“The last deed of Maui the Trickster, the Polynesian demigod who played jokes, pushed the sky higher, roped the sun with braided pubic hair from his mother, pulled the land up out of the ocean, and brought fire to earth, was to seek immortality for men and women by stealing it from Hina of the Night. He instructed the people, the beasts, the birds, and the elements to be silent. Hunters walked through forests and fishermen waited in this same silence. In silence the snarer caught birds alive, plucked the few red feathers, and released them; the seer read the clouds, heard spirits and did not disturb them. Children learned and worked silently. There was a chant that could hardly be discerned from silence. Maui dived into the ocean, where he found great Hina asleep. Through her vagina like a door, he entered her body. He took her heart in his arms. He had started tunneling out feet first when a bird, at the sight of his legs wiggling out of the vagina, laughed. Hina awoke and shut herself, and Maui died” (Kingston 122).
Critical questions: How does myth, be it Chinese or American or something else entirely, function in Kingston’s China Men? Does Kingston construct a new mythology of immigrant Chinese men? How does this specific myth of Maui and Hina reflect the subjugation and taming of the land as told in the larger myth of “The Great-Grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains”?
In this vignette, it is possible to read the figure of Maui as a colonizing force. With the express purpose of seeking immortality, he instructs and persuades those around him to remain silent while he attempts to steal Hina’s heart (in the least romantic sense possible). The use of “silence” as a literary device calls to mind the complicity in this act by many different parties. Hunters, fishermen, bird snarers, and children all wait for Maui to bring them immortality. It is interesting to note that hunters, fishermen, and bird snarers all share a singular purpose - to maintain their livelihoods through dependence on natural resources, much like the Chinese laborers on the sugar cane plantations.
Maui’s death-by-entrapment-in-a-mythical body signals a kind of deus ex machina solution against the attempt to steal Hina’s life force. The use of the deus ex machina as a literary device is often seen as a cop out, while in myth, the deus ex machina offers a clean-cut ending to an otherwise complex and difficult story. Unfortunately, there is no solution that can be mandated by divinity, and there can be no quick fix or quick stop to the process of colonizing - literally stealing the immortality of the land.
This vignette is fascinating to me because as the closing vignette of “The Great-Grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains,” it mirrors the closing vignette of the previous section, “The Ghostmate.” Both tell stories of men being “taken in” by women. In “The Ghostmate,” the travelling man is taken into the beautiful house of a beautiful woman, and stays for too long - when he returns to the “real” world, he discovers that his family is gone, and the beautiful woman’s house is instead a tombstone. In “On Mortality Again,” Maui is consumed by Hina and he dies. I believe that these short vignettes and retold traditional myths, when interspersed with the stories of various fathers and grandfathers, act as a kind of validation of Kingston’s myths.
I thought your reading of the Maui figure as a colonizer to be powerful. I liked that you chose to focus on the vignettes in China Men. They gave the book a certain character that isn't seen often; it gave insight in a way that would have, as you said, been more complicated to explain. Maybe bring up, more explicitly, what these short episodes do exactly and how they work. You touched upon it a bit, but draw that out more perhaps. I think your topic is very intriguing, bravo :) :)
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