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China culture in brief
China culture in brief
China culture in brief
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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...
Jonathan D. Spence weaves together fact and fiction in his book The Death of Woman Wang. Approaching history through the eyes of those who lived it, he tells a story of those affected by history rather than solely recounting the historical events themselves. By incorporating factual evidence, contextualizing the scene, and introducing individual accounts, he chronicles events and experiences in a person’s life rather than episodes in history. Spence pulls together the narrative from a factual local history of T’an-ch’eng by scholar Fenge K’o-ts’an, the memoir of magistrate Huang Liu-hung, and fictional stories by writer P’u Sung-ling. The book closely resembles an historical fiction while still maintaining the integrity of an historical reconstruction.
In Maxine Hong Kingston story, “No Name Woman,” the author told a story of her aunt who was punished for committing adultery and died in order to express her thought and spirit of revolt of the patriarchal oppression in the old Chinese society. My essay will analyze the rhetoric and the technique of using different narrators to represent the article and expound the significance of using those methods in the article.
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston portrays the complicated relationship between her and her mother, while growing up as a Chinese female in an American environment. She was surrounded by expectations and ideals about the inferior role that her culture imposed on women. In an ongoing battle with herself and her heritage, Kingston struggles to escape limitations on women that Chinese culture set. However, she eventually learns to accept both cultures as part of who she is. I was able to related to her as a Chinese female born and raised in America. I have faced the stereotypes and expectations that she had encountered my whole life and I too, have learned to accept both my Chinese and American culture.
In the story “Listening to Ghosts” Malea Powell talks about the native Americans on challenges and educational practices. The story is about the native American living in America before the British came to ruin their lives. This effect caused the Native Americans to disappear for good and became shadows. Afterwards there were different theories about the beliefs such as white guy philosopher's theory and western culture theory.The white guy’s philosopher's theory states that the stories were special and central civilized.Western culture, people thought that they were “savages” and “civilized”.
Imagination is a quality that everyone has, but only some are capable of using. Maxine Hong Kingston wrote “No Name Woman” using a great deal of her imagination. She uses this imagination to give a story to a person whose name has been forgotten. A person whose entire life was erased from the family’s history. Her story was not written to amuse or entertain, but rather to share her aunts’ story, a story that no one else would ever share. The use of imagination in Kingston’s creative nonfiction is the foundation of the story. It fills the gaps of reality while creating a perfect path to show respect to Kingston’s aunt, and simultaneously explains her disagreement with the women in her culture.
The “prodigal” aunt in Maxine Hong Kingston’s essay No Name Woman, was shunned from her family and ultimately ended up taking her life and her bastard child’s, as a result of public shaming. Instead of being heralded as a heroine and champion of women’s rights, the aunt’s legacy is one of shame and embarrassment that has been passed down through generations. While this story’s roots are Chinese, the issue at hand is multi-cultural. Women suffer from gender inequality worldwide.
In the chapter "White Tigers" from her book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston first fantasizes of a Chinese woman warrior before switching back to the reality of her American life as a woman. Using her imagination, Kingston dreams of a strong female avenger who manages to satisfy often opposing roles, such as warrior and mother and who receives honor and respect from her family. Yet in her true life, Kingston faces a much different world in which she struggles to fight for her beliefs and encounters disapproval from her parents. Employing her fantasy which starkly contrasts her real life, Kingston provides an alternate, more liberated view of a woman's role and abilities which reflects her own aspirations and wishes for an ideal life.
The ability to tell one’s own story, to speak one’s mind, is the best antidote to powerlessness. Tan’s writing instills agency and visibility in Chinese American women. The silence is broken, and their new voices are constructed in collective storytelling, a language of community, without denying or erasing the different positions such collaboration encounters. Tan compels each of her characters to tell their own story in their own words, thus (re)creating the meanings of their life. The interrelated narratives make sense only if readers can discern the specificities of each woman’s story as located within the novel.
Bucci, Diane Todd. "Chinese Americans and the Borderland Experience on Golden Mountain: The Development of a Chinese American Identity in The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts." Ethnic Studies Review 30.1/2 (2007): 1-11. Ethnic NewsWatch. Web. 12 Dec. 2011. .
As a writer, and author of the essay "No Name Woman", Maxine Hong Kingston finds herself continuing to struggle with her sense of identity. She feels a sense of betrayal to her family, torn between her loyalty to them, and her desire to write about her aunt. She feels that as she writes about her, revealing her story, her aunt is "haunting" her even today. She writes" The Chinese are always frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute."
In the novel The Woman 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 spirits are there but physical appearance is a mystery.
Chinese-Americans authors Amy Tan and Gish Jen have both grappled with the idea of mixed identity in America. For them, a generational problem develops over time, and cultural displacement occurs as family lines expand. While this is not the problem in and of itself, indeed, it is natural for current culture to gain foothold over distant culture, it serves as the backdrop for the disorientation that occurs between generations. In their novels, Tan and Jen pinpoint the cause of this unbalance in the active dismissal of Chinese mothers by their Chinese-American children.
The patriarchal repression of Chinese women is illustrated by Kingston's story of No Name Woman, whose adulterous pregnancy is punished when the villagers raid the family home. Cast out by her humiliated family, she births the baby and then drowns herself and her child. Her family exile her from memory by acting as if "she had never been born" (3) -- indeed, when the narrator's mother tells the story, she prefaces it with a strict injunction to secrecy so as not to upset the narrator's father, who "denies her" (3). By denying No Name Woman a name and place in history, leaving her "forever hungry," (16) the patriarchy exerts the ultimate repression in its attempt to banish the transgressor from history. Yet her ghost continues to exist in a liminal space, remaining on the fringes of memory as a cautionary tale passed down by women, but is denied full existence by the men who "do not want to hear her name" (15).
“Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She tested our strengths to establish realities”(5). In the book “The Woman Warrior,” Maxine Kingston is most interested in finding out about Chinese culture and history and relating them to her emerging American sense of self. One of the main ways she does so is listening to her mother’s talk-stories about the family’s Chinese past and applying them to her life.
The Dilemma of a Ghost is a short play written by the Ghanaian writer, Ama Ata Aidoo. The story is about a young Ghanaian man, Ato, currently studying in America. Here, he meets and falls in love with Eulalie; an African-American girl who lives in America. When he returns home with his new bride, Ato is torn between his family’s traditional custom against his wife’s western culture. His marriage and his wife’s behaviour become sources of great criticism from both family members and the Ghanaian community at large. The writer uses various scenarios to point out the difference between the African traditional culture and the modern western culture.