Woman Warrior

3 Pages 859 Words

East Meets West

Children raised in a culture different from their parents’ often present an interesting viewpoint. The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is no exception. Maxine Hong Kingston masterfully blends the mythical storytelling of Old China with her past and present experiences in the United States. In doing so, she addresses several different angles of this culture clash, including the role of women in each society, the backward logic in both languages, and the general resistance the author’s mother faces to cultural change. Kingston addresses these issues in a stream of consciousness format that enables her to fade in and out of different setting without ever formally notifying the reader.
Kingston spends much of the book analyzing the role of women in Chinese society. The book opens with an oral history, given by the author’s mother (Brave Orchid), of a nameless aunt in Old China who committed adultery. The people of village responded to strayed morals by ransacking her family’s home. In response, she killed herself and her bastard child. The subservience of women can also be found the narrator’s own childhood experiences. It seems every time Kingston turns around she is being denied some right or privilege a boy would enjoy; she is consistently referred to as a “slave”. Much of the family goes along with this, “Throughout childhood my sister said ‘When I grow up, I want to be a slave,’ and my parents would laugh, encouraging her.”, ironic when one considers that many women in China were real slaves. Women of higher family status were viewed more as trophy’s devoid of responsibility or leadership. Such is the case for Moon Orchid, Brave Orchid’s sister, who she comes to America infuriated over her husband’s decades long abandonment of her. She proves herself to be inadequate of handling even the most simple of tasks; and when the time came for her to confront h...