I Need a Hero

Continuing my self-assigned quest of reading the books I should have read at university, I've finished The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston. Similarly to The Joy Luck Club, it was written by a Chinese-American authoress, and it was first published in the seventies. In other respects I must say I liked Tan's book better.

The Woman Warrior is divided into five sections of different length. Sometimes it was hard for me to get the point of a chapter because there were so many things in it. I know it's an exaggeration and a poor illustration, but it reminded me of my high school essays, when we were supposed to write an outline of the main points and a draft before writing the actual composition, and I never did that. I just followed my own line of thinking, as it came, and usually it turned out well, and I didn't have to cross out too many things. Something similar happened in this book, the of course it was of a higher quality than a high school essay. I think the first two chapters were the best-written ones, and also they were the tersest.
The first one tells the story of an aunt who was erased from the memory of the family because she had an extramarital child. The story of being erased, made unborn captures the limits of women's chances in China (before WWII). The second story was even more interesting for me. It's about Fa Mu Lan, a woman warrior, who I think is somewhat related to the Walt Disney picture Mulan. Her story is part of the Chinese folklore, though it's hard to tell whether she really existed. Basically, she was a girl who took her father's place when he was recruited, and disguised herself as a man. In the book the narrator compares her life as an American-born Chinese girl to the heroic deeds of Fa Mu Lan, and imagines what her life would be like if she were a woman warrior. One of the main ideas here is that she (the narrator) was never good enough for her mother. In the end she comes to the conclusion that she is similar to the woman warrior in the sense that she fights with her writing against the evils of the world. And on the cover of the book someone says that Kingston turned her words into a sword, and I really liked the idea and the pun here. I'd like to think of myself as a woman warrior, too.
I don't want to spoil the book any more. As you can imagine, its main themes are womanhood, cultural clash, and the mother-daughter relationship as such. And of course, finding one's identity. Voice was a very important motif here. The narrator was told to have a duck voice. And in the end this motif is merged with the story of a barbarian reed pipe. And these are very important motifs for me because the oboe is said to have a duck voice until you learn to play it well.
We learn several Chinese traditions and old wife's tales, and it seems that even the writer cannot tell the difference. Her mother told her so many things, but somehow she was excluded too, so she couldn't work out what was true and what was fiction. She allows for the possibility that even she herself imagined things. (I know I shouldn't mix the terms writer and narrator here, but I strongly feel that this book is highly autobiographical.)
In general I think it was worth reading it, and I'm becoming more and more interested in this culture, but there's something I miss from the literary point of view.