The Woman Warrior Chapter 1 Summary

The Woman Warrior is told in 5 chapters all based on the stories of five women. Kingston’s forever dead aunt, Chapter One “No Name Woman”, a mythical female warrior, Fa Mu Lan, Chapter 2, Kingston’s mother, Brave Orchid Chapter 3, Moon Orchid, Kingston’s aunt, Chapter 4, and finally Kingston herself, Chapter 5.

In the first chapter, “No Name Woman,” begins with an aunt Kingston never knew she had existed or even lived. This aunt had brought disgrace upon her family by having an un-authorized child. She committed suicide by killing both herself and her baby by jumping into a family well in China. When she heard the fable, which is told to be a curse and forbidden, Kingston is never permitted to reference her aunt ever again, and it the story

was forever banished. Instead of speaking of the unpleasant truth, she creates her own history of her aunt instead. She visualizes the ways that her aunt attracted an admirer, comparing her aunt’s actions of quiet uprising against the community to her own rebellion. Kingston also remakes her aunt’s terrifying experience of giving birth in a hole and imagines her aunt’s spirit walking around with no one to give gifts, as this was a Chinese practice. In the end, Kingston is unsure whether she is doing great to her aunt’s thoughts or just wanted her own desires.
“White Tigers” the second chapter is based on another story, one about the mythical female warrior Fa Mu Lan.

Also known as Mulan in the Disney movies. Fa Mu Lan’s story is told through Kingston’s first person narrative. She trains to become a warrior since she was seven years old. She leaves her family to be trained by a group of an old couple and becomes ready to fight. She then returns to her family and they are so glad to see her. They tattooed her, putting the family symbol to represent them. She now leaves, and then leads an army of men or villagers, (and even pretending to be a man herself) against the forces of a corrupt aristocrat and emperor. After the emperor is defeated she returns to her family becoming a wife and mother. This story is sharply compared to Kingston’s own life in America, which she can barely deal with her racist bosses, the color “Nigger Yellow”. However her words are the weapons that defeat the

evil.
The third chapter of The Woman Warrior is “Shaman.

“ Shaman is mainly about Kingston’s mother as a non-parent in China. Brave Orchid, also the antagonist of the stor. Brave Orchid was a powerful healer, wife, and the destroyer of evil spirits. To a young Kingston, Brave Orchid’s past is as stupefy as it is horrific, and a lot of the images from her mother’s story, Chinese babies were left to die, slave girls being bought and sold, a woman being attacked by stones till death by her villagers, those haunt Kingston’s dreams for years. After many disagreement and conflicts, they eventually arrive at some kind of understanding and become normal family people, with warm love.

The title of “At the Western Palace” refers to another of Kingston’s mom’s stories (Brave Orchid.), a ruler who married four women. It is a comparison for her sister Moon Orchid’s (aunt) situation: Moon Orchid’s husband, a successful Los Angeles doctor, he had left her in China and remarried in the United States. Brave Orchid urges her sister into a dreadful encounter with her husband that demands her part as his wife. As a result, Moon Orchid, who doesn’t know anything about the English language, she is left to repel for herself in America. She suddenly goes insane and dies in a California state mental

asylum.
The fifth chapter of the Woman Warrior “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” focuses on the author of this book, Maxine Hong Kingston. This is the last chapter of the whole entire story. In this section it focuses mainly on Kingston’s pre-adult years, drawing her infuriation and frustration in trying to express her and attempting to please a mean and aloof mother. There are a number of characters whose personalities highlight many of her Kingston’s own characteristics, including a reticent Chinese girl whom Kingston tortures as a little girl. In a climatic moment in the chapter, after failing to express her feelings, she erupts verbally at her mother with animosity, complaints and criticisms. Later in her life however, Kingston come to love her mother’s stories, At the end of the chapter she even reveals one herself, the story of Ts’ai Ten, a warrior poetess taken by brute soldiers who returns to the Chinese with songs from another place.