Food strengthens us, without it we are weak. Eating has always been an important factor with families living in poor conditions. Often, those who could not help to produce more food are considered inferior or unworthy to eat. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is no exception, due to the relation it creates between eating and the strength of people. This is shown through the tale of Fa-Mu-Lan, the story of the eaters, and the references to the fellow relatives left in China.
             In the tale of Fa-Mu-Lan, the narrator is given a survival test, where she has to survive a mountain trek without provisions. During that trek, the narrator finds herself weary from hunger. Hunger brings out her animal instincts, because she needs to stay strong to live. "On the fourth and fifth days, my eyesight sharp with hunger, I saw deer and used their trails when our ways coincided. Where deer nibbled, I gathered the fungus, the fungus of immortality" (25). The narrator is forced to search for her food to eat. The hungrier she becomes, the more feral she is. Meat also played a role in the connection between food and strength. During the beginning of her story she claimed she no longer needed meat. After she became starving, she breaks down and eats meat. "...I saw the rabbit had sacrificed itself for me. It had made me a gift of meat" (26). Her will was eroded by the hunger because as her hunger increased, she became weaker and her resolve was easier to destroy. When the narrator was not starving she was in control of her faculties. Hunger however, strips her even of vision, as she imagines things that do not exist. The narrator says, "Hunger also changes the world when eating can't be habit, then neither can seeing. I saw two people made of gold dancing the earth's axis" (27). Viewing two gold dancers would be wonderful to witness, however the chances are very slim. The hunger had...