Analysis Of The Woman Warrior By Maxine Hong Kingston

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club explores the conflicts between two generations and two different cultures. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a novel that touches upon the relationships and conflicts of Chinese mothers and their American raised daughters.

“When I discover who I am, I will be free.” ~Ralph Ellison With a cultural identity as unclear as her own, Sarah Howe grew up questioning the human condition, specifically regarding the idea of belonging. Yet despite her great efforts in discovering what it means to have a bicultural heritage, her journey of understanding is forever ongoing.

Cisneros uses ethnic and thematic elements to portray the girl's evolution. Through many hardships and life-changing experiences, Esperanza slowly blossoms from an innocent child into a mature young woman. Some of the major ethnic elements that greatly impact the story are the culture, mindset, and tradition of her people when concerning women. For example, in the story, many girls who Esperanza shares a close bond to currently lead lives of solitude and oppression. Because of this, Esperanza feels as if she needs to break free from her heritage.

Throughout her memoir, The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston laments on the gender roles prevalent in both her own culture and the United States, as well as the disdain she feels for the ideology driving these beliefs and the difficulties she’s faced resulting from it. In “White Tigers,” Kingston displays this theme through the use of the epic hero quest and paralleling common staples of the genre in her own story, effectively demonstrating the importance of her own personal message, feminism and female empowerment, through this process. Specifically, Kingston utilizes elements such as the quest itself, the constant struggle and setbacks faced by the protagonist as they attempt to achieve their goal, and the characteristics possessed by the main hero of the tale, Fa Mu Lan, in order

Hsiu-chuan Lee discusses the criticism of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Kingston about the use of discursive community crossing the boundaries of genres/disciplines. Lee explains the different genre shifts in the novel to show how the different chapters contains myth, story, and memory as a way to develop different meaning. By analyzing the motif of silence, Lee reveals the Kingston’s intention of breaking the silence imposed by her mother through the various stories and how the silence emphasizes a difference between the mother and daughter. With the difference comes the various cultures mentioned in the story—Chinese, Chinese-American, and American—and the influence of these cultures on the characters in the novel. Lee also explains that

As discussed in the previous chapter, cultural and language barrier have caused serious obstacles for the mothers and daughters. Not being able to see and think from each other’s perspective blocks the path to effective communication which result in silence between them. The focus of this chapter is to analysis in details of Jing-mei’s change after her mother’s death and her trip to China to meet her lost sisters, which symbolizes that her split identity is healed and her relationship with her mother is reconciled as well. The mother-daughter relationships between the other mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club will also be studied When Jing-mei is young, she is the same as the other three daughters - an outsider of their mothers’ world. She laughs at her mother’s “fractured English” and she “[grows] impatient” when her mother speaks Chinese (40).

In the poem, "When I Was Growing Up”, Nellie Wong relates the struggles of a Chinese girl growing up, searching to find her voice in a predominantly white cultural majority. The speaker begins the poem with, “I know now that once I longed to be white,” (1). This speaker longs for the privileges she attributes to being a member of the cultural majority. Ashamed of her darker Asian skin and Chinese culture, the speaker laments, “…I could not change, I could not shed / my skin…” (49, 50).

Her higher education level is only a path to marry better. A qualified woman should be tolerant towards the demand of her husband, parents and the society. These gender stereotypes rooted in the Chinese history are like fog, numbing and redirecting the self-revolution of Chinese female. LI Ruijue,a relatively minor character in Ba Jin’s masterpiece:Family, represents a brand group of female who are situating their gender role all life long as a typical eastern lady:they are imprisoned in the exquisite house,staying far away from the noises in the outside world,they learn the" three obedience and four virtues" along with the basic knowledge of poem-writing in their early childhood. The influence of this sort of knowledge pushed them to bear the heavy burden of old morals and norms3（Zhou, F. (1999).

Title Idk You tell me ??? “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” is an Dramatic novel written by Author, Amy Tan. The novel discusses the relationship between an immigrant mother from China and her daughter. Without communicating a relationship can be hurtful. In the novel LuLing Liu Young the mother of Ruth was going through a phase that her ability to remember things was decreasing which has a huge effect on a person’s daily functions.

Footbinding in China: Fighting a Thousand Year Tradition Through Public Relations The footbinding practice prevailed in China for 1000 years; it did not only deform, mutilate and manipulate women physically, but also introduce a young girl to the patriarchal power that would control her entire life. The presence of Western missionaries and colonialists, mixed with the Chinese elites and reformists led to the anti-footbinding movements. In the anti-footbinding movements, public relations played an essential role to educate bound feet women, and influence public opinions, which eventually helped to terminate this practice.

In this book, “The Woman Warrior”, by Maxine Hong Kingston, wrote about her life as Chinese-American. She focuses on strong female warriors, idolising qualities like taking control of your life without anyone controlling you. Kingston saw examples of how to make your own life, yours. Kingston explains that there were many actions about what it takes to be brave and being an experienced fighter that she explains what it really takes to be one.

A society can change an individual’s point of view on a certain group of people or things. In the books, The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston is a pungent fiction novel that is about destiny and struggles of living as a Chinese female, and Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel is a fiction novel about a poignant love story between a couple. These books clearly show that society and an individual are closely related. Society can change an individual’s destiny through a community. In The Woman Warrior, society relates to the Chinese traditions and some stereotypes about Chinese people’s behaviors, and the individuals are Kingston, her aunt and Brave Orchid.

Ruisha Yang The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston “I refused to cook. When I had to wash dishes, I would crack one or two. ‘Bad girl,’ my mother yelled, and sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn’t a bad girl almost a boy?”(Kingston 47). By simply isolating the quote from the content, it seems to be describing a lazy teenage girl who’s in denial of doing chores and feeling proud of doing so.

In The Woman Warrior, Kingston describes the everyday ghosts she sees as a symbolic reference to the unknown people who she cannot identify with in order to illustrate to the reader how isolated she felt around the ghosts. As Kingston and her family continue to live in America, they perceive everyone as unknown because they are very different by culture, race, and way of living. Kingston feels isolated because she is not able to speak English very well, everyone around her thinks she is "strange" because she does not look "normal" in an American society. In addition, her parents do not pay as much attention to her as they do with her brothers because they cherish them over her. She does not care about her grades because her parents would only

Point of View on Culture     Among many literatures about Asian and Chinese culture “Saving Sourdi” by May-Lee Chai is one.   This short story is about a young girl, Nea, and her sister, Sourdi, and what happens when Sourdi grows up when Nea does not want her to. Their family are Chinese and they moved to America.