I’ve recently been thinking a lot about a book called The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston. My mother first gave it to me to read when I was in middle school and I later read it again for my AP English and Composition class during my senior year of high school. It’s a beautifully written book that blends memory and ghost stories so seamlessly that sometimes it’s difficult to tell truth from fiction.
One of the essays in the book is a retelling of the story of Fa Mu Lan, the female warrior. Most of you are probably familiar with Disney’s 1998 Mulan, which tells a, well, Disney version of the story of a girl who takes her father’s armor and goes away to war. Ever since I first read Kingston’s version, I’ve been unable to get the story of the female warrior out of my head. It’s lingered in the back of my mind for years, ebbing and flowing in my consciousness.
I have a story in development which makes heavy use of hero archetypes and I’m basing many of the characters on the heroes found in the history and folklore of different cultures around the world and so naturally I wanted to base one of my characters after Fa Mu Lan. However, my only exposure to Fa Mu Lan has been through the Disney movie and through Kingston’s book. And so yet again, The Woman Warrior came into the forefront of my thoughts.
I’d been thinking about the book for weeks, trying to remember as much as I could about the chapter on Mu Lan. I remembered the gist of it, as well as some details, but the whole of the story escaped me. I couldn’t remember who she was fighting, how she was trained, what happened when the war was won and I never quite remembered to look for it in the bookstore or to order it online, so I was stuck with the frustrating task of trying to piece together a story from a five-year-old memory.
I’d almost forgotten that I was looking for the book when, last weekend I was driving through town and saw that the library was having it’s annual book sale. I figured I’d stop and see what was there. I’d forgotten that I was looking for anything in particular. I wove through the tables, eyes skimming the spines of well-worn paper backs – some so well-worn, their spines so creased, that it was almost impossible to read the titles – and all of a sudden, there it was: The Woman Warrior. A different edition from the one my mother had given to me, older and well read by the creasing in the spine and the wear on the pages, but the binding was intact and miraculously the pages weren’t moldy.
I paid my fifty cents and took the book home and immediately started reading and that’s when I discovered that the book’s previous reader had underlined certain passages. And as fascinating as it was to reread the book for the sake of the stories it contained, I found myself almost more fascinating with the other reader’s underlines. Some passages they had underlined and I could not fathom why. (For they hadn’t written any annotations, simply underlined and circled certain sections.) Why that passage? Why that reference to that doctor? Was the person looking for references to the communist party in China? Were they reading the book for a class or on their own?
I couldn’t tell. There didn’t seem to be a consistent theme to the underlined passages. But every once in awhile, the other reader had underlined a passage that sang in my soul – a philosophical tidbit, or a particularly poignant piece of imagery – and I marveled at the connectivity that words provide.
I’ve always thought of reading books as a way of psychically connecting with the author. You see a skilled writer is able to describe an image so well that reader sees exactly what the writer saw down to the last detail and it’s in those moments the minds of the reader and the writer connect across time through the words written on the page. But words don’t just connect writers to readers, they connect readers to other readers and while I have no idea who it was who owned this copy of The Warrior Woman before me – who marked it with blue pen – I feel as if I know them, just a little bit, by what they’ve underlined and circled, what they’ve drawn a star next to. I can tell that we laughed at some of the same lines, were moved by others. And I think it is marvelous that a book can do that.
Thank you for reading
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