Chinese Talk-story

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Reading Comprehension question.

TopicsInferenceHumanities

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Passage

With their recognition of Maxine Hong Kingston as a major literary figure, some critics have suggested that her works have been produced almost ex nihilo, saying that they lack a large traceable body of direct literary antecedents especially within the Chinese American heritage in which her work is embedded. But these critics, a highly developed genre of song and spoken narrative known as "talk-story" (gong gu tsai).

Traditionally performed in the dialects of various ethnic enclaves, talk-story has been maintained within the confines of the family and has rarely surfaced into print. The tradition dates back to Sung dynasty (A.D. 970-1279) storytellers in China, and in the United States it is continually revitalized by an overlapping sequence of immigration or new forms of Western discourse, as in the case of Kingston's adaptations written in English.

Kingston herself believes that as a literary artist she is one in a long line of performers shaping a recalcitrant history into talk-story form. She distinguishes her "thematic" storytelling memory processes, which sift and reconstruct the essential elements of “personally remembered stories”, from the memory processes of a print-oriented culture that emphasizes be frozen in print, but which continue to grow both around and from that frozen text.

Kingston's participation in the tradition of talk-story is evidenced in her book China Men, which utilizes forms typical of that genre and common to most oral cultures including: a fixed "grammar" of repetitive themes; a spectrum of stock characters; symmetrical structures, including balanced oppositions (verbal or physical contests, antithetical characters, dialectical discourse language rich in aural and visual puns, making her work a written form of talk-story.

What this question is testing

Inference

Anticipate

This is a Most Strongly Supported question. The trick is to find an answer that the passage clearly backs without going further than the passage does. Strong candidates here come from the contrast the passage explicitly draws: talk-story uses thematic, reconstructive memory, while print culture emphasizes exact word retention.

Goal

Looking for an answer the passage will essentially restate. Common traps:

Answers that exaggerate (frequency claims, "most" claims) when the passage isn't comparing

Answers that introduce a topic the passage never addresses

Answers that flip a claim from positive to qualified or vice versa

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The question

15.

Which one of the following can be most reasonably inferred from

Answer choices

Out of Scope1% picked this
In the last few years, written forms of talk-story have appeared in Chinese as often as
The passage doesn't compare the frequency of written talk-story in Chinese versus English. It says Kingston's writing in English is one adaptation of the tradition, but it makes no claim about how often talk-story has been written down in either language.
1%
Unsupported5% picked this
Until very recently, scholars have held that oral storytelling in Chinese ethnic enclaves was a
The passage doesn't describe what scholars used to think about Chinese ethnic-enclave storytelling. It only describes what some critics missed about Kingston's antecedents — that's about Kingston, not a broader scholarly consensus on uniqueness.
5%
Unsupported23% picked this
Talk-story has developed in the United States through a process of combining Chinese, Chinese American, and
The passage describes talk-story being "continually revitalized" in the U.S. by ongoing immigration, but it doesn't describe combining Chinese, Chinese American, and other oral traditions. The development the passage describes is the same Chinese tradition continuing in a new setting, not a fusion of multiple traditions.
23%
Correct66% picked this
Chinese American talk-story relies upon memory processes that do not emphasize the retention of precise
Why this is right
P3 explicitly contrasts Kingston's "thematic" storytelling memory — which sifts and reconstructs essential elements — with print-oriented memory that emphasizes "precise sequences of words." Since the passage treats Kingston as belonging to the talk-story tradition, the natural read is that talk-story relies on memory processes that don't emphasize verbatim retention. That is exactly what (D) says.
Skill tested: Inference · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
66%
Wrong View6% picked this
The connection between certain aspects of Kingston's work and talk-story is argued by some critics to be
The passage's author argues for the connection between Kingston's work and talk-story. The critics in P1 didn't question that connection as tenuous — they overlooked it entirely. The passage presents the connection as well-supported, not contested.
6%

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