THE WOMAN WARRIOR
By Maxine Hong Kingston
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| THE WOMAN WARRIOR By Maxine Hong Kingston |
Book Summary
Divided into five chapters, each more or less self-contained, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior explores the many forms of adversity women face. Kingston uses women's stories to explore her own cultural history. As a first-generation Chinese-American, she struggles to reconcile her Chinese cultural heritage with her emerging sense of self as an American.
In the first chapter of the memoir, "Woman with No Name", Kingston's mother, Brave Orchid, tells her daughter about an aunt on her father's side of the Kingston family. This aunt, whom Kingston calls Woman with No Name because her real name is never spoken by the family, becomes pregnant while her husband is working in America. When No Name Woman can no longer hide her pregnancy from her family and village, the villagers destroy the family home as punishment for her adultery. After giving birth in a pigsty, she commits suicide and kills the baby by drowning it in the family well.
In the second chapter, "White Tigers", Kingston recalls the legend of Fa Mu Lan, a female warrior who leads her people to victory in battle. As a child, Kingston felt that girls could not achieve greatness in a man's world. "White Tigers" is the story of her own childhood fantasy of overcoming feelings of inferiority as a woman. Like Fa Mu Lan, she imagines herself leaving home at the age of seven and being raised by martial arts masters. She becomes a great warrior and triumphantly returns home to save her people.
"Shaman" tells the story of Brave Orchid's extraordinary medical career as a midwife in China. After giving birth to two children in China, Brave Orchid makes the unusual decision to go to medical school, after which she works as a doctor in her hometown and becomes a highly successful healer. Eventually, she gave up her career to join her husband in the United States. However, unable to practice medicine in the United States, she and her husband opened a laundry business in California.
As The Woman Warrior progresses, Kingston relies less on her mother's stories and more on her own memories of family events and growing up experiences. In the fourth chapter of the memoir, "In the Western Palace", he writes about his aunt, Moon Orchid, who failed to assimilate into American culture. Moon Orchid's husband came to America alone and became a successful doctor. However, after many years of practicing medicine in Los Angeles, he remarried and left Moon Orchid, who remained in Hong Kong waiting for him to bring her over. Determined for Moon Orchid to stand up to this irresponsible man, Brave Orchid arranges for her sister to emigrate to America, but when Moon Orchid finally stands up to her husband, he rejects her again and scolds her for interrupting his life and his career. Subsequently, Moon Orchid becomes insane and ends her days in an insane asylum.
In the final chapter, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe", in which Kingston describes the emotional experiences of his childhood and the conflicts he felt growing up in a Chinese home in America, he describes the difficulties of finding an identity personal identity and a voice to express herself in front of her parents and a society that does not understand her. Warrior Woman ends with the legend of Ts'ai Yen, an ancient Chinese poet who was captured by a non-Chinese tribe and lived among these nomadic people for twelve years, but was never able to fully assimilate to their culture. Kingston strongly implies that her mother is like Ts'ai Yen in that Brave Orchid yearns to return to her Chinese village, but Kingston also suggests that she too sees herself as an outsider among Americans, caught up in the Chinese traditions of their parents and Americans. culture. emphasis on individuality. His memoir resembles the cathartic song of Ts'ai Yen, which the barbarians cannot understand: "His words seemed to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood his sadness and his anger."
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