When I consider my own relationship with myth, growing up in the West, there is a particular lexicon derived to refer to the didactic lessons imparted on me in my youth. There were prison escapees who dragged an injured leg through the snow, a pointed hook on one hand, desperate after a recent escape to murder someone in a parked car. Razorblades in Halloween apples. Staring into mirrors and chanting. The boogieman. There are also tales more palpable to me personally, such as Bigfoot (I just like the idea of a massive, hairy beast tromping through the woods in the Northwest). But however considered, these tales have all been trivialized. Many of the stories based on the Anglo-oral tradition have been marginalized in labeling them Fairy Tales or Urban Legends. Even the sounds of those titles suggest childish connotations. The terms serve to distance the didacticism or the simple entertainment of the yarn, not to mention any tangible effect the stories might play in my history. But for Maxine Hong Kingston The Woman Warrior is an account of her family’s “talk-stories”, her oral tradition, and the inextricable bond between myth and reality.
For Kingston, her history and mythology depends largely on context, as any story does, and, perhaps more importantly, as any folklore. During her belief in myth in The Woman Warrior, Kingston is unwilling to bend to the belief of the reader, to console them for the awkward possibility that he or she may not believe in ghosts. And nor should she. The palpability of her stories depends on her conviction. And conviction may be the wrong word here. Kingston’s talk-stories are at one point so engrained in her history that to call them convictions would be to suggest that she contested with the possibility that ghosts, her history, are not real. After moving to the United States, living in San Francisco, working at her parents’ laundry, her and other neighborhood Chinese children “were regularly visited by the Mail Ghost, Meter Reader Ghost, Garbage Ghost” (98). By recognizing anyone who wasn’t Chinese as a ghost, Kingston does not distance herself from the locals; rather she understands them as integral to her history. Kingston’s mother engendered in her the continuity of the mythical and the real.
Kingston eventually outgrows the mythologies of her youth. The power of myth attenuates into a third-person account of an American life. “When they were younger the children used to sit out there too during their breaks…Passers-by and customers gave them money. But now they were older, they stayed inside or went for walks” (142). The Postman Ghosts and Garbage Ghosts disintegrate with the first person. Kingston is syntactically removed from the story, repositioning herself as the storyteller. She is no longer an active participant and thus left as an observer of her own history and, as the oral tradition is concerned, her own present.
Now, I have my own stories that are equally distancing from my own reality, that position me, indifferent to my opinions, outside of the narrative. I tell a friend of mine, Josh, who is a PhD candidate at Ohio State in Native lit. studies, about some of the local legend of Salt Lake City. We attended a Master’s degree at Utah State in Logan, Utah, so he has a peripheral knowledge of the city and the local Mormon practices. I tell him over a jovial phone call that years ago, in 2001, Jell-O was declared the official State Snack of Utah. One of the weeks when the city hosted the Winter Olympics, Bill Cosby was invited to endorse the snack and inaugurate the time as Jell-O Week. Bill Cosby, who has over 15 honorary doctorates, performed with Coltrane, has multiple Emmys and Grammys, and also, later in his career, served as the spokesperson for Jell-O, was presented a gift from the State of Utah for, as far as I can tell, his work with Jell-O.
I use this to segue into another faulty measure the state took to announce Donny and Marie Osmond as the Utah State Couple. For a place that acts as the epicenter for the Mormon religion, which avoids defending private groups of fundamentalist LDS who endorse polygamy and ignore lawful marriage ages, to be so ignorant to the implications of naming a sister-brother talk show duo as a “couple” reveals an underlying anxiety and exposes an innate local perversion about the culture. Josh laughs heartily at this and just about cuts me off before I insist on relating one more story.
I tell him about a drive I took recently to Tombstone. Five miles outside of the town there’s a billboard with the cast from the 1993 movie Tombstone, guns drawn, stoic. I drive from one end of the town and back, stop at a gas station and get something to drink. On my way out, I glance at a bronze statue of Wyatt Earp. I pull into a nearby parking lot and go to take a few photos of the bust. When I get closer, I notice that the statue is not of Wyatt Earp, but of Kurt Russell, the star of Tombstone.
Bill Cosby as Jell-O Man, Donnie and Marie: Utah’s State Couple, Kurt Russell constructed to pay homage to Wyatt Earp—the simulacrum is real. But I have been counting on these mythologies to be fabrications, to know that under that hyper-color space of pixilated stories there was genuine realness. I wanted to use these set pieces as juxtapositions to my own sense of reality, to my own confusions, to inject some semblance of personal definition with the natural world.
In this sense, I relate to Maxine Hong Kingston. At some point, the myths faded into characters—people to observe. The ghosts are just people and the dragon is just earth. It’s a disappointment in one sense, to be limited to the storyteller’s role—characters get to have all the fun. But the difference lies in an intrinsic expression of an action and the responsibility of making the action, and the ideas, the myths, accurate.