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양성적 비전을 향한 글쓰기 : 『 여인무사 』 와 『 중국 남자들 』 을 중심으로
Kingston`s androgynous vision : The Woman Warrior and China Men
조무석(Moo Seuck Cho)
UCI I410-ECN-0102-2009-840-005104141

As a Chinese American writer, Maxine Hong Kingston, has attempted to delineate the unique experience of Chinese immigrants in America, including their cultural backgrounds. In her first autobiographical novel, The Woman Warrior, she focuses in particular on the sexism which still lingers as part of the Asian legacy in Chinese America and the angry agony of American-born daughters who are still confined in that longstanding custom. The author describes the protagonist`s struggle for self-definition amid complex cultural and historical legacies. She, as a young girl, had a double-edged and contradictory feeling toward her mother who, on the one hand, enforced her to follow the suppressed model of traditional Asian women, but, on the other hand, induced her to seek a self-reliant life by telling her many legendary lives of independent women like the woman warrior, Fa Mu Lan. Accordingly, the protagonist projects her hatred toward her mother in the beginning of the book, and then gradually comes to reconcile with her mother. Forbidden by her mother to tell a secret, unable to read aloud in English while first attending American school, the protagonist eventually speaks with a vengeance through writing, that is, through a heroic act of self-expression. In China Men, Kingston shows her broadened concern into men, as she always says that, "I care about men as much as I care about women." In fact, Chinese American women may be sympathetic to but angry toward the men in their ethnic community. This work reveals the author`s double allegiance. First of all, Kingston depicts the similarities between China men`s and women`s suffering from the perspective of a repressed and marginalized ethnic group in the white-dominated society of the US. China men are also the Other, the silenced and oppressed in America. The protagonist, in the persona of an immigrant daughter, can communicate with the emotionally constrained father, who has concealed his story and history from his children under layers of rage and silence. Taciturn men like her father can speak indirectly through her of their deepest frustrations, and the protagonist can reconstruct their untold history, depending sometimes on her imagination and interpretation. The combination of the historically specific, such as the Chinese emigration to the United States, and the folkloric, such as the story of Tang Ao, characterize the core of this work. As Tang Ao symbolizes the emasculation of Chinese men by the dominant white culture, Chinese American men are urged to see parallels between their plight and that of Chinese American women. At the same time, the author identifies herself with Tang Ao, enters the realm of the other gender, and becomes "the kind of woman who loves men and tells their stories." Kingston`s attempt to understand and write about the opposite sex in China Men is perhaps a tacit call for mutual empathy between Chinese men and women. Although Kingston started her writing from the perspective of feminist, she shifted her concern into the realm of androgyne, which admits the differences between the sexes but urges each sex to supplement a want of the other for mutual development. Based on the idea of androgyne, Kingston is able to express much deeper affection toward human beings. Kingston`s attitude keeps her from being limited in being called a simple feminist writer.

[자료제공 : 네이버학술정보]
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