Whether born in pre-World War II China, or post-World War II America, whether conventional or rebellious, the female characters in Maxine Hong KingstonÆs The Woman Warrior are united by various forms of the oppression of women. In China gender discrimination was much more severe than in the United States. The stories of the Chinese women in KingstonÆs memory novel reveal not only their inferior status in Chinese society, but also their passivity that, in a sense, makes them enablers of their role. Kingston, struggling with her identity as a child and young woman and repudiating the traditional role of the submissive, always obedient Chinese woman, becomes the female avenger in her fantasies, ôthe woman warrior.ö By the bookÆs end, Kingston has become a woman warrior in reality, winning her fight to carve out her own place in life without following the dictates of gender and cultural strictures. The subtitle of KingstonÆs book is Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, and the book is both a well-crafted, imaginative memoir and a means of exorcising the ghosts and demons Kingston faced. The ghosts of the sub-title are entities representing the memories and remnants of the Chinese experience, and these entities permeate KingstonÆs life and consciousness. This paper will discuss the turmoil she felt growing up hearing horrific stories of her motherÆs and auntÆs oppressive life in China, and how her own experiences growing up in the United States differed. Her dilemma was trying to forge her own identity without giving up her heritage. The difficulty for her was that her heritage consisted of the traditional Chinese view of the inferiority of women. ôWomen in the old China did not chooseö (Kingston 6).
KingstonÆs book is a ôpartly fictional work about her girlhood as it was affected by the beliefs of her Chinese family,ö a blending of family history with KingstonÆs personal experiences and ideas (Bowden 223).
The book is...