Maxine Hong Kingston By Maxine Kong - 1199 Words

Maxine Hong Kingston prides herself on her personal strength and character, as well as the ability she developed to assert herself into a culture that is not accepting of her differences. As the daughter of Chinese immigrants living in the US, she was tasked with living a double life, straddling the line between her traditional Chinese upbringing and the environment outside of her home in 1960’s California. She was in many ways a perfectly normal and intelligent child. Through her writing she is able to describe complex interactions from her childhood, detailing her reasoning and understanding of the world. Despite this cleverness and flexibility, she begins her account by describing herself as voiceless, seemingly dumb, and explains how it was that she failed kindergarten. Through this story we get a view of how an intelligent young person might experience difficulties caused by cultural differences, a unique perspective from a first generation American. In this excerpt fro m Woman Warrior, Kingston recounts her experiences as a young person without a voice. Her struggle is deepened by the culturally engrained xenophobia and misogyny that existed in her diverse neighborhood, as well as pressures and extreme obstacles thrown at her by her own mother. The child whom Kingston describes goes through continuous growth in finding her own identity and strength in character, but it is clear that she still carries the fear and pain created by her uniquely difficultShow MoreRelatedThe Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston Essay1208 Words   |  5 PagesIn the novel The Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston uses ghosts to represent a battle between American and Chinese cultures. The two cultures have different views of what a ghost is. The Chinese believe the ghost spirits may be of people dead or alive. Chinese culture recognizes foreigners and unfamiliar people as ghosts because, like American ghosts, they are mysterious creatures of the unknown. Americans view ghosts as spirits of the dead that either help or haunt people. American ghosts mayRead MoreEssay on Chinese and American Ghosts (Woman Warrior)1220 Words   |  5 PagesIn the novel The Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston uses ghosts to represent a battle between American and Chinese cultures. The two cultures have different views of what a ghost is. The Chinese believe the ghost spirits may be of people dead or alive. Chinese culture recognizes foreigners and unfamiliar people as ghosts because, like American ghosts, they are mysterious creatures of the unknown. Americans view ghosts as spirits of the dead that either help or haunt people. American ghosts mayRead MoreThe Western Place By Maxine Hong Kingston899 Words   |  4 PagesWhen Two Different Worlds Collide Throughout the book, â€Å"The Western Place† , by Maxine Hong Kingston, there is a differential gap between the two sisters who come from two different sides of the world. A lot of differences between the two sisters and their personal lifestyles comes from one sister living in America as a Chinese-American and the other sister living in China. In the story Brave Orchid who is the sister that is brave, outspoken, and sometimes cruel sees life as a bundle of opportunitiesRead MoreGender Roles in Sandra Cisneros and Maxine Hong Kingstons Books697 Words   |  3 PagesSandra Cisneros and Maxine Hong Kingston: Gender roles Feminism is often spoken of in generic terms, but the novels of the Hispanic-American author Sandra Cisneros and the Chinese-American Maxine Hong Kingston highlight how, even though the oppression of women may be a nearly universal construct, this oppression inevitably takes on very particular forms, depending upon the social, national, and political context of the authors. The authors collective works highlight the struggle of women from historically-discriminatedRead MoreDescriptive paragraph992 Words   |  4 Pages habits. The following paragraph opens the third chapter of Maxine Hong Kingstons The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Knopf, 1976), a lyrical account of a Chinese-American girl growing up in California. Notice how Kingston integrates informative and descriptive details in this account of the metal tube that holds her mothers diploma from medical school. 4) The Magic Metal Tube by Maxine Hong Kingston Once in a long while, four times so far for me, my mother bringsRead More Mother-Daughter Conflict in Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club Essay2944 Words   |  12 Pagesshould live its life (Liu Wu-Chi). Both Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston recognize the difficulties faced by women in such a regimented society. Kingston in The Woman Warrior tells of the folk sayings that proclaimed the worthlessness of women, such as [t]here’s not profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls, or [w]hen fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls (195,6). According to Anne P. Standley, Kingston tells of her lifelong struggle to fashion an identityRead More Alice Walkers In Love and Trouble Essay2326 Words   |  10 Pagescannot say that Walker’s characters are represented by all women. Apart from black women, there are also other cultural groups that suffer the similar plight as Walker’s characters, such as Chinese-American women, mainland Chinese women in Hong Kong, and so on. I will use the case of Chinese-American women as an example to justify my point. According to Hui, ethnic minority groups, women in particular, are often considered inferior in Western societies, particularly the United States. SheRead More The Search for Identity in Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club Essay3982 Words   |  16 Pageswant to be American. It is in the daughters stories that we identify the generational and cultural conflict that they experience. By telling the stories of both mothers and daughters, Tan initially seems to solve what Linda Hunt, examining Maxine Hong Kingston, describes as a basic problem for a Chinese-American woman: being simultaneously insider (a person who identifies strongly with her cultural group) and outsider (deviant and rebel against tradition), she cannot figure out from which perspective