Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

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Introduction Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, published in 1976, is an assemblage of undisclosed memoirs that put together “talk-stories” and false realities to demonstrate the hardship that a second-generation Chinese-American faces in trying to battle the muting barriers of a home known only through stories and a new nation, America, that is not yet accommodating for Chinese immigrants. The significance of the title is that it is through the lens of a woman warrior to Kingston chooses to see her life. Additionally, the subtitle of the book signals to the reader that this autobiography is not going to be a traditional one, but rather attack issues of foreignness and cultural identity within the reality of life. This autobiographic novel is divided into five chapters and is set in three different places: the New Society Village in China, a medical school in Canton, and Kingston’s American home, Stockton, California. Throughout the novel women are vehemently oppressed by other women due to the cultural view of women are inferior to men and useless. The first chapter, “No Name Women” illustrates the tale of Kingston’s aunt, who gives birth to a bastard child in a pigsty, kills herself and child in a well, and is shunned after her death to the effect that her entire existence is erased and unacknowledged. The second chapter, “White Tigers,” depicts the epic story of Fa Mu Lan, a fierce woman warrior that leads men into battle to overthrow a cruel empire. This story is then contrasted with …show more content…

She does this by stitching together different stories of Chinese women and creates the parallel between speechlessness and the ability to survive in society. As the stories unfold and Kingston matures, she manipulates this concept and ideal into a message by using subthemes of ethnic clashes, misogyny, and distorted

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