Hong Kong

Through The Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston recounts on her life as well as her family’s past. Her cultural background calls for many unheard of customs and stories. Kingston’s mother teaches her daughter lessons through stories to show the importance of a message. Both death and ghosts reappear throughout the memoir and how ghosts never die. Kingston describes how revenge is a driving force for many actions throughout the memoir and how death seems to be answer to all issues but is not.…

Maxine Kingston’s story, “No Name Woman” recounts the tale of a young lady who learns the heartbreaking history of her aunt’s illegitimate child. The resulting aftermath is a bevy of turmoil and chaos that ultimately forces her to meet a tragic end. Kingston spends most of her time bordering on the line between fact and fiction, making the readers journey through the story quite complicated. The author is amazing at illustrating what a struggle it is for Maxine to believe certain things about…

Yuchin is the unrealistic character of The Bane of the Internet, a short story written by Ha Jin. This story has an almost humorous tone as two sisters, one who lives in China and the other in New York, communicate with each other. This character and her older sister wrote and sent each other letters via the postal service as their main means of communication until they discovered email. The name of the older sister is unknown but this story is told through her point of view. The narrator is…

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 " No Name Woman" By Maxine Hong Kingston the conflicts the main character faces is that when the Aunt of the writer broke a number of taboos in her…

Finding one's own personal voice is important to individual identity and helps against social injustices. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston is a memoir that invites readers into the life of one Asian American writer. Kingston narrates the story of several women in her family, and how they are oppressed and silenced by Chinese culture. During the narration, Kingston provides her own voice for those women in the culture that did not have the opportunity to speak out for themselves.…

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…

It was April 12th 1865, the slaves of the south were promised an opportunity, a new opening in the world that had for so long been run by whites. With the end of the Civil War, America was supposed to be on to new horizons. Racism was supposed to eventually come to an end in order to make available the same prospect for all peoples, regardless of skin tone or cultural heritage. Instead, what ensued into the 20th and 21st centuries was the ire of prejudice and bigotry from both the minorities and…

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.…

Ruisha Yang The Woman Warrior A novel can be considered as a form of art while it imitates our internal life and experiences in the world or as a crazy telescope that allows us to explore the life of minds. However, the plot is the structure of a novel. As Culler implies, “Aristotle says that plot is the most basic feature of narrative, that good stories must have a beginning, middle, and end, that they gave pleasure because of the rhythm of their ordering...Essentially, though, a plot requires…

In the opening of the first chapter, “No Name Woman”, we can see how Kingston lived in a continual conflict between messages, sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, of two cultures. How could a bridge be built on this terrible emptiness with socialization within a framework of expectations on the one hand and acculturation on the other? The lack of public voice, the silence, the secret kept, formed the loose threads of the story of the aunt who committed suicide and whose name was erased from the…