The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

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Maxine Hong Kingston, Chinese-American author of her first book The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, opens with the first chapter “No Name Woman” where she writes about her struggle to distinguish her cultural identity through an impartial analysis of her deceased aunt’s denied existence. Grew up in American culture, Kingston analyzes the possible reasons behind her disavowed aunt’s dishonorable pregnancy, and her village’s subsequent raid upon her household. Kingston explains how strict Chinese culture fails to be practical in American society. Kingston describes how she rebelliously breaks the family’s cultural taboo by mentioning the exiled aunt and how she defiantly acknowledged the existence of her aunt’s life. In doing so, Kingston understood that she lost Chinese values imposed by her family, which paralleled her actions to that of her aunt’s capital crime in her village. Kingston did not write this chapter in veneration of her aunt, but with the intention to provide insight to her understanding of herself as a Chinese-American woman. Today there are many wom...

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