notion and cohesive whole of a nation. It’s the particular way factors such as culture, language and tradition build a nation. In this essay I will examine how Hong Kong (HK) horror is empirical to the nation’s identity. My case study will be ‘A Chinese Ghost Story’ (1987) as well as other supportive substantiations i.e. Books and websites. The integrity within Chinas national identity is said to be ephemeral changing since the archaic China. After The Treaty of Nanjing (1842-1997) was signed to end the
fictitious nature of ghosts. It displays that the meaning of the word “ghost” is equivocal. In supplementary words, the word “ghost” is multivalued, that way that ghosts can purpose in extra than one way. The word “ghost” originates from the Aged English word “gast,” and its synonyms are “soul, spirit [good or bad spirit], existence, breath,” and “demon” (etymonline.com). In the book, The Woman Warrior, that is, ironically, subtitled as Memoirs of a Girlhood Amid Ghosts, the author, Maxine Hong
The word “ghost,” is officially defined by Webster’s Dictionary as, “the soul of a dead person thought of as living in an unseen world or as appearing to living people,” but has been know to hold countless other meanings throughout history. In Maxine Kingston’s memoir, Woman Warrior, ghosts are a reoccurring theme and are represented in many different ways, both through the living and the dead. To Kingston, disembodied spirits, forgotten lovers, outcasts, deceased family members, and even things
Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston uses ghosts to represent a battle between American and Chinese cultures. The two cultures have different views of what a ghost is. The Chinese believe the ghost spirits may be of people dead or alive. Chinese culture recognizes foreigners and unfamiliar people as ghosts because, like American ghosts, they are mysterious creatures of the unknown. Americans view ghosts as spirits of the dead that either help or haunt people. American ghosts may or may not be real. There
Analysis of Ghosts in Woman Warrior In Chapter 3 of Woman Warrior, Kingston portrays “ghosts” as people who she does not quite associate herself with directly. She argues, “America has been full of machines and ghosts” (96), and then goes on to classify the many different types of these “ghosts”. Thus, at this point in the book, ghosts appear to be actual people. There are “Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts” (97). These
of a Girlhood Among Ghost by Maxine Hong Kingston, she refers to most people as ghost. She considered anyone who is not Chinese as a ghost. Kingston labels herself as a Chinese-American and she labels herself as a ghost too. This term is used throughout the entire book. In the chapter Shaman, it is used more than any other chapter. Kingston has her own meaning and interpretation of ghosts. Ghosts to her are living spirits, such as the people she calls ghost in this chapter. Ghost are people without
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. Since her mother's talk-story was one of the major forces of her childhood and since she herself is now talking-story in writing this book, stories, factual and fictional, are an inherent part of Kingston's
Appreciation of Chinese Ghost Tale Sung Ting-Po and the Ghost The story Sung Ting-Po and the Ghost tells the story of a man living in Nan-yang, whose name was Sung Ting-po. At the time when Ting-po was a young man, he had ever met a ghost when he was walking on the night of a day. Ting-po told the ghost that he was also a ghost, and they went together to Yuan market. On their way, the ghost suspected him twice, and Sung Ting-po answered that he was a new ghost, thus in some ways he might still
Hong Kingston is a Chinese American woman whose first book won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976. Her follow-up China Men won the National Book Award (biography.com, 2016, para. 1). Most of Kingston’s books relate to her life. For instance, is her book ‘The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts’, The Chapter “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” was about her experience in school and the other chapter was “No Name Woman” which was about her aunt. In Chinese culture everything
Tan was given the Chinese name An-Mei, which stands for blessings from America (McCarthy). To them she was the blessing that they had received after their own struggles. Tan’s father came to America after WWII to become a minister (Amy Tan). Even though it seemed like Tan’s life was running smoothly tragedy struck. Both Tan’s father and older brother died of a brain tumor when Tan was only fifteen years old (Wiener 27). In her works, Amy Tan focuses on the struggles that Chinese-American women face
Examine in brief the reasons why the Yulanpen or Ghost Festival becomes so popular in China. Introduction In Buddhism, “Yu-lan” is a foreign word describing the pitiable fate of those handing upside-down in the subterranean prisons of hell. While “pen” is the Chinese word indicating a bowl or a tray in which offering are placed. Thus, yu-lan-pen usually means the bowl in which are placed offerings to monks given with the intention of rescuing one’s ancestors from the fate of “hanging upside-down”
Kingston wrote The Woman Warrior as a collection of stories from her childhood. She is a child of Chinese immigrants who grew up in America, and battled between the culture she was living in and the one Chinese culture her mother tried to preserve. One aspect of Chinese culture that is different between Maxine and her mother, Brave Orchid, is the distinction between ghosts for each person. Maxine and her mother encounter different types of ghosts, and have thus have different reactions than the other
Amy Tan was born February 19, 1952 in Oakland California. Her family lived in several communities in Northern California, both parents are Chinese immigrants. Her father named John Tan was an electrical engineer, he also had a second job as a Baptist minister. He came to America to escape the turmoil of the Chinese Civil War. Amy’s mother is named Daisy who inspires her book The Kitchen God’s Wife. Her mother divorces her first husband who abused her, but had custody of her three daughters. She escapes
Introduction Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, published in 1976, is an assemblage of undisclosed memoirs that put together “talk-stories” and false realities to demonstrate the hardship that a second-generation Chinese-American faces in trying to battle the muting barriers of a home known only through stories and a new nation, America, that is not yet accommodating for Chinese immigrants. The significance of the title is that it is through the lens of a woman
O’Connor’s story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior”, and Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”, revolve on the issue of race. Morrison and O’Connor focus on the theme of race specifically between blacks and whites in America. It could be said that Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior” concentrates on the racial difference between Asian and Caucasian but race is not made to be a big issue in this novel, since almost all of the characters is ethnically Chinese. Instead
Learn from the Stories Having two considerably different cultures can cause a strife with one’s identity. In “No Name Woman,” Maxine Kingston’s mother tells her a story of her aunt that committed adultery which therefore led to her segregation from her own family and villagers. Kingston’s mother asserts that the story should not be told by anyone and the story’s purpose was to strike fear in her daughter. Then, Kingston explores the different scenarios that could have led to her aunt’s suppressed
of the Ghost in Morrison's Beloved and Kingston's No Name Woman The eponymous ghosts which haunt Toni Morrison's Beloved and Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" (excerpted from The Woman Warrior) embody the consequence of transgressing societal boundaries through adultery and murder. While the wider thematic concerns of both books differ, however both authors use the ghost figure to represent a repressed historical past that is awakened in their narrative retelling of the stories. The ghosts
Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghost” Maxine Hong Kingston is a critically acclaimed memoir published in 1975 that presents her struggles and experiences during girlhood life in America as an immigrant Chinese girl. Finding voice of silenced women is the fundamental theme of “The Woman Warrior.” Through her memoirs, Maxine Hong Kingston gives a special language for the voiceless women to find their own identities. Kingston largely figures out the lives of Chinese American women she evidently knows
orders; she followed. ‘If you tell your family, I 'll beat you. I 'll kill you. Be, here again, next week." In her first version of the story, she says her aunt was a rape victim because "women in the old China did not choose with who they had sex with." She vilifies not only the rapist but all the village men because, she asserts, they victimized women as a rule. The Chinese culture erred the aunt because of her keeping silent, but her fear had to constant and inescapable. This made matters worse because
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