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Different stereotypes in american born Chinese
Essay on woman warrior
Different stereotypes in american born Chinese
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Introduction
“The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghost” Maxine Hong Kingston is a critically acclaimed memoir published in 1975 that presents her struggles and experiences during girlhood life in America as an immigrant Chinese girl. Finding voice of silenced women is the fundamental theme of “The Woman Warrior.” Through her memoirs, Maxine Hong Kingston gives a special language for the voiceless women to find their own identities. Kingston largely figures out the lives of Chinese American women she evidently knows. She tells the talk-stories of her mom, Brave Orchid, her nameless aunt, No Name Woman, her aunt, Moon Orchid, and the warriors, Fa Mu Lan and Ts’ai Yen. It is a memoir of Kingston’s girlhood and a coming-of-age story. In her memoir, Kingston explores daughter relationship, motherhood, sisterhood, wife relationship, childbearing, child rearing, and patriarchy. “The Woman Warrior” is not a traditional tale, but Kingston’s girlhood memoirs that make her work a collage. Maxine puts forth an unanswered question how a Chinese-American can find the identity when the immigrants hide and change their names (mostly nameless) in America.
Chinese-American Women
“The Woman Warrior” is a story of a Chinese girl’s childhood life and experiences in California and shares family stories and Chinese legends. “The Woman Warrior” is a magnificently written memoir of the author, Maxine Hong Kingston, but is a pungent, truth about the slavish life of Chinese women. From her mother’s talk-stories, she understands that only a brave, wily woman can withstand in the patriarchal Chinese society. Kingston presents the two worlds, one about life in China, and another about life in America. America is the place where her parents emigr...
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...nese immigration was illegal. Kingston presents the emotional and cathartic experience in “The Woman Warrior.” She feels that she be marginalized by the voicelessness of the women in the male-dominated Chinese society. Maxine puts forth an unanswered question how a Chinese-American can find the identity when the immigrants hide and change their names (mostly nameless) in America.
Works Cited
Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Print.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1976. Print.
Rishoi, Christy. From Girl to Woman: American Women’s Coming-of-age Narratives. Albany: State U of New York, 2003. Print.
Ya-Jie, Zhang. “A Chinese Woman’s Response to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.” Melus 13.3/4 (1986): 103. Print.
Soon after Papa’s arrest, Mama relocated the family to the Japanese immigrant ghetto on Terminal Island. For Mama this was a comfort in the company of other Japanese but for Jeanne it was a frightening experience. It was the first time she had lived around other people of Japanese heritage and this fear was also reinforced by the threat that her father would sell her to the “Chinaman” if she behaved badly. In this ghetto Jeanne and he ten year old brother were teased and harassed by the other children in their classes because they could not speak Japanese and were already in the second grade. Jeanne and Kiyo had to avoid the other children’s jeers. After living there for two mo...
Rosenberg, Rosalind. Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century. New York. Hill and Wang, 1992.
Hirata, Lucie Chen. 1979. “Chinese Immigrant Women in Nineteenth-Century California.” In Women of America. Ed. C.R. Berkin and M.B. Norton. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co.
Since people who have different identities view the American Dream in a variety of perspectives, individuals need to find identities in order to have a deep understanding of obstacles they will face and voices they want. In The Woman Warrior, Maxing Hong Kingston, a Chinese American, struggles to find her identity which both the traditional Chinese culture and the American culture have effects on. However, in The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros clearly identifies herself as a Hispanic woman, and pivots to move up economically and socially to speak for her race. Even though both Kingston and Cisneros look for meanings of their identities, they have different approaches of reaching the full understanding.
“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.
Oftentimes the children of immigrants to the United States lose the sense of cultural background in which their parents had tried so desperately to instill within them. According to Walter Shear, “It is an unseen terror that runs through both the distinct social spectrum experienced by the mothers in China and the lack of such social definition in the daughters’ lives.” This “unseen terror” is portrayed in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club as four Chinese women and their American-born daughters struggle to understand one another’s culture and values. The second-generation women in The Joy Luck Club prove to lose their sense of Chinese values, becoming Americanized.
Saiving, Valerie. "The Human Situation: A Feminine View" in Womanspirit Rising, Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds. Harper & Row, 1979, pp. 25-42.
...in her essay “No Name Woman”. The Chinese tradition of story telling is kept by Kingston in her books. Becoming Americanized allowed these women the freedom to show their rebellious side and make their own choices. Rebelling against the ideals of their culture but at the same time preserving some of the heritage they grew up with. Both woman overcame many obstacles and broke free of old cultural ways which allowed them an identity in a new culture. But most importantly they were able to find identity while preserving cultural heritage.
The second and third sections are about the daughters' lives, and the vignettes in each section trace their personality growth and development. Through the eyes of the daughters, we can also see the continuation of the mothers' stories, how they learned to cope in America. In these sections, Amy Tan explores the difficulties in growing up as a Chinese-American and the problems assimilating into modern society. The Chinese-American daughters try their best to become "Americanized," at the same time casting off their heritage while their mothers watch on, dismayed. Social pressures to become like everyone else, and not to be different are what motivate the daughters to resent their nationality. This was a greater problem for Chinese-American daughters that grew up in the 50's, when it was not well accepted to be of an "ethnic" background.
Rappaport, Doreen. American Women, Their Lives in Their Words: Thomas Y. Crowell, New York 1990
Other research has devoted to unveiling the origins and the development of their stereotyping and put them among the historical contextual frameworks (e.g., Kawai, 2003, 2005; Prasso, 2005). Research has shown that those stereotypes are not all without merits. The China doll/geisha girl stereotype, to some degree, presents us with a romanticized woman who embodies many feminine characteristics that are/ were valued and praised. The evolving stereotype of the Asian martial arts mistress features women power, which might have the potentials to free women from the gendered binary of proper femininity and masculinity. Nevertheless, the Western media cultural industry adopts several gender and race policing strategies so as to preserve patriarchy and White supremacy, obscuring the Asian women and diminishing the positive associations those images can possibly imply. The following section critically analyzes two cases, The Memoirs of a Geisha and Nikita, that I consider to typify the stereotypical depictions of Asian women as either the submissive, feminine geisha girl or as a powerful yet threatening martial arts lady. I also seek to examine
...locaust Girlhood Remembered. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2001. Print.
Thompson, mark. “Women in Combat: Shattering the Brass Ceiling.” nationtime.com. Time, 2014. Web. 29 Apr. 2014.
Nussbaum, Felicity. “Risky Business: Feminism Now and Then.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 26.1 (Spring 2007): 81-86. JSTOR. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.
Cultures can shape the identities of individuals. Kingston identity was shape by Chinese and Chinese American culture. "No Name Woman," begins with a talk-story, about Kingston’ aunt she never knew. The aunt had brought disgrace upon her family by having an illegitimate child. In paragraph three, “she could not have been pregnant, you see, because her husband had been gone for years” (621). This shows that Kingston’s aunt had an affair with someone and the result was her pregnancy. She ended up killing herself and her baby by jumping into the family well in China. After hearing the story, Kingston is not allowed to mention her aunt again. The ideas of gender role-play an important role in both cultures. Kingston in her story “No Name Woman” describes some of the gender roles and expectations both women and men had to abide. Some of the gender roles in Kingston story have a semblance with the contemporary American culture.