The Woman Warrior Sparknotes

What does womanhood imply? Furthermore, what roles do societal and familial values have in forming female identity? Countless writers examine this question throughout modern literature and discourse, providing intriguing facts, personal accounts, and varying opinions of women’s value and the influence culture plays in self-definition. In 1976, Chinese-American writer, Maxine Hong Kingston, became a significant voice in this discussion in her seminal work, The Woman Warrior: A Girlhood Among Ghosts. This memoir enticingly blends Kingston’s youth as a Chinese-American girl and the stories she developed from Chinese myths her mother retold. Kingston recounts a variety of talk-stories from her mother, Chinese myths, and her own experiences. Although
Kingston ascribes to both Chinese and American cultures, her book discusses the conflict between these realities and her adaptation to combine them to develop her individual, cultural identity. Therefore, Kingston explores the responsibility of receiving a cultural legacy and maintaining it. In Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston demonstrates women’s lives are the continuation of cultural legacies. Kingston reveals the complexities of navigating the incompatible American and Chinese cultures through her own experiences and her mother’s talk-stories, thereby developing her own identity and providing a relevant commentary on the role of women in modern society.
Maxine Hong Kingston published Woman Warrior in 1976, a volatile period of countercultural movements.
United States citizens of all ages questioned the injustices present in society, joining human rights campaigns, the Civil Rights movement, free speech advocacy groups, and second-wave feminist movements. Rapidly, Federal-instituted constructs and long-standing injustices were abandoned in favor of human rights, peace, and progression (Erlich). In an environment of social and political upheaval and liberation, certainly, the concept of an “American” began to be challenged. Decades later, American political theorist, Michael Walzer, boldly declares, “[t]here is no country called America. We live in the United States of America, and we have appropriated the adjective ‘American’ even though we can claim no exclusive title to it” (Walzer 591). There remains a dichotomy regarding “hyphenated Americans” and accepting the influence of other cultures on the United States, a country with an admittedly blended history. Therefore, as writers such as Walzer question: who is a truly an accurate representation of an American? Walzer argues no conventional American should bear this title, rather, every citizen of the United States is an alien. Moreover, this is a global reality with the increasingly globalized world. Ultimately, humans are citizens of the world rather than a singular nation. Interestingly, however, the modern world still clings to some semblance of categorizing its’
peoples.
In this intriguing social climate, Kingston enters a far greater conversation about identity politics.
However, Kingston’s struggle specifically involves the balance between her Chinese heritage and her American life. Kingston comments bitterly, “[e]ven now China wraps double binds around my feet” (Kingston 48). Certainly, the oppression of an ancient culture holds significant weight for Brave Orchid, and by extension, her daughter. As author Patricia Lin Blinde notes, “[f]rom her earliest years, Kingston’s link with China came in the form of tales told by her mother” (Blinde 62). Kingston has never experienced China or lived in the country of her ancestors yet the traditions and standards for Chinese women imprison her daily through her mother. Furthermore, Blinde continues, Kingston’s own sense of “the Chinese part of herself is derived entirely from the absorption of these tales” (Blinde 63). Kingston’s connection to China is not one of personal experience or objectivity, rather she discovers her heritage through the lens of fictional stories of a distant land, impersonal yet undeniably significant. Therefore, Kingston’s struggle is not merely in navigating Chinese and American society, but her own reality contrasted with the folklore from her mother. Kingston states, “[t]hose of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrant built around our childhoods fit into solid America” (Kingston 5). Furthermore, just as Walzer
debated the title “American,” Kingston considers what it means to be “Chinese,” particularly for individuals living outside of the Old Country. As a transnational woman, Kingston recognizes through the remembrance of her childhood that she can only obtain wholeness through reconciling her Chinese heritage with her American reality.