In order to understand her relatives, and ultimately understand
             herself, Maxine Hong Kingston records the stories of her family in amusing
             and fanciful tales that point out the gap between the Chinese culture of
             her mother, and the American culture of Maxine and her siblings.
             Kingston's story is more than simply the age-old contest between mother and
             growing daughter, it is a struggle to understand a culture she is part of,
             and yet has never known. Often, her mother's actions make no sense to
             Maxine, living a comfortable life in the U.S. She has no understanding of
             hunger and want, and does not understand her mother's obsession with food,
             waste, and eating. She writes, "We'd have to face four- and five-day-old
             leftovers until we ate it all. The squid eye would keep appearing at
             breakfast and dinner until eaten. Sometimes brown masses sat on every
             dish. I have seen revulsion on the faces of visitors who've caught us at
             meals" Kingston 108). Maxine reacts by rejecting her mother's love of all
             food, and turns away from the stove as a method of silent protest against
             the things she does not understand. She notes, "Even now, unless I am
             happy, I burn the food when I cook. I do not feed people. I let the dirty
             dishes rot. I eat at other people's tables but won't invite them to mine,
             where the dishes are rotting" (Kingston 56). This is just one example of
             the clash of cultures Maxine faces as she grows up, and how she reacts to
             them. As she struggles to understand where she fits in American culture,
             she also struggles to understand where she fits in Chinese culture - a
             culture that is her heritage, but feels foreign to her.
             Maxine's mother, Brave Orchid, is also caught between two cultures,
             but she is far more Chinese than American and this is part of the widening
             gap between her and her daughter. Just as Maxine does not understand many
             of her mother's actions, Brav...