Ghost Stories

...But perhaps the author is right to confine her to this role...

...There is no doubt that she lived in a world where a great-grandfather, watching the girls eating, would shout, "Where are my grandsons...

...She then falls in love and bears a child, whom she has to conceal because "the Chinese executed women who disguised themselves as soldiers or students...

...In "White Tigers," a tour de force, Kingston tells of the adventures of the fabled woman warrior Fa Mu Lan in the first person, as if they were her own...

...Her determination to preserve so much, however, makes great demands on the reader, who must exercise a selectivity the author has not provided...

...Interrupting, or commenting on, these events are chants and poems adapted from the folklore...

...Brave Orchid never said that she herself killed babies, but her stories of deaths and deformities haunted her daughter's childhood...

...Tell that gorilla-ape to go away," she finally yelled at her father...

...The story itself is a good one...

...These "poetic" passages consort oddly with a prose style reminiscent of long-forgotten novels of the '20s and '30s...

...A railroad station "smelled like trains, diesel oil and creosote ties...

...There are five chapters in Kingston's book, all in different styles, all save one involving the author directly in passionate, eloquent questioning of the ghosts of her heritage...

...W/ilko is celebrating an Indian community that, left to itself, was peaceable and benign...

...The half-breed hero, Tayo, a survivor of Japanese prison camps, is discharged from a veterans' hospital and returns to his reservation...

...This legend Kingston learned from her mother, "who said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but . . . taught me the songs of the warrior woman"—songs she is singing, we realize, with her book...

...It enables us to weigh her perception with her confusion, and to appreciate the reasons for each...

...At nine, Maxine rejoiced when the letters from Communist China "made my parents, who are rocks, cry...

...Silko employs it all too often to achieve a gratuitous realism: "Tayo held onto the beer bottle, feeling moisture condense on his fingers...

...Following training in the mountains in swordsmanship and magic arts, she returns to her family to have "their grievances carved into my back with knives," before going off to lead troops against the Emperor...

...Maxine Hong Kingston, in The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Knopf, 209 pp., $7.95), is speaking out, also by means of stories, against a Chinese village culture in Stockton, California—where her family and many of her neighbors emigrated from Kwangtung Province—that is malevolent and harsh, particularly toward women...

...We see this remarkable mother in many different lights: telling dramatic "talk-stories" in the family laundry to "chill the air" when the temperature goes up to 111 degrees...

...At 80, for instance, her mother denied that there were two older children who died in China, and contended that Chinese parents communicated admiration for their children by saying the oppo site...

...The outraged villagers (the baby's father among them), masked and dressed in mourning white, destroyed the family house on the eve of the birth...

...She is not orjy telling a tale, but "telling on" those forces that would silence her...

...Eat, maggots...

...Maxine did not talk at school for the first three years...

...Can't you take a joke...

...The countrywomen insisted on delivering in the pigpen to fool the gods?jealous of human joy"—into thinking the baby was a piglet...

...Yet at the same time she exploits popular fictional elements, raising expectations of speed and suspense that she does not satisfy...

...Many, though, fell flat for me: I was unable to separate them from their familiar non-Indian associations, as in the seemingly banal lines, "Sunrise!/We come at sunrise/to greet you/ . . . You are beautiful," etc...

...If it was a girl, the midwife would sometimes smother her in a box of warm ashes...

...Nevertheless, growing up in Stockton, she believed she risked a marriage, arranged by her parents, to a retarded youth, "a hulk, a hunching sitter," who hung around the laundry...

...The Laguna life is part of Silko's own legacy, and she knows what emotions, male and female, have been, as Ruth Benedict put it, "already channeled by the culture...

...People still say "speak up" to her, but she is a "story-talker" herself now, and she has found in the memoir her ideal form...

...I suspect it is these imitations of writers who imitated Hemingway that cause one reviewer to praise Silko's gift for expressing the male sensibility...

