Kingston

Struggle to Find Self 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 paternal aunt, whom the family say’s is an embarrassment to the point that they refuse to mention the aunts name. Kingston begins to talk about her mother,Brave Orchid, who studied in a medical school before joining her husband in America. As continuing Kingston talks about Fa Mu Lan a great warrior

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

society so that they can construct a coherent self and achieve wholeness, in The Woman Warrior however, Kingston cannot reconcile. The fact is, Kingston has internalized so many doctrinal values of the patriarchy, that she incapable of discerning a middle ground between slavery and rebellion. Throughout the memoir it is apparent

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 be but wives or slaves” (Kingston 19). The words of her elders engrained in Kingston and her female peers their place of women, enslaved to their husbands and bound to housework. Yet Kingston does not accept this reality and instead plunges into a powerful tale of a female who

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 out the meaning behind this subtitle, one has to try to see what Kingston means when she and her family use the term "ghost." When people think of ghosts, it can be said that thoughts of death and non-existence come to mind. When this term is used

It is here where we see Kingston use the term "ghost" in a manner to mean "stranger." She writes, "America has been full of machines and ghosts – Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts Five-and-Dime Ghosts." This description

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

chapter, “A Song For A Barbarian Reed Pipe”, Kingston expressed the idea of cultural aspects and how they can hinder a woman’s ability in society. Kingston talked about how she was silent for most of her life. However, it was not only her. As she stated, “[t]he other Chinese girls did not talk either…so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl," (cite). Their silence was based on their traditional Chinese culture. Now, I can connect why Kingston brought up the way Chinese women were because

others? Imperative to answering this question, in fact the answer itself, is a personal understanding of what is “I” and what is “other”. Despite the ostensive brevity of the question, 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

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 Chinese society and how they differ for the expectations of men. She writes: “when we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves” (Kingston 19). Many