Identity In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston, is a book a young woman trying to develop her own identity. Throughout this book, Kingston spends countless days trying to find herself in the cruel world. In a culture where men superiority rules, Kingston attempts to recognize herself as her own person, and not as a slave. Kingston attempts to create a world where both men and women are treated as equal. Through all of her days and conquests, and in all of her efforts to produce equality, Kingston eventually discovers her own identity. Kingston is on a journey to discover her personal identity. That is to have her own personal uniqueness, not remain a slave. She attempts to discover herself as a Chinese person in an American civilization. However, she grapples to differentiate Chinese from American. Striving to construct her own voice in America, she says, “We American-Chinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American feminine. Apparently we whispered even more softly than the Americans” (Kingston 172). Wanting to be included in the American society, Kingston writes,
She wants to “come to terms” with her correspondence to her culture. However, when she does this, she becomes terrified. Kingston realizes that in the Chinese culture, she has no more value than that of “geese” or “maggots”. She realizes that she is worth no more than just a “slave”, and all this only because she is a woman. This being said, Kingston cannot accept this. Kingston writes, “When one of my parents or the emigrant villagers said,” ‘Feeding girls is [like] feeding cowbirds,’ “I would thrash on the floor and scream so hard I could[not] talk. I could[not] stop” (Kingston 46). The villagers and her own family would continuously repeat the same locution over and over again, but there was nothing she could do to stop that. Filled with rage, she realizes that she is bound to