Kingston and Moraga Essay

878 Words2 Pages

In their books “The Woman Warrior” and “Loving in the War Years,” Maxine Hong Kingston and Cherrie Moraga write about the persistence of social oppression. They also describe the dynamics of race, sexuality, and gender in everyday experience. Through reading these books I have picked up on several significant events which illustrate these issues. The correlation between these two authors is the importance placed upon these issues that seem to be underlying themes in both books.
The persistence of social oppression is an obvious theme in Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior”. One can pickup on this from the first chapter quite easily. Through Kingston’s recount of the story her mother told her about her father’s sister we can see how cruelly women could be treated in China at that time. In this “talk-story” as her mother calls it, we learn that Kingston had an aunt who never left China. This aunt was shunned by her village and family for becoming pregnant by a man who was not her husband. The details surrounding this man and their relationship are shady and uncertain, however the villagers decide to ransack her home, slaughtering the family's livestock and destroying their crop.
The relationship with this story and the theme of social oppression comes later in the chapter. We learn that after her home was destroyed, made outcast by her family, Kingston’s aunt crawls into the barn and gives birth to the child. She feeds the child and later carries it to ...

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