Kingston Woman Warrior Essay

“She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman”(20).These are the true and unforgettable words of Kingston, the main character in Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, The Woman Warrior. The author portrays her memoir as an act of rebellion through using the redemption of her aunt, "No Name Woman", the opposition to Chinese culture, and the discovery of Kingston’s inner-self.    In Chinese culture, one must

interpretation of the story of the No Name Woman when she writes: “Imagining her free with sex doesn’t fit, though. I don’t know any women like that, or men either. Unless I see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help” (Kingston 8). Maxine tries to imagine her aunt as a more sexually liberated woman, but her experiences with Chinese traditions and culture complicate her interpretation of these events. In the following chapter, Kingston further discusses the expectations of women

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

The “No Name Woman” is a failure in Chinese society, but starkly contrasted by the success and fulfillment of traditional expectations demonstrated in the woman warrior, Fa Mu Lan. In the second section of Kingston’s account, White Tiger, the author controversially develops her own retelling of this famous myth with herself as the legendary Chinese figure. Kingston initiates this section stating, “when we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to

In this essay, I decided not to summarize Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior since we have already done that by posting our weekly responses and since it is an open essay; also it might seem too boring for you to read the same thing again. Instead, I wanted to write more on particular subjects that Kingston had talked in the interviews. Watching the video of Kingston’s interview with Josephine Reed at F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference in 2011, gave me deeper understanding and insight

Impact of Chinese Heritage on Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior "Haunted by the power of images? I do feel that I go into madness and chaos. There's a journey of everything falling apart, even the meaning and the order that I can put on something by the writing." —Maxine Hong Kingston It is true that some dream in color, and some dream in black and white. Some dream in Sonic sounds, and some dream in silence. In Maxine Hong Kingston's literary works, the readers enter a soundless

Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior”, in chapter 2 “White Tigers” Kingston says that Chinese immigrants say things such as “better to raise geese than girls”. They also say “Chinese executed women who disguised themselves as soldiers or students, no matter how bravely they fought or how high they scored on the examinations”. I argue that in doing this, the texts suggest shockingly, that Chinese immigrants continue to treat woman as if they are worthless, which is why Maxine Hong Kingston compares herself

In the first chapter of The Woman Warrior, No Name Woman, Kingston tells the story her mother told her as a teenager about her aunt’s untimely death. Throughout the story, many remarks proving the empowerment of Chinese women are made. In the middle of the story, Kingston’s mother stops to say, “Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born” (Kingston 5). This is seemingly demeaning, but is actually empowering. It shows that while Chinese women are thought to

it is an especially challenging one to answer for Maxine Hong Kingston. Throughout her memoir, Woman Warrior, she constantly struggles to define her “I”, or rather her “self”. In this autobiography she attempts to “write [herself] into being” (Gates 57) as an American by reconciling her Chinese heritage with her experience growing up as a second-generation American. To assess the ways in which Maxine does this, Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976), Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Writing, “Race,” and the Difference

Woman Warrior Essay Maxine Hong Kingston's novel, The Woman Warrior is a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories that chronicles her childhood in California. It gives the reader a feeling of how it feels like to be a Chinese American girl growing up with traditional parents in a world that is quite different from theirs. Throughout the novel, both she and her mother refer to the outside world as "ghosts." The subtitle given to the book is Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. To figure