Impact of Chinese Heritage on Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

The piece describes what she envisioned her time in China would be like; visions of small talk and drinking tea danced in her head (Schmitt 125). This is a bit admirable to a more reserved person because it shows how outgoing she is when diving into a new culture. However, the reality of a language barrier and day to day behavior settled in. A series of uncomfortable exchanges illustrate the challenge of being accepted into a new culture. Described in the essay are people standing around in bath robes and under garments and popping in and out of rooms like some sort of clown

She is significant in Chinese history because of her writings and teachings of the “Admonitions for Women” using a Confucian approach to define appropriate behavior (Gregory p. 123).

In The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston blurs fiction and reality using a poetic, singsong writing style, blending sentences together using sentence structure and diction. She also relies heavily on symbols to reveal inner conflict that she had while growing up Chinese American, trying to determine what was authentically Chinese and what was illusion.

Being an author of several praised works, Maxine Hong Kingston has been deemed a noteworthy American writer since her first book debuted. Her unique style and interesting blend of myth and truth in memoir form garnered her international attention and won her several awards. Kingston’s works have put heavy emphasis on her family history and her experiences as a Chinese-American, so it is no surprise that she has been received well by many and misunderstood by others at the same time. A discussion on one of her most popular works, “No Name Woman”, and a look at the different ways Kingston’s works have been interpreted should reveal how literature can have different meanings depending on what one is looking for.

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

Having two identities is like mastering the dragon ways. In Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1976 The Woman Warrior, she retells about her autobiography in a fictional way and greatly magnifies the art of storytelling. Maxine introduces with the story about her unknown aunt and then transitioning to her favorite story about a woman warrior, Fa Mu Lan. Then she explores about her mother’s past, sister, and interaction with herself. She truly connects every part of the story and creates an identity for herself. The dragon passage illuminates Maxime’s identity and brings her stories into a whole where one must understand one part to find person’s identity.

feels cut in half as if her new American world were to pull her apart

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.

Maxine Kingston in “The Women Warrior” presents a traditional Chinese society that anticipates women not to decide what is best for them all by themselves. Kingston creates a woman who goes beyond this ritual culture constraint and who take up

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.

At this point in her autobiography, Kingston remains disoriented about her position in the two enveloping cultures, and Ling suggests this idea by considering the significance of Kingston's two culturally different responses rather than only one- either American or Chinese.

Kingston begins The Woman Warrior by writing a story which started with her mother insisting that she “must not tell anyone...what I am about to tell you.” (Kingston 3). Kingston’s first written words are a defiance of this silencing. Silence is a motif that permeates the entirety of The Woman Warrior; Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel The Woman Warrior is a series of narrations, vividly recalling stories she has heard throughout her life. These stories clearly depict the oppression of woman in Chinese society. Even though women in Chinese Society traditionally might be considered subservient to men, Kingston viewed them in a different light. She sees women as being equivalent to men, both strong and courageous.

Women did not have any power in Chinese culture. Kingston describes how a man intimidates her aunt by telling her that he will beat and kill her if she tells anyone. It shows men dominance over women because the man is making Kingston’s aunt do anything he wants. In paragraph fifteen, “women in the old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil” (623). It adds to how women in China did not have any voice and were supposed to comply with any thing men said. Women had to be protective mothers. Kingston states, “as a last act of responsibility: She would protect this child as she had protect its father… mothers who love their children take them along” (629). This quote means that women would protect their children and always look out for the best interest for them. Women had to provide food for their family and their gods. In paragraph thirteen, “she plants vegetables gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the fields and eats food left for the gods” (622). It shows one duty of women in Chinese culture and the role they had to follow.

In 1976 Maxine Hong Kingston won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best work of non-fiction for her book The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood among Ghosts, a novel built up from a collection of stories that draw on from Chinese folklore and myth intertwined with her own life’s experiences and episodes from her and other female family members’ life. While labelled as an autobiography, American readers enthusiastically welcomed it as work of fiction that deals with the exotic, mysterious and unfathomable China. This illustrates the why and wherefores of the many readings that this work has originated since its publication. The lack of adherence to one genre, especially autobiography, presents one of the central issues of how