Response To Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

Having enjoyed the time I spent reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior last week and the week beforehand, I opted to spend a bit more time with this masterpiece, and couldn’t be happier to have made such a decision. Page after page features Kingston coming from the heart with openness and honesty. She shows intimacy within the story. This text amounts to that fleshy skin covering each bone she possesses.
Each story is a means by which she can stay alive. Thanks to that honesty which she displays within what she’s written, a reader cannot help but find the experience an enthralling one. He or she can’t avoid finding that which each story offers intriguing. She has a multitude of parts that, when put in togetherness, solve one puzzle

or another.
I am unsure about that which forms her big pictures, and yet there is a rawness/beauty within each story. Thus, although each showcases intensity plus borderline craziness I can appreciate where she’s coming from and how she is approaching her storytelling. Linguistics plus communicating are important themes within The Woman Warrior. Each story Kingston tells involves conflicts betwixt one staying silent plus feeling needy for communicating their personal beliefs plus emotions with the people they love.
Kingston touches upon how frustrating it was coming from a Chinese-American background given how expectations got placed upon her for maintaining quietness.

Kingston tells stories as a means for penetrating those silent walls that kept this woman and not only the people she had love for but also the societal rest at a distance. The violent action Brave Orchid commits against the tongue of Kingston exists as a testament towards how willing she is when it comes to compromising if not destroying things if there’s even a slim possibility of such an anti-heroic deed improving them over time: “I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language. You’ll be able to speak languages that are completely different from one another. You’ll be able to pronounce anything. [The frenulum of your tongue] looked too tight to do those things, so I cut it” (Kingston

164).
One among the more interesting excerpts has to do with how Kingston is timid as far as speaking the English language goes, given how The Woman Warrior exists as an English-language composition. It’s possible that each memoir has gotten intended for supplementing those periods where staying silent was normal for her: “When I went to kindergarten and had to speak English for the first time, I became silent. A dumbness—a shame—still cracks my voice in two, even when I want to say ‘hello’…or ask an easy question in front of the check-out counter, or ask directions of a bus driver” (Kingston 165). Kingston displays all the ways in which a silent demeanor can get compared to those blackish paints belaying each drawing they’re covering up.
The simple fact that no things have gotten articulated thus far isn’t meant for indicating/shouldn’t get considered an indicator of each idea not being available/existent: “My silence was thickest—total—during the three years that I covered [the] paintings [I made for school] with black paint.

I painted layers of black over houses and flowers and suns, and when I drew on the blackboard, I put a layer of chalk on top. I was [creating] a stage curtain, and it was the moment before the curtain parted or rose” (Kingston 165). Kingston also displays all the ways in which there’s no need for languages existing as barriers separating people belonging to unique life circles: “I liked the Negro students (Black Ghosts) best because they laughed the loudest and talked to me as if I were…a daring talker too. One of the Negro girls had her mother coil braids over [both of] her ears Shanghai-style like mine; we were Shanghai twins except that she [got] covered with black like my paintings. Two Negro kids enrolled in Chinese school, and the teachers gave them Chinese names” (Kingston

166).
Given how Kingston doesn’t experience any guilt over maintaining silence before the moment where she gets pressuring into changing, a suggestion gets made by her on how it’s not bad by nature to stay silent: “It was when I found out I had to talk that school became a misery, that the silence became a misery. I did not speak and felt bad each time that I did not speak. […] The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl” (Kingston 166). The way in which Kingston applies more than one culture sensibility creates a sense of uneasiness at the moment where such an application is with a language duo, each having a differentiated history: “I could not understand ‘I.’ The Chinese ‘I’ has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American ‘I,’ [one] wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight? Was it…out of politeness that this writer left off strokes the way a Chinese has to write her own name [both] small and crooked? No, it was not politeness; ‘I’ is a capital and ‘you’ is lower-case” (Kingston 166).
During a meeting involving that female who maintains quietness during a course on Chinese, Kingston shows how insecure she is. She is fearful of a possibility involving silence, when maintained, being the equal of not existing, of how people will forget her: “‘[You are] disgusting,’ I told her. ‘Look at you, snot streaming down your nose, and you won’t say a word to stop it. You’re such a nothing” (Kingston 178).
Kingston reiterates each threat that mom of hers made whilst tormenting that female who maintains quietness. It’s not hard to discern how she’s actually coming to grips with each fear she possesses and taking it out on this innocent female: “What are you going to do for a living? Yeah, you’re going to have to work because you can’t be a housewife. Somebody has to marry you before you can [become] a housewife. And you, you are a plant. Do you know that? That’s all you are if you don’t talk. If you don’t talk, you can’t [own] a personality. You’ll have no personality and no hair. You’ve got to let people [understand how you’ve got] a personality and a brain. You think somebody is going to take care of you all your…life” (Kingston 180).
Kingston getting frustrated as far as each word Brave Orchid says goes exists as a single circumstance from many wherein linguistics collide with truths getting communicated: “That’s what Chinese say. We like to say the opposite” (Kingston 203). Brave Orchid instructs Kingston on means of talking stories, yet additionally ends up doing things in opposition to such a purpose, including cutting the tongue of Kingston. The manner in which Kingston negotiates the relations she has involving that mom of hers can get compared with those negotiations of hers involving means of communicating.