Her visions of her mother as some kind of monster-deliverer appear in Kingston's nightmares. She states on page 86, "My mother has given me pictures to dream -- nightmare babies that recur." The grotesque imagery of her mother delivering monsters corresponds also with her dreamlike memories of foods they ate when she was a child in China. The images converge in Kingston's head to provide the foundation for her self-image and her identity as a Chinese woman living as an immigrant in the United States. At the close of the "Shaman" chapter she comments about her mom's psychic legacy: "She sends me on my way, working always now and old, dreaming the dreams about shrinking babies," (109).
Kingston's memories and thoughts of her mother are partly created by her nightmares. The distinction between waking and dream life are not important for Kingston's psychological development or the creation of her self-image.…...
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Works Cited
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1977.
oman arrior
My aunt haunts me -- her ghosts drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her," (16). Aunts, the sisters of fathers or mothers who serve as surrogate female role models, play a central role in Maxine Hong Kingston's The oman arrior. However, Kingston's aunts are no warrior women; in fact, "No-Name oman" and "Moon Orchid" embody the antithesis of the woman warrior-heroine. No-Name oman disgraces herself and her family, killing herself and her newborn and forever erasing her name from the family tree. Kingston can but imagine the true spirit of this no-name aunt who haunts her since her mother told her the tale of her downfall. Similarly, Moon Orchid displays shameful characteristics: she cannot pull her weight doing chores when she arrives in America and she hasn't got the gumption to stand up to her husband. Both…...
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Works Cited
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
Woman Warrior
Maxine Kingston's Woman warrior has been a controversial addition to the literature written by Chinese-American writers. The writer has tried to answer the critical question of Chinese-American identity and hence been criticized for adopting an orientalist framework to win approval of the west. The woman warrior speaks of a culture that neatly fits the description of the "Other" in the orientalist framework. It appears alien, remote and immensely degrading to women who were treated like non-human beings by Chinese chauvinistic society. However things changed for the generation of Chinese that grew up in the U.S. Or at least that is what Kingston wants us to believe.
Frank Chin has been the most vocal critic of Kingston's who accused her "of reinforcing white fantasies about Chinese-Americans" (Chin, 1991) and claimed that writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and David Henry Hwang who won approval of the American white readers…...
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References:
Frank Chin. 1991. Come all ye Asian-American writers of the real and the fake. In: Jeffery Paul Chan, et al. (eds.), The big Aiiieeeee: An anthology of Chinese-American and Japanese-American literature. New York: A Meridian Book.
Maxine Hong Kingston. 1981. The woman warrior. London: Picador.
Maxine Hong Kingston. 1998. Cultural mis-readings by American reviewers. In: Laura E. Skandera-Trombley. (ed.), Critical essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. New York G.K. Hall & Co., 100.
Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. Vintage Books, New York.
It is true that while Kingston can use irony against the stereotypes of passivity imposed upon Chinese femininity, at other times she seems to use these stereotypes less self-consciously. Her portrayal of her mother calling white people 'ghosts,' and her decision to name her mother Brave Orchid, seem to reflect cultural construction of Oriental women and Asians in general as superstitious and somewhat primitive in their understanding of the world. But there are always intrusions of the modern world that satirize the tendency to render China as exotic and Oriental. The fact that Kingston calls her mother 'Brave Orchid' and her aunt 'Moon Orchid' are less important than the cultural clash that transpires between their ways of life.
The characters in Kingston's work are always recognizably human in the manner in which they illustrate the immigrant experience. Moon Orchid is shown marveling at as well as being horrified by American ways…...
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References
Kingston, Maxine. The Woman Warrior. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Forbidden Face and the oman arrior
In My Forbidden Face, Latifa narrates a poignant coming-of-age story of a young girl growing up under the brutal regime of the Taliban. Latifa skillfully pulls the reader into a world that seems that of a typical teenager. She writes of "college, girlfriends in search of music tapes, film videos, novels to read avidly in bed in the evening" (11).
Latifa's protected world collapses when the Taliban assume power in 1997. Until then, Latifa had enjoyed the privileges afforded by her family's relative affluence. Latifa went to school, talked to her friends about fashion, dreamed about Indian and Iranian movie stars. She did not wear a veil and donned skirts that were hemmed at the knee. More importantly, the young author had strong career ambitions. Her own mother was a gynecological nurse, while Latifa herself planned for a career in journalism.
