Maxine Hong Kingston's Memoir, The Woman Warrior

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, The Woman Warrior, she intentionally blurs lines between truth and imagination in order to capture the readers with an engaging story while forcing them to take a closer look in order to figure out from whose perspective the story is being told. Especially in the chapter entitled “White Tigers”, this blurring technique benefits her work by adding emotion and her own opinion into the story, contrasting between a fantasy life in China versus her life in America, and Kingston’s personal connection to characters like Fa Mu Lan and later, Ts’ai Yen. Throughout the second chapter of her memoir, “White Tigers”, Kingston recalls the story of Fa Mu Lan, the mythical woman warrior, which her mother tells her as a child

The presence of this contrast is very significant in the chapter, “White Tigers”, because it really shows the audience how little factual knowledge Kingston actually knows about what ancient China looks like and how much of this chapter is actually left to her imagination. This is very evident when Kingston compares a majority of her physical descriptions of China’s nature to art, or uses art similes to describe the environment surrounding her. For example, “. . . I would only see peaks as if shaded in pencil, rocks like charcoal rubbings, everything so murky. There would be just two black strokes – the bird” (Kingston 10). This quote clearly shows how Kingston believes that ancient China looks as artistic as in the pictures she sees, every stroke and smudge purposeful like Chinese tradition. The imagery used to describe ancient China is very different than that is used to describe that of her American life later in the memoir. An example of this is found on page 139 in the chapter entitled “At The Western Palace”, “Business was carried out at one end of the shop, which was long and had benches against two walls. Rows of men sat smoking” (Kingston). American life was always described as ugly, rough, and melancholic, especially when Kingston never knew whether or not she could believe in her mother’s talk stories, reality was a tough break from her