Cutting the Tongue: Language and the Body in Kingston's the Woman Warrior

One of the most widely taught books in American colleges in recent years, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior has a vexed reception history that both attests to its popularity and questions it. (1) The debates regarding Kingston's text that flared up immediately after the book's publication primarily concerned authenticity and representation. (2) These conflicts centered on whether Kingston's representation of Chinese culture and Chinese Americans was faithful. While the debates over authenticity and representation have subsided, the questions raised regarding the representation of a minority still find their way into recent scholarship on The Woman Warrior, if in varying forms. (3) This essay focuses on a key figure from Kingston's text--tongue-cutting--because it embodies a key concern raised by critics of The Woman Warrior: does Kingston misrepresent the Chinese American community as barbaric while accommodating the mainstream readership's expectations for Orientalist tales. (4) Because of its physicality and violence, tongue-cutting runs the risk of being inscrutable when approached within a narrow set of definitions of civilization and its norms. Perhaps the easiest way to take care of this problem is to regard the tongue-cutting in Kingston's text as fictional, as an exercise of Kingston's creative imagination. The impressive work that has been done so far on Kingston's innovative use of genre in The Woman Warrior supports such a reading. (5) Viewing Kingston's text as a memoir in the traditional sense is now largely discredited. However, while The Woman Warrior does not ask for a sorting out of fact from fiction, too hastily labeling as fictional every incident in the text that potentially signals intercultural tension does not help understand Kingston's sophisticated manipulation of reality and imagination. To explore the figure of tongue-cutting in the text as it marks a crucial intersection between the body and language is to take a step further from the debates over representation and to think about how Kingston's text interconnects social reality and the material conditions of life. A recent article in The Houston Chronicle, also on tongue-cutting, serves as a point of entry into the relation between language and the body in The Woman Warrior. The October 19, 2003, issue of The Houston Chronicle reported the case of tongue-cutting among school-age children in Korea, prompted by their zealous parents who wanted their children to acquire full proficiency in English. "Chop a centimeter or so off your tongue and become a fluent English speaker" reads the first line of this arresting newspaper article ("Korean"). Tongue-cutting, in the Korean case, takes place as a result of a misconstrued relationship between language and the body. Parents believe that there is an optimum mouth structure for unlimited language capacity, and they couple this with a misplaced faith that modern medicine can produce an optimum bodily organ through surgery. Such thinking ties together the body and language in a simplistic cause-and-effect relationship. While The Woman Warrior debunks the idea that there can be a causal relationship between language and the body, it grapples with the question of what it means for a racialized body to acquire a language. By showing how the body's racial marker precedes language performance, Kingston dismantles an easy distinction between language ability and disability and makes the reader aware that language is always intimately linked to the body that speaks and the material conditions of that body. I borrow from recent scholarship on disability studies to think through the shifting bases of ability and disability and to examine the role of the body--both the exterior that is visible and the interior that is not so readily visible--in the subject's self-perception and social acceptance. A social constructionist view of disability, the view that "disability is neither 'natural' nor essential but rather that it is socially produced" has made it possible to see how disability and ability are in fact mutually constitutive (Marks 78). …