The Woman Warrior

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

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

A typical warrior is a medieval knight in shining armor fighting for his life and homeland. Today, the definition of what it means to be a warrior has become ambiguous. Often times, we view those willing to sacrifice their lives for others--soldiers, police officers, or firefighters--as warriors. Even expanded in this way, the warrior still has a connotation of physical bravery, masculine strength, and unhindered confidence. However, the word warrior can have an entirely new meaning when we use it

The woman warrior by Maxine Kingston elaborates readers what it was like to grow up as a female Chinese American. Kingston came to America as a little girl with her family. Even though she was in America, she still had to deal with old Chinese traditions. Traditions where women were seen as useless and as slaves. But, Kingston refused to believe that women are worthless. She states, “When one of my parents or the emigrant villagers said, ‘feeding girls is feeding cowbirds’, I would thrash on the

Duality of the Self in The Woman Warrior and The Sympathizer In Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, the narrator’s often describes herself not necessarily as she is, but instead as the idealized version of herself she wishes to be. This idealization is depicted extensively in the chapter “White Tigers,” wherein the narrator retells the story of Fa Mu Lan, a female warrior who takes her father’s place in battle. But not only does the narrator simply retell the story, but she also fantasizes that she becomes

Ap 11 August 2014 The Woman Warrior In The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Kingston illustrates the struggles and the sufferings Chinese women had to face. The author incorporates five anecdotes, each telling the life difficulties and sexism of Chinese women. Kingston's different story does not relate with one another, but she finds a way to reveal what she needed to say. Kingston proves her point at indirectly to the reader even without having a plot. No Name Woman, the first story Kingston

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. In White Tigers, the narrator describes how after learning to be a warrior, she could see everyone dancing, “Whenever I did not eat for long, as

In the Woman Warrior Kingston develops a motif using ghosts in order to illustrate the differences between the Chinese and American cultures. During the novel ghosts are typically represented as the opposing culture and ideas that the Chinese do not understand. After Moon Orchid immigrates to America, her inability to adapt to her new culture slowly takes a toll on her, eventually causing her to go insane. Shortly after she moves in with her sister she starts seeing Mexican ghosts that she thinks

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. Kingston especially hates how the girl does

In The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Brave Orchid (the mother of Kingston) walks the line of parenting between helping her daughter succeed and hurting her. While raising Kingston she always seems to be putting a pressure on her to be better and that she isn’t good enough. By the end of the book we can see that Brave orchid and Kingston’s relationship damaged and they barely speak. Yet despite the fact that it hurt their relationship, Brave Orchid would tell kingston stories of strength