Kingston upon Thames

Isabelle Baumfree was born into slavery in Ulster, New York, 1797. She was one of 12 kids in her family. When she was 46 she changed her name to Sojourner Truth. Her parents were James and Sojourner Truth. She mainly spoke dutch. The family’s owner was Colonel Hardenbergh. Later Sojourner was sold to John Neely a slave owner know to be violent. At the Neely farm most people called her Belle. Sojourner married a man named Robert from a neighboring farm. They had two daughters.…

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.…

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 her aunt, often debating the distinction between accuracy and personal experience. The story not only describes the aunt’s struggle but also paves the way for her niece to help sort out her often confusing emotions. Kingston becomes a…

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…

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. Building upon…

each portrays a woman figure along with talk-stories: Kingston’s long-dead aunt in “No Name Woman”; female warrior Fa Mu Lan in “White Tigers”; Brave Orchid, Kingston’s mother in “Shaman”; Moon Orchid, Kingston’s aunt in “At the Western Palace”; Kingston herself at last. The chapters integrated the series of talk-stories with the narrator’s inner self feeling the ache of being split between the two cultures, to show her growth and development of realization. Each chapter carries their own unique…