Analysis Of Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior

Four Chinese mothers have migrated to America. Each hope for their daughter’s success and pray that they will not experience the hardships faced in China. One mother, Suyuan, imparts her knowledge on her daughter through stories. The American culture influences her daughter, Jing Mei, to such a degree that it is hard for Jing Mei to understand her mother's culture and life lessons. Yet it is not until Jing Mei realizes that the key to understanding who her

Two items are not the same—they are not comparable. Employing the word “different” to describe the countries of America and China demonstrates Maxine’s mother’s awareness of the numerous dissimilarities between them. In her 2012 nonfiction book, Quiet, Susan Cain writes, “Westerners value boldness and verbal skill […], while Asians prize quiet, humility, and sensitivity” (Cain 189), the same cultural differences that Maxine’s mother recognizes in The Woman Warrior. America prefers “verbal” communication, whereas China places more value on silence. In particular, American residents who straddle both Chinese and American cultures must face these two conflicting ideals.

She can never fully assimilate to the American way because others cannot over look her different cultural heritage. However, she cannot fully revert back to her Japanese culture. She has lost touch to the language and traditions. Her linkage to Japanese culture go back so far that the only remnants of her Japanese identity can only be identified through blood. Trying to find an escape from this scrutiny, Nishio seeks refuge in art. However, coming from the west coast, she remains an outsider when she comes to the east coast. The artistic styles differ on the opposing coasts, which makes it hard for Nishio to identify as one or the other. Nishio’s background puts her in the position of an outsider. Another outsider who presents her story through her memoir The Woman Warrior is Maxine Hong-Kingston. Kingston is an outsider in both the American and Chinese community. Kingston could never figure out “American-feminine” (Kingston, 204). Her Chinese blood interferes with Kingston’s potential of becoming a “true American.” The Chinese and American standards contrast one another rather than complement each other, which compiles Kingston’s hate, especially towards her Chinese

Maxine Kingston's Making of More Americans like Amy Tan's Mother Tongue has been a controversial addition to Asian American literature. The writer has tried to answer the critical question of Chinese American identity and hence been criticized for adopting an orientalist framework to win approval of the west. Similarly Rendezvous by Frank Chin and Mother Tongue by Amy Tan also speak of a culture that neatly fits the description of the "Other" in the orientalist framework. It appears alien, remote and immensely degrading to women who were treated like non-human beings by Chinese chauvinistic society. However things changed for the generation of Chinese that grew up in the US or at least that is what authors wants us to believe.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior” is novel composed of myths and memoirs that have shaped her life. Her mother’s talk-stories about her no name aunt, her own interpretation of Fa Mu Lan, the stories of ghosts in doom rooms and American culture have been the basis of her learning. She learned morals, truths, and principals that would be the basis of her individuality.

In the story “Two Kinds”, author Amy Tan, who is a Chinese-American, describes the conflicts in the relationship of a mother and daughter living in California. The protagonist in this story Jing-mei Woo’s mother is born and raised in China, and immigrates to the United States to escape from the Chinese Civil War. For many years she maintained complete Chinese traditional values, and has been abided by it deliberately. This kind of traditional Chinese culture has also affected her daughter profoundly. However, Jing-mei is born and raised in the United States. Despite she has a Chinese mother; she is unfamiliar and uncomfortable with Chinese

Throughout the novel The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston, the past is incorporated into the present through talk-stories combined into each chapter. Kingston uses talk-stories, to examine the intermingling of Chinese myths and lived experiences. These stories influence the life of the narrator as the past is constantly spoken about from the time she is young until the novel ends and she becomes an adult. Kingston incorporates two cultures. She is not a direct recipient of Chinese culture, but she has her own sense of talk-story, that she learns from her mother, which tells the old Chinese stories with a sense of myth, in a new American way. This is a way of weaving two cultures together, bringing the Chinese past into her present American life.

