Essay on The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston

struggles to live up to the “Asian or Chinese” model stereotype. She says, “I did not speak and felt bad each time that I did not speak…. The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl”. (166). She becomes disappointed because she wants to share similar aspirations, behaviors, and attitudes with the Americans. Disparately, she admits, “My American life has been such disappointed,”(45). She remarks, “Normal Chinese women’s voices are strong and bossy. We American-Chinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American-feminine. Apparently we whispered even more softly than the Americans” (69).

Thesis: The similarities of coming of age tales and how women grow up and are shaped by love, sex, and marriage. (OR MOTHER HOOD AND COMING OF AGE)

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

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 have played a tremendous role in many countries' armed forces from the past to the present. Women have thoroughly integrated into the armed forces; all positions in the armed forces should be fully accessible to women who can compete with men intellectually and physically.

`When most women were powerless during the late 14th century twenty-three-year-old Isabella I defined a hostile older brother and an inexplicable king to seize control of Castile and Leon. She ended an entire generation’s worth of fighting between Muslims and Christians. She forced North African invaders back over the Mediterranean Sea. She sponsored Christopher Columbus’s trip to the Indies and negotiated Spanish control over the new world. Her reputation stood tall as she annihilated all those who stood against her. She established a rather bloody Inquisition that would darken Spanish reputation for centuries. Whether historians see Isabella as cruel and satanic, or saintly and

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

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.

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.

This need to separate the angelic qualities of women into a totally separate world might come from the desire to protect one’s mother, and plays into the idea of the eternal feminine that must be preserved. “She has no story of her own but gives ‘advice and consolation’ to others, listens, smiles, sympathizes…” (Gilbert and Gubar 815). The aunt is a perfect example of such feminine qualities and represents the untainted light of civilization.

When it comes to combat assignments and the needs of the military, men take precedence over all other considerations, including career prospects of female service members. Female military members have been encouraged to pursue opportunities and career enhancement within the armed forces, which limit them only to the needs and good of the service due to women being not as “similarly situated” as their male counterparts when it comes to strength or aggressiveness, and are not able to handle combat situations.

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 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 Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston presents the story of a girl trapped between the cultures of her surrounding environment and that which her mother and family have forced upon her. Knowing only the Chinese way of life, this girl’s mother attempts to familiarize her daughter, whom is also the narrator, with the history of their family. The mother shares this heritage through the use of stories in hopes the narrator will be prepared for her ultimate return to China, which is a life completely foreign to her own. Through these stories and the strong influence of the surrounding American culture, the narrator’s life and imagination spin off in a new direction. She is confronted by

Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir The Woman Warrior, details the many holes in Kingston's life story. As her family traded in China for America, some of Kingston's family history got lost in the transition. She attempts to uncover her family's past through extrapolating talk-stories. In a memoir reliant on reiterated stories, the reader questions the reliability of the information. These talk-stories retold by Kingston may have transformed into something more than they originally were. As Kingston pieces together the truth for herself, the reader sifts through the talk stories to uncover the true happenings of this memoir.