Girlhood among ghosts
For most immigrants, finding identity and carving out a personal space in an alien culture with its peculiar life-styles, heritage, traditions, and language is difficult. Living on the edge of two distinct communities makes it harder to adjust to the standards of the new culture, and at the same time retain all the values of the old one. In her autobiographical novel The Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston dramatizes the conflict of growing up among contradictions and confusions between the home and alien cultures and languages. For much of her life, Kingston feels torn between her Chinese heritage and her American destiny, she oscillates between the two worlds of China and America, functioning in relation to both, yet wholly belonging to neither. Ultimately, however, she is able to reconcile the two disparate cultures and incorporate them into her own story, into one "song."The tales of the women in the book, and particularly of her mother, have a significant influence on the formation of Kingston's identity. But she does not just blindly accept these stories; she tries to reinterpret them through her own vision of the world and her own understanding of how it works. Kingston begins her journey by looking
The tales about Kingston's aunt, Fa Mu Lan, and the story of her mother's life, both factual and fantastic, keep piling up and make Brave Orchid a complete person in her daughter's eyes, a person to be proud of, and at the same time to reject, to move beyond. Her childhood silence seems to originate from the conflict between her Chinese upbringing and the ways of an American school, but in the story Kingston represents it as symbolically caused by her mother (China), who seems to have cut her tongue, slicing the frenum, when she was a child. She is unable to express herself in the American school: " I read aloud in the first grade, though, and heard the barest whisper with little squeaks come out of my throat . Born in America to a Chinese family, Kingston is as much a product of two cultures as of two distinct education systems. At this point Kingston manages to blend the two cultural inheritances, the two separate worlds within her. She has come to realize that, like her mother, she is a talk-storier and she asserts, "The beginning is hers, the ending, mine" (207). However, little by little, Kingston starts speaking and even tries, although violently, to help another Chinese girl overcome the barrier of muteness. Kingston arrives at a point when she can articulate herself successfully. Piece by piece she has been trying to collect the scraps of her mother's stories and combine them with meager facts about her parents' past life to weave them together with her American perception of life into a coherent whole. Kingston observes, "I could not tell where the stories left off and the dreams began, her voice and the voice of the heroines in my sleep" (19). At the end of the text Kingston claims her voice in a fierce tirade against her mother, asserting her own American sense of independence. Kingston compiles a list of over two hundred things that she feels she has to tell her mother "to stop the pain in my throat" (176).
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Acceptance Essays
