Analysis Of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs Of A Girlhood Among Ghosts

Writing is one of the many ways people try to understand their identity. In the book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston, she reveals that voice, through the use of talk-stories and her words, allows her the freedom to own the independence needed to reach a closer understanding of her own identity. Talk-stories, defined by Jenessa Job in “The Woman Warrior: A Question of Genre,” are “…verbally relayed stories based upon Chinese myth and fact” (83). Kingston uses talk-story to retell her aunt, No Name Woman, and her mother, Brave Orchid’s, stories. As well, she talk-stories her life, to give readers a better understanding of her identity as an American-Chinese woman.
In the first section of The Woman Warrior, Kingston's mother talk-stories of "No Name Woman", Kingston's aunt. Her mother gives little
facts about her aunt except for the necessary information.
She tells Kingston this story when she starts her menstrual cycle, to keep her from embarrassing the family. In the story, No Name Woman was married to a man who went to America. While he was away she became pregnant with another man’s child, putting shame on her and the family. After the child was born, she killed herself and the child. No one is to speak her name; they are to pretend she never existed. Since Kingston knows nothing of her aunt she makes up stories to fill in the blanks bring back to life her aunt. In “Treading the Narrative Way between Myth and Madness,” by Mary Zeiss Stange, she also explains how Kingston filled in her aunt’s story. “However, Kingston cannot rest satisfied with this fragmentary, cautionary tale. She fills in the outline of the story, imaging a variety of possible scenarios, suggesting a number of conclusions as to what happened to her aunt, and why” (20). This helps her find her identity through giving her aunt a
voice and allowing her to be able to understand her ancestor. “Unless I see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help” (Kingston 8). Although, Kingston believes her aunt to be weak by killing herself and not facing her punishment, she still shows love for her by writing about her, giving her a voice, and thinking up stories about her. These stories help show Kingston’s love and kindness toward her family. By giving her aunt a voice Kingston is able to better understand her ancestor and her Chinese heritage. This allows her to find her own voice and be the first in her family to brave imagining and thinking of her aunt. This shows that Kingston is brave and defies some of the Chinese traditions.
Another talk-story told to her was of her mother, Brave Orchid. In these "stories" Brave Orchid tells of her time in China before she came to America and when her sister, Moon Orchid, came to America. Kingston gets to see how her mother lived and who she is as a person. This helps her be able to understand her family and get a perspective on her own identity. Kingston, like her mother, was a tough woman who worked all her life. Kingston explains in The Woman Warrior that like her mother she works all the time; she also, tells her mother to not worry about her starving then clarifies that she knows how to kill and prepare food and knows to work even when times are hard (106). She explains how Chinese females are only believed to be good for being a wife or a slave. She wants to break that and become something; she doesn’t like how little the Chinese think of women, how they think of them as a waste of money. Job explains, “In a Question of Genre,” that a part of Kingston’s personality is confused due to the struggle she faces as the two cultures push-and-pull with her cultural identity. Job goes on to explain that this conflict with the two cultures is due to Kingston’s inability to please her Chinese parents and at the same time attain American success. Job feels that Kingston must learn to find a sense of balance between the cultures to understand that part of her personality (83-84). When Moon Orchid comes to America, readers get a better understanding of Brave Orchid’s children and how they have tried to integrate themselves into American customs. “How greedy to play with presents in front of the giver. How impolite (‘untraditional’ in Chinese) her children were” (Kingston 121). This allows her to get a perspective on her identity, finding that she is confused on which culture to be a part of. She is in a tug-of-war with herself over being part of the Chinese culture or part of the American culture. Kingston became self-reliant at a young age when she learned that no matter how hard she tried she could not please her parents. All she wants from her parents is to be loved, accepted, and wanted. She tried to be the best daughter she could, but felt like she was never good enough and her parents thought her to be a nuisance.
After hearing these talk-stories, Kingston reflects, using talk-story, on her past as a child. She writes of some of the mistakes she has made such as, bullying a girl who never talked, until the girl cried, and stealing money from a cash register to buy candy for her family and friends. She also writes of how she would get into fights at school and she pulled up the family’s garden out of anger. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston lists that she picked on a girl even as she cried and stole from a cash register to buy candy for everyone she knew, including strangers. That out of anger she pulled up the onions in the garden, tried to fly by jumping head-first off a dresser, and got into fight at her Chinese school (197). From reading the book readers learn how Kingston saw the quiet girl to be an extension of herself, which she hated and wanted to change. Later in life, Kingston writes of how she regrets bullied the girl. In “The Woman Warrior: Claiming Narrative Power, Recreating Female Selfhood,” by Joanne S. Frye, she explains why Kingston bullied the girl:
“… she tells of her physical and psychological abuse of another Chinese American girl with whom Kingston herself obviously identifies for the ‘quiet one’ shares Kingston’s own earlier refusal to speak aloud in public and her inability to participate in American life…. The painful retelling of the abuse and of her subsequent healing solitude becomes the attempt now to reinterpret her own past, to free herself from both the silence and the aggression, to alleviate the evident guilt she feels, and to understand the sources of the person she has become, somehow straddling Chinese and American realities and accepting her female identity” (2).
While trying to integrate into American culture, Kingston and her siblings were thought to be different by their Chinese family and friends. “…were ourselves ghost-like. They called us a kind of ghost.” (Kingston 183). In this passage Kingston uses the term ghost to signify people who were not Chinese. While trying to become American-Chinese, Kingston and some of the other girls she went to school with, whispered to make themselves seem like they were American-feminine. Kingston also writes how she tried to become an American-female while trying to escape being a Chinese-female. She admits to being embarrassed of her mom and her Chinese culture. For example, when the pharmacist's son made a delivery mistake, Kingston’s mother made her go to the pharmacist for free candy for her family. Due to what Kingston witnessed and the talk-stories she heard, she felt that every family had a crazy member. She believed herself to be the crazy member of her family because she acted out, trying to get away from the Chinese female stereotype. Being confused about whether she was American or Chinese and trying to be both added to this feeling of being crazy. Since her parents were Chinese immigrants and didn’t understand American culture, she found it hard to combine her two cultures together. When Kingston is older, she becomes an outspoken, confident woman.
In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston, she uses talk-story and her words to allow her the independence needed to discover her identity. Through the talk-story about her aunt, No Name Woman, Kingston finds love and kindness toward her family and ancestors and bravery in herself. In the story about her mother, Brave Orchid, and her aunt, Moon Orchid, she learns that she is a tough woman like her mother and self-reliant. She also discovers that she struggles with trying to bring her two cultures together. Lastly, in revisiting her past, Kingston comes to terms with her mistakes and becomes an outspoken, confident woman. Work Cited
Frye, Joanne S. “The Woman Warrior: Claiming Narrative Power, Recreating Female
Selfhood.” Faith of a (Woman) Writer. Greenwood, 1988. PDF file.
Job, Jenessa. “The Woman Warrior: A Question of Genre.” PDF file.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Warrior Woman: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.
New York: Vintage International Edition, 1989. Print.
Stange, Mary Zeiss. “Treading the Narrative Way between Myth and Madness: Maxine Hong
Kingston and Contemporary Women’s Autobiography.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 3.1 (1987): 15-28. PDF file.