Memoirs Of Maxine Hong Kingston

Lena St. Clair’s mother always looked out for her by reminding her: “‘You must not walk in any other direction but to school and back home,’… ‘A man can grab you off the streets, sell you to someone else, make you have a baby. Then you’ll kill the baby. And when they find this baby in a garbage can, then what can be done? You’ll go to jail, die there’” (106). The strong diction expresses the depth of Ying-ying’s fear for her daughter’s wellbeing. She uses the words “terrible”, “kill”, and “die” which connote fear and pain. The purpose is to accentuate how ridiculous the precautions women have to take just to feel safe are. The importance of these safety measures is shown and made understandable. Tan uses a hyperbole saying that Lena will kill her child and end up dying in prison. The purpose of amplifying the potential outcome is to convey how crucial it is that Lena knows how to stay safe which helps to understand that the vitality of women having these safety regulations. Waverly argues with her mother about her fiancé and attempts to understand her mother’s resentment towards him. Waverly realizes her mother’s fear saying, “…I knew what lay on the other side: Her side attacks. Her secret weapons. Her uncanny ability to find my weakest spots. But in the brief instant that I had peered over the barriers I could finally see what was really there: an old woman, a wok for her armor, a

While categorizing each and every person living on the face of this Earth through stereotypes remains a virtually-impossible task, culture does in fact play a role in shaping humans into the people they are. Such cultural traits and customs can conflict with those of other cultures, with one prominent example being the silence of Asia contrasted with the openness of America. Maxine Hong Kingston covers these two topics in depth 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 causing those who internalize their feelings to struggle with establishing meaningful interpersonal connections. A character loosely based upon Kingston’s own upbringing and stories that she has heard, Maxine remains unaccepting of her true self until she manages to achieve a cultural balance, learning to respect and somewhat yield to the American value of verbal communication.

When they arrived Mama and Kirst went inside, Annemarie and Ellen went for a walk. They walked down a path where they saw a cat that was eyeing them out. When they reached the ocean Ellen told Annemarie how she and never been to the proper ocean, only the harbour because her mum was afraid of the big sea and that it was to cold. The girls sat on a rock and took their shoes of. When they felt the water they got straight back out again. They then started to talk a they saw Mama waving for them to come back. When they got back Ellen as holding the kitten that was well asleep in her hands. Mama asked if they saw anyone and asked of the girls to make sure that they stayed out of sight from anyone else. They started to make dinner for when Uncle Henrick returned. The girls were getting ready to go to sleep when Ellen asked about her necklace when Annemarie responded by saying that it was in a safe hiding spot. While they were trying to fall asleep they heard the adults talking about why Henrick didn’t have a wife. Annemarie remembered the old times and how things had

The beginning of the memoir confronts the reader with Kingston's forgotten aunt. The little knowledge of her aunt begins

Once upon a time there was a family the mother, father ,and little girl named sha-nae-nae they were walking through the hood. Out of nowhere a gang war broke out and sha-nae-nae’s parents died after that she ran away and moved to main street.

She moves into a new home with her husband, John. She describes the new home as a “colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house” (Gilman). Her description of the home is a negative feeling she has towards the house. The description of the home being haunted shows her terror because she sees it as an imprisonment. In this home, there is a yellow wallpaper in the room she is staying in. She describes the wallpaper, as “the color is repellent, almost revolting; a shouldering unclean yellow” (Gilman). In this wallpaper, she tries to see the figure out the patterns and comes to find a woman. In comes to conclusion that she is living life like the woman in the wallpaper. In the statement, “And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody can climb through that pattern, it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads” (Gilman). She empathizes with the woman in the wallpaper because they are both in pattern that they cannot break through. The pattern being in a home that feels that haunted and with a man that watches every move and empowers her through her

A little speck is shown upon a black and white monitor as the heartbeats of two soon to be parents go rapid. As weeks pass by the doctor announces that the fetus has the gender of a female which leaves the father with a frown planted upon his face. Days, weeks, and months passed by as they attended doctor appointments while making plans for how the child would live. One random day the birth of Shiann Carol Diguilio took place; it was in the early morning hours of November 27th which was also known as thanksgiving day. This child knows not of a home, but of a house she sleeps inside of during the late hours of night. As her life went on she never cared much for the people around her seeing as they never made a positive influence upon her life.