Latifa makes it clear that…...
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Works Cited
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1976.
Latifa. My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman's Story. New York: Hyperion Books, 2001.
Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir, the Woman Warrior, may be considered a microcosm of the work as a whole. The section "No Name Woman" incorporates the recurring themes of silence, invisibility, ghosts and using words as weapons.
It is argued, that the story's central theme is the process of "finding a personal voice" (Ling). This is mainly about the Aunt, but also about the mother and the narrator. It is a combination of three female characters each trying to find a voice and fighting against silence, some by choice such as the narrator, some by force, such as the mother, that makes this a powerful theme.
Silence is especially important in the story in relation to women, women are not expected to be outspoken but to live in the background, not expressing their feelings and more importantly, not being expected to have feelings, "the work of preservation demands that the feelings playing…...
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Bibliography
Chatman, S. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon, 1990.
oman
Maxine Hong Kingston's short story "No Name oman" approaches the silencing of women and the potential for their expression in younger generations through the story of the narrator's unnamed, possibly fictional aunt. In particular, the story highlights the way in which women can actually work to reinforce the social standards which keep them silenced and relatively powerless, because the narrator's mother uses the story of the nameless aunt in order to scare the narrator into hewing more closely to cultural norms. However, the narrator is critical enough to see through this ideological imposition, and works to undermine not only her mother's method of control through fear but also the underlying societal assumptions which motivates her mother in the first place. By examining the motivations of the narrator's mother in conjunction with the critical perspective of the narrator, one is able to see how breaking the silence of women's voices…...
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Works Cited
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. Vintage International Ed. New York: Random
House, 1976.
Manchin, Linda. Ed. Women ageing: changing identities, challenging myths. New York:
Maxine Kingston's Contribution To Literature
Maxine Kingston's Contribution to Contemporary Literature
Maxine Hong Kingston's literature falls into the Contemporary Literature movement and many critics consider her work to be an important contribution on the feminist front as well as that of Asian literature. Kingston was born in Stockton, California in 1940 and is the best recognized Asian-American writer of today. (2094) The oman arrior demonstrates the struggle experienced as a Chinese-American growing up in America as well as focusing on other issues such as success and mother-daughter relationships. The oman arrior is able to tell the story of one woman who discovers her self through overcoming the memory of her heritage and finding her place in society.
The oman arrior is formed from what many critics like to call fiction and fact and memory and imagination (Lauter 2094). The book examines the "difficulties in Kingston's development as a woman and as a Chinese-American"…...
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Works Cited
Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Lexington D.C. Heath and Company. 1990.
Kingston, Maxine. The Woman Warrior. New York: McGraw Hill. 2000.
The legend itself tells very significant things about the Native Indian cultures in general and the Oneida culture in particular. The story offers at once hints to the heroic ideal of the Iroquois, to the cult of the female gender specific to some Native American peoples and to the metaphoric significance of the tribe's name. The most important conclusion to be derived from the analysis of the story is therefore the fact that there is a tight connection between the legend and the values and ideals specific to the Oneidas. Other versions of the arrior Maiden legend, such as the variant told by the Hopi tribe, also render the image of feminine modesty combined with spiritual strength. In the Hopi tradition, the maiden actually fights against the enemies of her people, because she is left alone at home with her mother, who at the time of the attack was…...
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Works Cited
Erdoes, Richard and Alfonso Ortiz. American Indian Myths and Legends. New York: Pantheon Fairy Tales and Folklore Library, 1984.
Ironically, Apollo who preferred Troy to Greece in the Trojan ar could have saved his city. Apollo's anger resulted in his beloved city of Troy's destruction. hen Cassandra warned that the Trojan horse would bring about the destruction of Troy, no one believed her, even her own father and mother.
hat is truly tragic about Cassandra, however, is not simply that the Trojan ar results in her eventual demise -- she is taken by Agamemnon at the war's end and killed by his angry and avenging wife Clymmenstra -- but of all the character of the Trojan saga, she alone does not chose her fate. Paris chooses to abscond with Helen, and thus brings about the war. Achilles on the Greek side chooses a short life filled with glory, rather than a long and uneventful life, and thus chooses to fight in the war. But Cassandra did not even chose…...
