The Woman Warrior: A Tale of Identity

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 a person does should satisfy people. People were extremely critical that it can affects one’s life. Kingston relates her stories to her life to show how cruel the Chinese culture is. Based on Kingston’s culture, she wrote many books about it.

A Warrior’s Triumph The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston presents the story of a girl trapped between the cultures of her surrounding environment and that which her mother and family have forced upon her. Knowing only the Chinese way of life, this girl’s mother attempts to familiarize her daughter, whom is also the narrator, with the history of their family. The mother shares this heritage through the use of stories in hopes the narrator will be prepared for her ultimate return to China, which is a life completely foreign to her own. Through these stories and the strong influence of the surrounding American culture, the narrator’s life and imagination spin off in a new direction. She is confronted by many obstacles, which cause problems with not only her mother, but also with her attempt to discover her personal identity.

Introduction “The Woman 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. She tells the talk-stories of her mom, Brave Orchid, her nameless aunt, No Name Woman, her aunt, Moon Orchid, and the warriors, Fa Mu Lan and Ts’ai Yen. It is a memoir of Kingston’s girlhood and a coming-of-age story.

In An-mei’s life, her mother and daughter allow others to use them, which Tan represents through the motif of stairs. Mirikitani shares the similar idea in her poem, “For a Daughter Who Leaves”, where a mother is watching as her daughter follows the same unhappy trail she went on in her life. An-mei’s mother passes down advice to An-mei, but both of them could not follow it, resulting in unhappiness for both. The mother in the poem also shares unhappiness and distraught she cannot control. One of the last morales in The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan has An-mei teach her daughter how to be assertive and strong in the world through a lesson of mother’s teaching their daughters to listen to their mothers and then they will grow tall and straight, like a tree.

Maxine, being of the first generation of her family to be born in America, only knows about China from what she hears in her mother’s “talk-stories.” These stories are told to act as lessons on how the Chinese people were and should be, and are often vary critical. In “No Name Woman,” the tale of Maxine’s aunt who was shunned from her family for having an affair shows how careful young women must be when growing up in Chinese culture. “My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devoted pages to her…” (17). Maxine feels remorse and can relate to her aunt because she too feels a sense of alienation from her traditional Chinese and seemingly narrow-minded heritage. With the start of “At the Western Palace,” an encounter between Brave Orchid, Maxine’s mother, and Moon Orchid, her other aunt, shows Maxine how far removed from Chinese culture she really is.

The gulf between these women is sadly acknowledged by Ying-ying St. Clair when she says of her daughter, Lena, "'All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore'" (Tan 242). Ultimately, it falls to the daughters, the second, divided generation, to bridge the gap of understanding and reconnect with their old world mothers. The Joy Luck Club begins with a fable that immediately highlights the importance of language in the immigrant story. It is the tale of a hopeful young woman traveling from China to America to begin a new life. She carries with her a swan, which she hopes to present to her American daughter someday.

The first member of the Joy Luck Club to die was Suyuan Woo. Her daughter, Jing-mei "June" Woo, is asked to sit in and take her mother's place at playing mah jong. Memories of the past are shared by the three women left, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong and Ying-ying St Clair. June Woo learns of the real secret her mother carried to her grave from her mother's friends. The twin baby girls, her half sisters, Suyuan pushed in a Wheelbarrow as she escaped from the Japanese.

Finding the voice to speak "The Woman Warrior" consists of five stories which focuses on five women: Kingston's long-dead aunt, "No-Name Woman"; a mythical female warrior, Fa Mu Lan; Kingston's mother, Brave Orchid; Kingston's aunt, Moon Orchid; and finally Kingston herself. Based on her mother's stories, which are integrated with Kingston's imagination, "The Woman Warrior" reveals her past childhood experiences, and explores her struggle to reconcile her Chinese heritage with her American identity. It is only at the very end that Kingston realizes that, through her writing, she can express her concern about the unfairness toward the voiceless Chinese women. In the beginning of the first chapter, Kingston has made the theme of the book very clear: Chinese women are voiceless. It is notably ironic that the story begins with something that is supposed not to be said: her unnamed dead aunt: "`You must not tell anybody about that', said my mother."

She has not called me that endearment for years-a name to fool the gods”. (108-109). She goes on to recollect the haunting stories of shrinking babies that her mother had filled her mind with symbolizing Kingston’s inability to forget all that her mother’s talk stories had taught her. Kingston’s “writing marks the transition from the position of separation and alienation to that of accommodation and re-position, initiating a positive self-invention instead of a denial of ethnic origin” (Yuan, 301). Talk stories contain strength, shamefulness, positivity, negativity, pain, and love-all important constructs to the formation of Kingston’s self-identity and perception of herself as a female.

Her mother and grandmother strongly encouraged her to think for herself and pursue her interests. After her graduation from Sacred Heart Academy in 1868, she married Oscar Chopin. Sadly, Oscar Chopin died in 1882 due to malaria leaving Kate in great debt. She started her writing career off by publishing stories in magazines like Vogue, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s. Most of Chopin’s stories are centered on women whom were forced to cope with situations such as prostitution, disease, and abuse.