The excerpt, "No Name Woman", from Maxine Hong Kingston's book, Woman Warrior, gives insight into her life as a Chinese girl raised in America through a tragic story of her aunt's life, a young woman raised in a village in China in the early 1900s. The story shows the consequences beliefs, taught by parents, have on a child's life. Kingston attempts to figure out what role the teachings of her parents should have on her life, a similar attempt for many of us in the world. Lessons taught by our parents, the people who brought us into this world, help guide us into the people we become as adults. Hopefully, the guidance is positive.

The theme of “voiceless woman” throughout the book “the woman warrior” is of great importance. Maxine Kingston narrates several stories in which gives clear examples on how woman in her family are diminished and silenced by Chinese culture. The author not only provides a voice for herself but also for other women in her family and in her community that did not had the opportunity to speak out and tell their stories.

Cynthia Sau-ling Wong realizes that The Woman Warrior provides “Two aspects of Kingston writing, its double ambivalence to the culture her parents brought from China and to the U.S. culture that also claims her” (87). Thus, it is important to note that the Chinese females’ issues and their identities are the central concern in Kingston’s book. She speaks about the Chinese women’s everlasting suffering under the hand of their society throughout companioning her new life and culture with her mother old stories about Chinese women and their lives in China. Actually, her memoir does not only represent her inner rebellion against American racism, but also it shows her disrespect to many cultural principles in her native culture because it is a patriarchal society. Kingston confesses, “Sometimes I hated the ghosts [Americans] for not letting us talk; sometimes I hated the secrecy of the Chinese” (183). Marianne Hirsch explains,“ The Woman Warrior is also suffused with “feminist anger.” The opening myth suggest that the author subjects as strenuously to the patriarchal practices of her ancestral culture as to the racist treatment of her forefathers in their adopted country” (240). Here, Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiography, The Woman Warrior, features a young Chinese-American constantly searching for "an unusual bird" that would serve as her impeccable guide on her quest for individuality (49). Instead of the flawless guide she seeks, Kingston develops under the influence of other teachers who either seem more fallible or less realistic. Dependent upon their guidance, she grows under the influence of American and Chinese schools and the role models of Brave Orchid, Fa Mu Lan, and Moon Orchid. Her education by these counselors consequently causes her to abandon her search for an escort, the bird to be found somewhere in the measureless sky,

In The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston crafts a fictitious memoir of her girlhood among ghosts. The book’s classification as a memoir incited significant debate, and the authenticity of her representation of Chinese American culture was contested by Asian American scholars and authors. The Woman Warrior is ingenuitive in its manipulation of the autobiographical genre. Kingston integrates the value of storytelling in her memoir and relates it to dominant themes about silence, cultural authenticity, and the cultivation of identity. Throughout her work, Kingston reaches a variety of conclusions about the stories her mother told her by writing interpretations of her mother, Brave Orchid’s, “talk-story”. Brave Orchid’s talk-story is a form

Response: Early on in the story, the author already established the morals that her community has been built upon. In this quote they use a hyperbole to show what the aunt did which was have relationship with another man instead of caring for her family and community. It shows the very strong importance of community and following community morals. Individualism and self-morals looks like it will be frowned upon for the remainder of the story. She may have not liked the man she was with right now, but due to the morals already built upon, she couldn’t define herself to her community that it’s okay to commit adultery or remarry.

In the first chapter of The Woman Warrior, No Name Woman, Kingston tells the story her mother told her as a teenager about her aunt’s untimely death. Throughout the story, many remarks proving the empowerment of Chinese women are made. In the middle of the story, Kingston’s mother stops to say, “Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born” (Kingston 5). This is seemingly demeaning, but is actually empowering.

Here the key role of “talk-story” comes to scene, an oral-narrative serving a specific purpose with which Brave Orchid, Maxine Hong Kingston’s mother, teaches her the traditions and culture of China that are to define her position in life, even though in American soil. In The Woman Warrior, this storytelling begins at the time of Kingston’s menarche with a cautionary account, “whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on” (Kingston 9), about the dangers of disregarding the unwritten cultural norms that are invested upon Asian