Writing 'kinography': Narrating the self through family and kin in 'The Woman Warrior' and 'Disappearing Moon Cafe' (Maxine Hong Kingston, Sky Lee).

摘要

Storytelling plays a vital role in the identity construction of the first and second generation narrators of The Woman Warrior and Disappearing Moon Cafe. Oral histories of family, passed from mother to daughter, form what Kingston deems 'ancestral help', or a complex weaving of the stories of female kin; through the reconstruction and subsequent writing of these stories, the narrators reconcile the Chinese and American mythologies that are a result of leading a dualized cultural existence. Thus a new genre is formed: neither a biography nor an autobiography, but rather a 'kinography', one which acknowledges the importance of family and kinship.