Girlhood among ghosts
For most immigrants, finding identity and carving out a personal space in an alien culture with its peculiar life-styles, heritage, traditions, and language is difficult. Living on the edge of two distinct communities makes it harder to adjust to the standards of the new culture, and at the same time retain all the values of the old one. In her autobiographical novel The Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston dramatizes the conflict of growing up among contradictions and confusions between the home and alien cultures and languages. For much of her life, Kingston feels torn between her Chinese heritage and her American destiny, she oscillates between the two worlds of China and America, functioning in relation to both, yet wholly belonging to neither. Ultimately, however, she is able to reconcile the two disparate cultures and incorporate them into her own story, into one "song."The tales of the women in the book, and particularly of her mother, have a significant influence on the formation of Kingston's identity. But she does not just blindly accept these stories; she tries to reinterpret them through her own vision of the world and her own understanding of how it works. Kingston begins her journey by looking
Born in America to a Chinese family, Kingston is as much a product of two cultures as of two distinct education systems. As a child she has to go to both Chinese and American schools, which fragments her identity even more. She is unable to express herself in the American school: " I read aloud in the first grade, though, and heard the barest whisper with little squeaks come out of my throat . . . the other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl" (150). The American schoolteachers interpret her silence as ineptitude, but her Chinese mentor in her Fa Mu Lan fantasy cautions against speech: "'The first thing you have to learn', the old woman told me, 'is how to be quiet'" (28). Kingston cannot blend with other children in the American school because she is scared of talking. Her teachers misunderstand her when she colors all her pictures black- being full of promise and "mighty operas" (165), they have a great significance to her, but do not make any sense to her teachers. Her childhood silence seems to originate from the conflict between her Chinese upbringing and the ways of an American school, but in the story Kingston represents it as symbolically caused by her mother (China), who seems to have cut her tongue, slicing the frenum, when she was a child. However, little by little, Kingston starts speaking and even tries, although violently, to help another Chinese girl overcome the barrier of muteness. Kingston realizes that without the ability to speak up, one is lost in the world of American culture. She says, "you are a plant. Do you know that? That's all you are if you don't talk. If you don't talk, you ca
Some common words found in the essay are:
Mu Lan, China America, Brave Orchid, Chinese American, , Hong Kingston, America Chinese, american school, american culture, Fa Mu, fa mu lan, don't talk, kingston realizes, kingston's mother, chinese girl, story kingston, chinese heritage, fa mu, mu lan,
Approximate Word count = 1127
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
|
