The Woman Warrior

Gender issues are culturally defined, and gender can be one of the elements of culture shock occurring when a person moves from one culture to another. Maxine Hong Kingston's book The Woman Warrior is one of many stories by children of immigrants showing contrasts and tensions between the dual role the children assume, that of traditional child (a role imposed and expected by the parents) and that of American child (a role adopted by the children as they face the realities of their new culture). Her story takes a particular tack in that it also involves issues of gender, which have a special meaning in her culture and which bring about particular tensions given that the nature of gender roles in Chinese society are quite different from that in American society today. These tensions are evident in differences between her own experience in America and her mother's experience in China.

Maxine Hong Kingston was born in 1940 in Stockton, California, to a Chinese immigrant family, and she grew up and lived in a Chinese community that followed the customs and tradition of its native land. The expectation for women in traditional Chinese society was as a wife or a slave, though in Kingston's family this expectation was considered an underachievement. Kingston herself would often be bombarded by negative comments directed towards her and her sister because the people in this more traditional Chinese community did not recognize the value of girl children:

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ompany them. This open display of disdain towards girls caused Kingston to hate her uncle and the views that he stood for: "At my great uncle's funeral I secretly tested out feeling glad that he was dead" (47). Kingston shows how she fails to find comfort in any milieu because she never feels she truly belongs in any of those among which she drifts in her life. She evokes the past first in terms of stories her mother has told her: Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker (Kingston 163). Kingston is indeed an outlaw in the modern world, or at least she views herself as such. The implication is that her mother views her as such because the girl would not conform to the norms of traditional Chinese society such as her mother wanted her to do. Kingston has no memory of such degrading childhood experiences as she heard about when her mother cut her tongue for her, but she is still bitter about it and angry that her mother could do such a thing. Why does her

Category: Literature - T