...Although the men in the family had branded them, the cows were "all scattered now, all lost, sucked away in the dissolution...

...The Chinese word for the female "I," incidentally, is "slave...

...Writers & writing GHOST STORIES BY RUTH MATHEWSON In her first novel, Ceremony (Viking, 262 pp., $10.00), the poet and short-story writer Leslie Marmon Silko demonstrates that she is a "saver"—of songs, religious rituals, histories, and stories of the Laguna Pueblo Indians of New Mexico...

...It all suggests a grail legend of this Southwestern "wasteland...

...This calls for a slow, meditative response to Silko's material...

...Look at the maggots chew...

...by the time she joined her husband in 1939, she was 45...

...Brave Orchid, never to divulge the secret of how the corpses of "your aunt and her baby plugged up the family well" in 1924...

...After giving birth the aunt drowned her child and herself in the well, and was deliberately forgotten...

...and, in a moving but terribly funny story, urging her gentle sister, just arrived from Hong Kong, to take over the household—and bully the second wife—of the husband she has not seen for 30 years...

...When she finally did, it was in a "pressed-duck" voice...

...The author was born nine months later, the first of six children...

...Her mother, "the champion talker," expostulated, "We can't sell people...

...Probably the most surprising view of the mother, in the tale appropriately called "Shaman," describes her days in a Canton medical school in the late '30s, after her husband had left for America and her first two children had died...

...There he rejoins the household of his Auntie, who had taken him in when he was a child after his mother, a prostitute now dead, had given him up...

...When she graduated, she bought a 12-year-old slave, and, with the girl for nurse, practiced medicine and midwifery in the villages...

...at 80, the laundry gone, scabbing in the tomato fields because she "hurts" when she stops working...

...In a way, the relative accuracy of Kingston's accusations does not matter...

...Tayo and four other "war heroes," as they call themselves, have come back to unemployment, terrible drought and the temptations of drinking and idle violence...

...Tayo is brought to an aged medicine man who uses old tales and rituals—sandpainting, scalp-cutting—to relieve him of his sorrow, and tells him how he will find the lost herd...

...He is to meet a maiden with a blue shawl, find a particular constellation of stars and approach a certain mountain...

...The climax—his recovering the cattle from the land of a rich white?is splendidly described...

...And there is no question that the family liked to say, "Better to raise geese than girls...

...What interests me more is that most of the women in this matrilineal, matrilocal society appear as stock figures...

...Theoretically, there is no reason why a work of fiction cannot accommodate both the curator and the scribe of a culture, but Silko, I think, has not found the proper form for combining these offices...

...A beloved uncle has died in his absence and missing, too, is Auntie's son, whom Tayo watched perish during the Bataan Death March...

...When she says later, "even now China wraps double binds around my feet," we are aware of Brave Orchid's role in issuing contradictory commands...

...While each story can stand alone, common themes are developed with great skill throughout...

...It is asserted that Auntie "had an old sensitivity, surviving thousands of years . . . when the people shared the same consciousness," yet she seems to be a rather conventional guardian of the properties...

...Some are amusing, others frightening...

...Grieving for his two lost relatives and despairing of his sanity, Tayo recalls a happier time before the War, when his uncle bought a herd?descendents of generations of desert cattle"?who could hunt water like antelopes and live off the dry, bony land far better than the Herefords recommended by white agricultural experts...

...This was "no-name" aunt, so called because she had shamed her relations by conceiving a bastard in her husband's absence...

...She begins by disobeying the command of her formidable mother...

...All these contradictory reports—fictions, legends, facts—are set forth with an artful wit and a scrupulous candor that readers will discover with delight for many years to come...

...By "ceremony" she means the use of traditional tales to cure the grief and despair of her hero, to bless the land with fertility, and to exercise the ancient "witcheries" that threaten its people with violence and cruelty...

...When the Japanese attacked, Brave Orchid set up a hospital in a mountain cave...

...The Revolution meant they wouldn't go back to China, and she would not be sold...