Queen Hatshepsut, The oman ho ould Be King
If one asks people their opinions about what characteristics describe a hero, the responses will probably vary across cultures and historical periods. Even so, there are several traits which seem to have almost universal appeal. One such trait that is frequently associated with the world's most enduring myths and legends is the depiction of a hero as someone who triumphs over obstacles. In the male-dominated civilization of ancient Greece, strong warriors were considered heroes. In the mythology of ancient Egypt, where religion was important at all levels of society, priest-magicians were often heroes. And in many cultures, women, by using their intelligence and forceful personalities to outwit their foes, came to be known as heroes ("Heroes"). Such was the case with Hatshepsut, an 18th-dynasty pharaoh who was one of only a handful of female rulers across ancient Egypt's three millennia of royal lineage.…...
I do not mind that Shu can ask questions about the novel such as, "hy were Chinese-American businesses separated from the mainstream economy? hy didn't working class immigrant women like herself get any adequate training for the workforce?" (Shu); however, I do not think that it is fair to criticize the novel because these questions are not answered according to Shu's expectations. These are important questions to ask but the novel does not set itself up to answer these questions and should be read as the work of art it was intended to be rather than an historically accurate piece.
I do agree with Shu on the idea, "Kingston combines stories from different sources in Chinese history and culture. She constructs the woman warrior as one who both fulfills her filial obligations to her family and village and cherishes her own dream of love and the world of success" (Shu). This…...
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Works Cited
Shu, Yuan. "Cultural Politics and Chinese-American Female Subjectivity: Rethinking Kingston's Woman Warrior." Melus. 2001. Site Accessed November 16, 2008. http://www.infotrac.galegroup.com
Ghosts in Two Novels
Immigration can be a painful and to a certain extent puzzling experience for those who leave behind a culture, which was starkly different from the one, they encountered upon immigration. We have heard and read numerous tales of immigration and related problems and thus there have been numerous books on the subject and some of them have left an indelible impression on reader's mind. Two such books, which we shall discuss in this paper are "The woman warrior" and "How Garcia Girls lost their accents" written by Maxine Kingston and Julia Alvarez respectively. In the first novel, which is part fiction and part autobiography, author has described her experience as an immigrant in the United States with reference to her native culture and its restrictions. In the second novel, we come across immigration problems of a Latin American family. While ethnicity, racism and cultural differences are the…...
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References
Jerry Berrios, IMMIGRANT FINDS HER VOICE IN GAP BETWEEN CULTURES., The Arizona Republic, 11-01-1998, pp. E14.
Alvarez, Julia, How the Garcia girls lost their accents, Plume Publishers, 1990
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1991.
In Kingston's more feminine rendering of identity, although she resists the ideals of silence and sexual repression, she accepts the idea that women have more permeable boundaries of selfhood and stronger ties to their family in the telling of her text.
Both works point to the inexorability of the past, especially for individuals of ethnic or racial minorities who consider themselves 'other.' Obama is 'other' because of his multiethnic heritage that alienates him from parents as well as friends, and because of the Americanness that separates him from his father. Kingston sees herself as Chinese, but female in a culture as well as a nation that mistrusts this aspect of a woman's self. Both make claims to how their lives speak for other lives -- Obama explicitly with his overly political narration, and his determination to use his struggle as fuel for success as an advocate of community enfranchisement, Kingston…...
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Works Cited
Kingston, Hong Maxine. The Woman Warrior. Vintage, 1989
Obama, Barak. Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
The struggle with tradition and one's personal history comes to the forefront in two other family memoirs, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel and Maxine Hong Kingston's the Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. In the case of the former, Ali is thrust into exile because of her unwillingness to conform to her parents' expectations of what is proper for a woman in her native culture. Maxine Hong Kingston experiences similar issues, although the consequences for her are far less extreme.
In my analysis of the issues outlined above, I intend to show how all three writers transform the personal into the political, effectively establishing that the most minute, particular happenings in our lives can indeed have universal implications.
ibliography
Ali, Ayaan Hirsi. Infidel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage ooks, 1975.
Walls, Jeannette. The Glass…...
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Bibliography
Ali, Ayaan Hirsi. Infidel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle. New York: Scribner, 2006.
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