamese veterans find out that they share the feelingthat war gave them a sense of purpose in life, was a great adventure, and was“good times, good fun” (355).
The woman warrior as a symbol of gender equality and a model of strength

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and self-assertiveness also turns out to die hard. Some of the female veterans,
although they are participating in the workshop because of their PTSD problems, are presented positively as competent servicewomen who have done
their duty and are proud of it. One of the male veterans who participates in
Kingston’s workshop recites his tribute to the women who were in Vietnam,
praising their willingness to serve the country, their sense of duty, and competence. The women who hear his speech are pleased, feeling that “[t]his
bunker is a men’s club that at last welcomes women” (321).
The “Paper” section shows the strong allure of war as story material anddemonstrates that we cannot, after all, ignore war into extinction, as Wittman
tentatively states (78) and as Woolf argues in Three Guineas. It is one thing
to be uninterested in participating in war, but quite another to deny its existence and its consequences. In the “Water” section Kingston succeeds increating characters who are not interested in supporting nationalism throughmilitary means and who, at the same time, are interested in creating opportunities for war veterans, who include both survivors and resisters, to have an
audience for their stories that, pejoratively categorized as “vet lit,” U.S. audiences have been unwilling to listen to (354–55).
VI.

ANOTHER “WOMAN WARRIOR”?

As if reflecting the contradictory situation highlighted in the “Paper” section, the narrator’s mother tells her another woman warrior story, which is“better than Fa Mook Lan” and which “men shouldn’t hear” (58). It is a storyof Ming Hong, who “disguises herself as a man, and wins first, second, andthird places in the imperial exams and archery contests” and “counsels the
king on how to be a good ruler.”
As a doctor, she cures the king. The King’s daughter throws the red ball at Ming
Hong, she catches it and has to marry her. Already married to a man, she marries
a woman. Her enemy discovers her feminine shoe, and takes it to the king. Her
father-in-law, who’s been having yearnings for her/him, takes the mighty archer,doctor, scribe in a carriage to a whorehouse, and exposes him/her. Meanwhile,
Ming Hong’s husband, away at war, lives through many adventures. He comeshome. (58)This story is strange in more than one way. First of all, Ming Hong, according to her mother’s version, is not a warrior but a scholar and “archer, doctor,
scribe.” Second, this story does not tell what happened to Ming Hong after

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she is “exposed” by the king. Was she executed for having deceived the king?
Was she forced to become a prostitute? What happened to her husband, awarrior, after he came back? Did he seek revenge, and in what way? Shall weread more about her in future? Or is her story just a reminder that a woman
warrior, if such a person really exists, is a gruesome and bizarre figure, not anadmirable role model? Kingston, after The Woman Warrior, seems to be
more concerned with advocating pacifism among both men and women thanwith focusing on feminist issues. But will she be, if she chooses to write more
about this other “woman warrior,” again, more gender specific? Will Ming
Hong be a “peace woman” and a heroic role model for women and girls? The
story is enigmatic and elliptical enough to allow for many possibilities todevelop, each of which probably contains contradictions of its own, just as
The Fifth Book of Peace contains contradictions.
The contradictions are not solved but well highlighted, which is probably
what Kingston refers to as her novel’s next step. Surviving the pain, telling
and writing stories about survival, and continuing to create even while still
struggling to survive and in pain—these are what Kingston does when shetries to create a coherent work of art after suffering the devastating loss of her
manuscript and her other belongings by fire, and what she proposes everyone
to do toward the end of The Fifth Book of Peace: “In a time of destruction,
create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A
moral principle. One peaceful moment” (402).
NOTES
1
I prefer to use “the narrator” rather than “Kingston” or “Maxine,” since the identity of thenarrator by itself has been an issue (that I do not intend to deal with in this article), as well as
if, or how much of, this “memoir” is factual or autobiographical. About the issue of the book’s
genre and of the narrator’s identity, see, for example, the articles by Lee Quinby and Sau-Ling
Cynthia Wong.
2
For more on Kingston’s commitment to the peace movement, see her interview with
Neila C. Seshachari (195–96).
3
Fa Mu Lan is supposed to be a historical figure who lived sometime during the Sui dynasty (581–618). See 391–92 of Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace, “The Ballad of Mulan,”for a well-known version of the legend that was recorded in the twelfth century.
4
For woman warrior images in Western art, see Linda Nochlin’s Representing Women.
5
For more on China Men and The Woman Warrior originally being parts of one book, seeKingston’s interviews with Kay Bonetti (35) and with Paula Rabinowitz (69).
6
On Kingston’s rereading of the Chinese classics, see my “Speaking with Divine Authority: Maternal Discourse in the Works of Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, and Leslie
Marmon Silko,” 46–94.
7
Mario’s being uninterested in joining the military is especially important, since having nointerest in war is one of the ways of preventing war that Virginia Woolf proposes in Three

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Guineas. Considering Woolf’s importance for Kingston, it is likely that The Fifth Book of
Peace was influenced by Three Guineas, Woolf’s explicit treatise on pacifism in which she
declares that “[a]s a woman my country is the whole world” (109). Mario’s refusal to be interested in joining the military obviously echoes Woolf’s assumption that women are pacifists
and can prevent war by being uninterested in war and military issues. The episode can be interpreted that men as well as women can be educated to be able to free themselves from thenationalism that requires violence for sustenance and to become a citizen of the whole world.

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