In Chinese traditional culture, since women had lots of limitations in gender role, they have no power to influence their future. In the essay “No Name Woman”, the author Maxine Hong Kingston shows a tragedy of her aunt in the traditional Chinese society and it emphasizes how it is necessary to change men and women’s status. Her aunt got pregnant after her husband left home. It was not accepted by villagers and her family because they thought she do not follow the traditional women rule. The whole family considered aunt as the shame and they kicked her aunt out of the family. Villagers tried to destroy her house, when she gave birth to her baby. At the end, her aunt killed herself with the baby in the well. In order to prevent

Maxine Hong Kingston, in her book No Name Woman states that on the day of her menstrual, her mom revealed a family secret. She starts by saying “You must not tell no one (42).” In China, her husband’s sister drowned herself and the baby in their well. The secret was not only the suicide, but also the existence of the sister-in-law. Her mom said that her husband, father, and brother-in-law left to seek fortune in California, “The Gold Mountain.” The majority of men in the village sought money elsewhere because the village crops were suffering. While the men journey out, the women stayed home. Later in time, her mother noticed the sister-in-law was pregnant. Due to the strict

One of the most striking parts of the novel (that is also similar to previous discussions in Women Writers) deals with abortion. Winnie, after having two children, refuses to bring any more lives into the world because of her abusive husband. She feels for her first two children, Yiku and the late Danru, with such passion, that she aborts her babies rather than subject them to a tortured life with her evil and dominating husband, Wen Fu. Winnie later tells her daughter, Pearl, "I cried to myself, this is a sin - to give a baby such a bad life! . . . In my heart, I was being kind (627)". This situation recalls to mind Maxine Hong Kingston's short story, "No Name Woman", a story in which a similar thing happens for similar reasons. In Kingston's story, the narrator's aunt throws herself as well as her newborn baby into a well to escape a future of ridicule and oppression, not from an abusive spouse, but from a

Vera Claythorne climbs to the top of the stairs clutching the Tenth statue as she thinks “what was the end of that nursery rhyme? Oh right one little indian boy left all alone goes to get married, was that it?” Vera reaches the top of the stairs and goes into her room thinking “hugo i know you're in there, i can feel it i'm going to walk in and see hugo. I'm going to walk in and see hugo on one knee asking me to marry me, one little indian boy gets married” as she stepped into her room she saw a noose hanging from the hook in the ceiling. “That was it one little indian boy all alone goes to hang himself, that was the end of the rhyme” vera walks toward the noose and chair and begins to sob, she then hears a rustling noise coming from the wardrobe

In “No Name Woman,” the repetition of the words black and white gives the impression of a yin yang symbol. Black represents the chaos, what the village tries to avoid. The white symbolizes tradition, what the village wants to continue. Roundness, another characteristic of the yin yang symbol, is used throughout the essay to show the continuation of tradition. The yin yang represents the balance, or equilibrium of the village.

Another story that use story-telling to reveal the relationship between mother and daughter is Maxine Hong Kingston’s No Name Woman. In this story, the narrator’s mother is a Chinese-American who immigrated from China. Even she lives in a foreign country, she still persist the old Chinese tradition. Her daughter, however, seems like she wanted an assimilation with American. She mentions in the story that “I have tried to turn myself American feminine” (245). In spite of this, her mother is a entirely tradition Chinese woman that “[She has] not been able to stop my mother’s screams in public libraries or over telephones. Walking erect (knees straight, toes pointed forward, not pigeon-toed, which is Chinese-feminine) and speaking in an inaudible

All throughout history women have been considered as the weaker sex. A woman without a man by her side commanding her was classified as a deviant since the beginning of time. Even though women have been perceived to be submissive and subjective in history, they have, in fact, been proven to be extremely rebellious, even though it has troubled them more. In Maxine Hong Kingston’s story “No Name Woman” the narrator’s aunt was punished by being erased and forgotten from history because she was accused of committing adultery as she became pregnant years after her husband went the United States. Her getting pregnant demonstrated that she was submissive to the point where she was not able to

The tailor’s widow, Mrs. Nakamura, happens to be watching her neighbor tear down his house when everything in her field of vision flashed white. Acting on motherly instincts, she makes a dash towards her children when suddenly she his hurled into the next room. As she is landing on her feet, tiles and timber knock her down, burying her under the debris of her house. Hearing the cry of her children, Mrs. Nakamura crawled out of the debris and began moving timbers and tiles to rescue her children.