The Woman Warrior: Memoirs Of A Girlhood Among Ghosts
In Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiography The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Kingston struggles to assimilate into American culture while living in Chinese culture at home. Her conflict in identity leads her to self-invention as displayed by her idea of American-femininity and the fictitious image of the Woman Warrior, thus contradicting the idea of America as a melting pot.
Kingston retains both her Chinese and American culture by merging the two together. The tradition of talk-stories and fictitious elements like the Woman Warrior and Fa Mu Lan are evident in the structure of her memoir through which she perceives herself (Li 499). She expresses this part of her heritage when she addresses the audience, “Here is a story my mother told me, not when I was young, but recently, when I told her I also talk-story. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine” (Kingston 78). Kingston keeps alive this part of Chinese culture, but makes it her own. She creates her own endings as opposed to passing on talk-story the exact way her mother told them. …show more content…
The metaphor came about to describe the fusion of various groups into one distinct people known as “Ex pluribus unum.” Ralph Waldo Emerson used this term to describe same “fusing process” that turned an emigrant into an American. The individuality and traits of the immigrant, be it his race or religion, fuse down into the melting pot. In America, the idea of the melting pot meant that identity was formed not by the blood, but by “the notion of individual, inalienable human rights that transcend group identity.” However, American history has made evident the violation of this ideal by means of racism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and other prejudices
Kingston retains both her Chinese and American culture by merging the two together. The tradition of talk-stories and fictitious elements like the Woman Warrior and Fa Mu Lan are evident in the structure of her memoir through which she perceives herself (Li 499). She expresses this part of her heritage when she addresses the audience, “Here is a story my mother told me, not when I was young, but recently, when I told her I also talk-story. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine” (Kingston 78). Kingston keeps alive this part of Chinese culture, but makes it her own. She creates her own endings as opposed to passing on talk-story the exact way her mother told them. …show more content…
The metaphor came about to describe the fusion of various groups into one distinct people known as “Ex pluribus unum.” Ralph Waldo Emerson used this term to describe same “fusing process” that turned an emigrant into an American. The individuality and traits of the immigrant, be it his race or religion, fuse down into the melting pot. In America, the idea of the melting pot meant that identity was formed not by the blood, but by “the notion of individual, inalienable human rights that transcend group identity.” However, American history has made evident the violation of this ideal by means of racism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and other prejudices