The Warrior Woman Warrior

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.

A warrior is recognized as sonmeone who battles for his/her beliefs. Even after receiving mortal wounds many times, such a person never leaves the battlefield. However, the inspiring and metaphorical idea of a warrior can certainly extend beyond the actual battlefield, and into the universal battle of living life. A woman must face this world like a warrior. She must endure the pain of a past that oppressed her, the adversity of a present that is only beginning to understand her, and a future that will continuously test her. From the beginning of time, Native American women have been a driving force in their cultures, retaining their immense strength throughout

The author argues the “combat masculine-warrior paradigm is the essence of military culture. This paradigm persists today even with the presence of “others” (e.g. women and gays) who do not fit the stereotypical image of combatant or masculine warrior.” In a 5-paragraph essay, discuss how the presence of women or gays will cause the military culture to change.

The memoir, The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston, is about Maxine’s childhood in America after her mother moved to America from China. The author, Maxine Hong Kingston, talks about Brave Orchid, Maxine’s mother, to show that extrinsic factors influenced Maxine’s ability to become a woman warrior. The first extrinsic factor that is significant is American and Chinese culture. This impacts Maxine Hong Kingston’s ability to be a warrior because the cultures are very different and can change her opinions on people, “ghosts”, and herself. To start off, in the first chapter, “No Name Woman”, Brave Orchid tells Maxine a story about Maxine’s aunt who is the No Name Woman.

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.

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

In The Woman Warrior, Kingston describes herself bullying a voiceless girls in order to illustrate how difficult it was finding her own voice while growing up in America. In the sixth grade, Kingston begins to dislike a girl in her class. Her hatred stems from realizing how similar she is to the girl. They both picked last for games, struggle in class, and follow their older sisters around. Kingston views the girl as being weak and this infuriates her.

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.

Identity does not have one source, and as someone lives their life, everything that they experience has an impact on the person that they will be in the future. The book The Woman Warrior delves into the influences on author Maxine Hong Kingston's identity, particularly the experiences that shape the parts of her that are attributed to her being an American woman with parents who are Chinese immigrants. Claiming Narrative Power, Recreating Female Selfhood by Joanne S. Frye points out how Kingston’s book clearly builds a sense of self through stories and real experiences. The book pushes the boundaries of the definition of a memoir, moving from Kingston’s almost complete separation from the stories she tells to her recounting her own experiences

I am not going to be a slave or a wife” (Kingston 201). As Kingston found a voice for herself she wrote this novel and gave those suppressed females a voice for themselves so they would not be suppressed by empowering them with a powerful weapon which is

These expectations increased when she was in the presence of “great power, [her] mother talking story” (20). In one particular situation, the narrator recalls her mother singing about Fa Mu Lan, the woman warrior. Although her mother expected her daughter to become a wife or a slave, the narrator had a different idea; she would “grow up a woman warrior” (20). As a young girl, she said that she “couldn’t tell where the stories left off and the dreams began” (19). This is the case in “White Tigers.” The narrator’s dream-state takes readers into the mind of a girl who attempts to please her mother and entire family by becoming a woman warrior. This is possibly an attempt to subside much of the harsh ridicule she receives from her mother due to cultural differences. Although this is a key factor in her early childhood, she learns to block out these criticisms as she grows older.

This story is unique because Kingston actually places herself in the role of the warrior in the story; she says, “We made a sling for the baby inside my big armor, and rode back into the thickest part of the fighting. The umbilical cord flew with my red flag and made us laugh.” This depiction of her fighting while carrying her infant in her arms shows how a woman can fight and nurture at the same time. She can both give but also take lives, which is something a man is unable to do. This illustrates Kingston belief that woman are not subservient, but in some cases, better than men in some respects.

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

“In my visions,” said Yellow Moon, “I saw that death that was coming. I tried to warn my people, but they would not listen; they say I am a woman, not warrior- women are born to farm, cook, and raise the young.

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