In the criticism, “Questioning Race and Gender Definitions”, Malini Schueller draws light to the expectations of Chinese women and how they are to be quiet and passive in nature. According to Schueller, “The initial story establishes the denial of expression women are condemned to in patriarchy and the cultural stranglehold the narrator must fight in order to express herself” (423). It is this cultural expectation that Kingston rebels against by telling her version of the unnamed woman. Schueller writes, “To articulate herself she must break through the numerous barriers that condemn her to voicelessness” (423). This liberation from the expectations placed on her has not only freed her but given her unnamed aunt a voice as well.…
Usha Pathak Professor DeWalt ENGL 1301 – Summer II 26 July 2017 Summary Response In “No Name Woman” Kingston story is about the unnamed woman who killed herself and her baby by jumping into the water in well at China. The Unnamed Woman was accused of child being born after the rape because her husband was out of the country while that happen. When the baby was born, the people from that places destroyed her house making their family miserable and nowhere to live which actually made her lose the family trust because of what she did.…
In her essay “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” Amy Chua informs the readers of the Chinese way of raising a “stereotypically successful child.” The Chinese childrearing method forbids many activities, including having “playdates” and excelling in drama. Chua’s method is not only extreme but also counterproductive. Firstly, when Chua condescendingly refers to the time a child spends bonding with other children as “playdates,” she is ignoring the vital skill learned through these bonds, these personal connections, which can be advantageous in the professional world.…
Before and after 1949, the gap between the possibilities and limits of Chinese women’s lives was large, where the limits on women far surpassed the possibilities for a prolonged amount of time. Societal views were placed upon women, creating a system in which women must conform to a specific type of person or they would be shunned upon by those around them. This system was what determined the future of a woman in China. In the following stories, “Sealed Off”, by Ailing Zhang, “A Woman Like Me”, by Xi Xi, and “Fin de Siecle Splendor” by Zhu Tianwen, we explore the status of women during these periods of times.…
Kingston experiences gender discrimination at home, especially from her mother and father, who always favor the boys and not the girls. Kingston’s father is said to be so discriminatory that he “refused to eat pastries because he didn 't want to eat the dirt the women kneaded from between their fingers”(Kingston, 98). Chinese believed that woman were dirty, and second to men. The image of men juxtaposes the image of women. Men are thought of as “gifts from God”, while women are thought of as “maggots in the rice” (Kingston, 69-70).…
The memoirs Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen and The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston reflect on experiences in the authors’ lives that have impacted their transition into womanhood. Kaysen has borderline personality disorder and recounts her struggle with mental illness during the time she spends at a mental institution when she was 18 years old. Kingston is Chinese-American and she reflects on her battles with her cultural identity in her coming-of-age memoir. Both Kingston and Kaysen include different types of literary, family and/or cultural documentation in their memoirs: Kaysen strategically places photocopies of her medical records throughout the memoir and also includes an excerpt and her…
Ding Ling’s “New Faith” resembles other stories that she wrote depicting the social conditions which she was concerned about. Namely, those conditions focused on the issue of gender identity as expounded by Tani Barlow’s essay on “Mother.” “New Faith” was not Ding Ling’s first story to focus on the shift of women’s gender identity during the modern era of Chinese civil war. As Barlow points out, Manzhen in “Mother” makes the change from an individual female character to an asexual political entity when she forms a sisterhood with her friends at the normal college.…
Maxine Hong Kingston shows that one can form an identity by breaking silence in The Woman Warrior; Kingston develops this theme through different talk-stories stories her mother tells her. Throughout The Woman Warrior, Kingston gradually finds her own identity by examining heavily weighted talk-stories. Through these stories told to her by her mother and her aunt, she is able to express a part of her which her own experiences cannot explain as a Chinese-American female. Convinced by her mother’s stories, Kingston grew up believing, “we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves” (Kingston 18).…
Yuan Cai’s, The Problems of Women, is a passage from a book written by Yuan Cai. The chinese elite and literate males are the sources’ audience. The book gives advice for other men that are like him and the head of a household. This passage is interesting to me because it pertains to gender and sex roles in the twelfth century. This passage tells me that the culture the author lived in had certain marital and sex standards for males and females.…
The end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century were a venerable period for China. The nineteenth century for China was a time of turmoil. The Boxer and Taiping rebellions, battles over the concessions and trading rights, all followed by the loss in the Sino-Japanese War shook all of China. The people were confused with the results and management of these events and wanted to know what would happen next. China’s search for security and superiority led it to study the very same people who humiliated and defeated them, all for the hope of never losing to anyone again.…
Conflicts In The Work Of Maxine Hong Kingston And Alice Walker Recently I came across two readings that were strong-minded on conflicts that heavily affected the main characters path. These two readings I came across were " No Name Woman" By Maxine Hong Kingston and " Beauty: When The Other Dancer Is The Self" By Alice Walker.…
In 1979 the Family Planning Policy was instituted by Deng Xiaoping as part of the Communist party initiative (Buckley 1). This policy, in effect, was instituted in an effort to limit married citizens to having one child only; this policy is also known as the one-child policy. The policy effected a decrease in fertility rate from about 5.8 births at its peak in 1960s, to less than 2 births in the 1990s. (Branigan 2). As a result, there was a dramatic decline in live births over the next 30 years.…
But closer study reveals the nuances of the interconnected inner and outer quarters of Chinese society and the role of footbinding in lessening the extent of female oppression. Under no circumstance is the ideal of footbinding morally ethical or intrinsically liberating, but within Chinese culture, it was the only act of agency women could perform in order to advance their status in society. Just as men and boys studied for the future, women and girls could bind their feet. Both the inner and outer quarters of ancient China relied on one another, but the Confucian ideals of society enforced a strict patriarchal hierarchy.…
In the world of men, women have no place among power and independence. While Marji and her father were on their way home, Marji’s mother ran to the car crying for Ebi and said, “They insulted me. They said that women like me should be pushed up against a wall and fucked. And then thrown in the garbage” (74). With men around, the women have no rights and are left defenseless against the arrogant men.…
Socio-autobiography There is no society where gender is considered to be insignificant. China is one such society where gender roles and inequalities have developed over time and remain present today. As I have spent the majority of my life in New Zealand, I have been exposed to many Western perspectives on gender. However, being the first generation to grow up in New Zealand meant that many traditional Chinese views on gender norms were still incorporated into my upbringing. This socio-autobiography will explore sociological gender concepts across time and cultures, and how they have shaped my life.…