Cultural translation and the exorcist: a reading of Kingston's and Tan's ghost stories

Kingston's first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, combines her mother's stories, Chinese legends and myths, with her own childhood memories and fantasies. In one episode from The Woman Warrior, the narrator sees a bird which reminds her of the ideograph for human ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] (4)) in Chinese. "In the brush drawings," it looks like a bird that "flew over our roof ... two black wings ... cross[ing] the sun and lift[ing] into the mountains "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]"(which look like the ideograph 'mountain')" (26, Chinese insertions mine). For a reader who does not understand Chinese ideographs, it can be a problem to imagine exactly what she describes. Though she does not directly put the Chinese ideographs in the text, readers with knowledge of Chinese can appreciate her imaginative description. However, readers without this knowledge may need to make an effort to understand it. For non-Chinese speakers, the way in which Kingston describes the Chinese characters creatively and imaginatively offers another kind of translation. She translates the ideographs into a landscape in which "[t]he imaging of self in a bird's flight, symbolic of one's freedom and transcendence" (Li, "Production" 327) is also a means for the young narrator to escape to the fantasy world of her mother's tongue.

These ideograph-transformed images signify the striking differences between English as an alphabetical language system and Chinese as ideographs. When the narrator goes to school, she confronts the tension between two languages and two cultures. She feels confused:

   I could not understand "I." The Chinese "I" has seven strokes ([TEXT
   NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]), intricacies. How could the American
   "I," assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three
   strokes, the middle so straight? Was it out of politeness that this
   writer left off strokes the way a Chinese has to write her own name
   small and crooked? No, it was not politeness; "I" is a capital and
   "you" is a lower-case. I stared at that middle line and waited so
   long for its black center to resolve into tight strokes and dots
   that I forgot to pronounce it. The other troublesome word was
   "here," no strong consonant to hang on to, and so flat, when "here"
   is two mountainous ideographs ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]).
   (150)

The narrator is particularly bothered by "I" and "here" because it shows that she cannot locate herself and construct her identity, and even makes her suffer from temporary aphasia. The Hawaiian teacher thinks she has gone silent again and thus punishes her by forcing her to sit in the corner where the noisy boys usually sit (150). This experience signifies her confusion and dislocation. It is not that she cannot understand "I" and "here," but she resists doing so. She is put in an alienated and marginalized situation when she has to learn English as a second language among the native speakers. She tries putting the American "I" in her native Chinese context but in vain. The American "I" wearing a hat like the Chinese "I" is, after all, an/other language for her.