Kingston In The Woman Warrior

In “No Name Woman”, Maxine Kingston’s ancestral line serves as a life lesson, whereas in “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”, Alice Walker inherits culture and hope. Kingston recounts the first time hearing of her aunt “who killed herself” due to the fact that she was pregnant, and “could not have been pregnant… because her husband had been gone for years”; the mom adds a reminder: “Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you were never born”. Kingston’s aunt disrespected the honor of her family and her village by her lack of faith to her husband, and creating another person dependent on the village for food, which is always scarce. Her ancestry and aunt serve as a lesson to always respect family and their well being, or risk being forgotten

In The Woman Warrior, Kingston develops the motif of comparing herself to a swordswoman in order to illustrate how the talk stories of Fa Mu Lan aid her in combating the racism and oppression she faces as a Chinese woman in America through embodying the power of a woman warrior she possesses in her fantasies. Throughout the chapter White Tiger, Kingston explores the mythical story of Fa Mu Lan, placing herself in the role of the woman warrior and explaining her fantasy of living with an old man and woman, who carve the path to her success as a warrior. Later in the chapter, she contrasts Mulan's grievances to her own difficulties as a Chinese-American. Kingston ends the chapter by comparing herself to Mulan through stating,

A member of the Executive Committee of the Vegetarian Society once questioned Gandhi, “Why is it that you never open your lips at a committee meeting? You are a drone” (Cain 189). Though the world today certainly knows of Gandhi, his peers once saw him as a drone as a result of his silence. Cultures linked with silence can conflict with other, more vocal cultures: a prominent example is the silence of Asia in contrast with the openness of America. Maxine Hong Kingston delves into this clash in her 1976 memoir The Woman Warrior, throughout which a young, insecure girl develops a voice of her own, gaining an increased appreciation for her Chinese-American heritage in the process. The world that she lives in values open communication, often

The narrator’s mother tells her story of her aunt as a cautionary tale, and in doing so draws a connection between the two. The narrator’s menstruation (Yue Jin in Chinese, as in “the moon’s passing” – once again, the roundness motif) mirrors the her aunt’s, her “forerunner[’s]” (8) “protruding melon of a stomach” (3). Indeed, the narrator views her childhood, barred from simple joys of flying “high kites” and “carnival ride[s]” and having to “pa[y] in guilt” (6) when she dares disobey, as markedly similar to her aunt’s life. Under the feudal system, women are relegated to the role of extending the descent line into perpetuity. Roundness, as critic Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong describes, is “mindlessly self-perpetuating; if a symbol of perfection and self-sufficiency, a circle also represents confinement” (“Necessity and Extravagance in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Art and the Ethnic Experience”

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.

The book, Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston is a memoir about a girl named Kingston and her past experiences and stories that involve myths and beliefs that her mother talks about throughout her life. In Chapter 1, when her mother told Kingston about an aunt she never knew she had, Kingston promised her mother that she “must not tell anyone” what her mother was about to tell her (Kingston 7). Her mother tells her that Kingston’s “father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well” and they all live as if she has never been born since she was a disgrace to her family (Kingston 7). Kingston writes this memoir as a break through as she struggles to have a voice since she’s been silenced all her life. Chapter 3 talks about

"The Woman Warrior" consists of five stories which focuses on five women: Kingston's long-dead aunt, "No-Name Woman"; a mythical female warrior, Fa Mu Lan; Kingston's mother, Brave Orchid; Kingston's aunt, Moon Orchid; and finally Kingston herself. Based on her mother's stories, which are integrated with Kingston's imagination, "The Woman Warrior" reveals her past childhood experiences, and explores her struggle to reconcile her Chinese heritage with her American identity. It is only at the very end that Kingston realizes that, through her writing, she can express her concern about the unfairness toward the voiceless Chinese women.

In this chapter Kingston’s mother would tell her stories of famous warriors but then contradict herself by saying that she would end up a housemaid and slave.

Kingston is still an immature girl and puts herself first but her mother states that you should always put family first. “I got straight A’s mama”(45). Maxine says, trying to impress her mother. Kingston’s mother leaves her with another comment that keeps her wondering: “Let me tell you a true story about a girl who saved her village” (45). Kingston ponders to herself, wondering what “her village” signified. “It was important that I do something big and fine now, or else my parents would sell me when we made our way back to China”(46). Kingston clearly doesn’t fully

Though she also wonders whether her aunt “kept rollicking company,” Kingston partly dismisses the theory because she “does not know any women like that” (311). Additionally, Kingston, many times, addresses the oppressive gender inequalities that her aunt faced. For example she describes how her grandparents “expected [her aunt] alone to keep the traditional ways, which her brothers, now among the barbarians, could

Maxine Hong Kingston ‘The Woman warrior’ takes place in No Society Village, a medical school in Canton, and Stockton,California, where Kingston was born. The novel starts with Kingston’s paternal aunt, whom the family say’s is an embarrassment and refuses to mention the aunts name. Then Kingston starts talking about her mother, Brave Orchid, who studied in a medical school before she joined with her husband in America. In the novel Kingston mentions a lot of people that are her family, friends, heroines and more. What Kingston wants is to find who she is.

Kingston illustrates silence in a variety of forms throughout the narrative. Early in the text we are presented with this theme of silence in two separate time periods. First we have the mother telling the story of the aunt in secret to a young Kingston who has just begun menstruating as a cautionary tale on how to conduct herself in a particular manner as a Chinese-American woman. Kingston begins her narrative with the introduction of this forced silence as she looks back at her mother telling her, “You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you. In China your father has a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born” (3). The mother is demanding Kingston to remain silent and requiring her to be obedient to this command while breaking this silence herself by speaking this story behind her husbands back.

The third function of cultural legacies, such as family stories allows for bonding like the second and the first functions, but it provides family members to teach each other coping strategies outside of the family. Kingston and her mother have opposite coping strategies, her mother copes with death by forgetting and moving on with daily tasks as soon as possible, but Kingston copes through death by talking about the issues to process and handle the situation. Kingston’s mother dealt with the aunt’s suicide without sorrow, viewing the entire ordeal as an annoyance instead of a cry for help from the aunt, and it seems as if she believed the aunt caused an issue instead of the problem is her suicide. The mother reacts harshly to the aunt’s death

The destructive power of silence is explored throughout much of The Woman Warrior. Looking through the eyes of Kingston, one is to perceive the traditional Chinese society as full of dark secrecies and carefully hushed family scandals. In “No Name Woman”, Kingston's

Instead,rising from the ashes was the destined hero. The warrior. The woman who would be an unmovable force. A force to be reckoned with. She knew being queen wouldn’t make her weak. She didn’t want that life,though. She wanted to prove that more than just a few woman could be warriors,even heros. She wanted to show who she could be-who she would be.”