Eliptical Elusiveness Still Elucidates Immigration

books:


	• The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts Maxine Hong Kingston Vintage, 1989 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 170 reviews view larger image
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the power of memory

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is a powerful
gem about the relationship between the author and her
mother and other women in her family. It is a memoir
but reads like fiction. I loved this book and especially
how she utilizes symbols, particularly ghosts to represent
people from different backgrounds, whom the author draws
upon for wisdom, strength and remembrance.

I usually have a tough time with "literary" fiction but
the author writes in an almost conversational tone. I felt
like I was there as the author told her story. This is
an excellent book to read to learn about Chinese culture.

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Eliptical Elusiveness Still Elucidates Immigration

The women ancestors of a geeky Chinese-American girl pile up impressive resumes, no worries ! They are kungfu heroines, joining peasant armies that overthrow the very Imperial throne. They are doctors who brave ghosts and come to America. They are mothers and grandmothers who remain staunchly Chinese in the face of the full press of American culture. They are sisters or aunts in Chinatown apartments or unknown relatives killed for following their hearts instead of the rules back in village China. Slowly, slowly, the background of the author (maybe) is depicted. You need some patience to realize what the author is doing. She doesn't give quarter. Readers who like everything spelled out will be disappointed. Ghosts play a big role in every section of the book. Ghosts train the warriors, ghosts oppose the student and the laundryworker. All Americans even appear as ghosts of a vast variety. Yes, it's one way of looking at the experience of immigration. You leave home, where everything is known, and come to a very foreign land where nothing is comprehensible. You understand nothing of the language or customs, but you have to make your way, earn a living, survive. Daring to sit and struggle with ghosts in a haunted Chinese classroom is similar to fighting with aliens in an alien land. So, you might interpret everyone around you as a `ghost'--scary, but propitiated or turned aside each in its own way. Women in China are treated like chattel, she says, but here women take control, control ghosts, control lives, control themselves. Is it a dream ? Is it another way of looking at Chinese women ? You will decide this for yourself after reading this highly original, lyrical book of tales of immigration, tales of women in a strange land, tales of "how I got to be me". It's got to be one of the most creative immigrant novels yet written.

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Brilliant!

An excellent book, funny, insightful, poignant. Ms. Kingston brilliantly conveys how cultures can clash within the minds of those who straddle them. After reading this book I bought half a dozen copies to give to close friends.

Woman Warrior, a hauntingly lyrical memoir.

Woman Warrior is one of the most gripping lyrical-memoirs I've read. Author, Maxine Kingston, is eternally haunted by the "no-name" ghost of her dead aunt, and she finds herself displaced and alienated as she attempts to put together two worlds: her Chinese ancestry, and her new American life.

It is Maxine's Chinese ancestry that teaches her that girls are half-ghosts that walk a tight wire and with one wrong step will transcend into full-pledged ghosts, with all memory of their existence erased from time. Girls in the history of her Chinese culture are regarded much the way Middle Eastern women are regarded today: burdensome, and dangerous. The saying "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls," holds a message repeated to Kingston many times over throughout her girlhood.

Compounding Maxine's troubles, not only is it difficult for her to adjust to being an American type of female, which is different than a Chinese accepted female, but she carries with her the eternal displacement of her violently banished, suicide-no-name aunt whose spirit forever lingers, haunting Maxine.

Alienation is also host to Maxine's reality, as she struggles to feel of value---caught as she is between what she's been brainwashed to believe gives a female value in Chinese culture, and what she is learning gives a female value in American culture. Alienation because she realizes that she is no longer authentic to the culture she comes from, just as she is not authentic to the culture she is now a part of; and she comes to realize that what herself and her family have become, is no less than a cultural patchwork, beyond easy definition: "No other Chinese, neither the ones in Sacramento, nor the ones in San Francisco, nor Hawaii speak like us."

Kingston's resentment and further displacement and alienation comes from the many secrets about her past, about her Chinese heritage, kept from her by her elders--the only stories they tell her are the ones meant to haunt her, but even those stories are not fully explained. How is she to form an identity when she isn't aloud to put all of the pieces together, of her past and present-- when she can't define her self as being a solid part of any given culture? Without proper definition of place, one merely floats along, trying to make sense of it. This is where the Woman Warrior, Fa Mu Lan, comes into play in this story.

Fa Mu Lan is used as a metaphor for female choice, female purpose, female strength and power. Fa Mu Lan does not simply assume the traditional role of a Chinese female, instead she goes out into the world and she fights! Only after she fights does she return home to resume her traditional female role.

I personally see this metaphor of Fa Mu Lan as Kingston's impression of having her feet in two different worlds, and how to cope accordingly. Fa Mu Lan, to me, represents the old and the new, and also she represents a force of identity that gives strength, and choice, to the traditional female role. Fa Mu Lan is a survivor of both worlds, and because she faces such danger outside of her home, the inside of her home may seem relatively less dangerous in light of that.

Danger in Kingston's world, comes from both the inside and outside of the home--whether through ghostly memories and threats lingering in the air, or through present day pressures and dangers from a cold native-America population-- and so Fa Mu Lan serves to bring balance and strength to this double-prong.

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Prepare for the unexpected.

This is a tremendous novel. The author threads the stories her mother told her when she was a child, through the retelling of her own life, using them to draw you into her own imagination. As she grows up, living half immersed in traditional myth and half in gritty reality, where mothers and daughters are only human, the reader grows up with her. The first person telling of her childhhood stories puts the reader directly in the shoes of a child/young adult working through the stories she has been told, using them to form her hopes and dreams and her understanding of the world.

(N.B. You may not think that your childhood stories influenced the way you live, but if you think for a minute, I am certain some will come back to you and you'll realize that just the other day you did something based on or combatting that belief. Maybe you even still wish on stars?)

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity.