The fibber often speaks in the first person, but this is shoddy as she adopts many different personalities, from role models to relatives. Ghosts populate her imagination, two those of people living and those of the dead. Communication is had through words, but the garner that come from China carry both good and rugged news. The way her parents sometimes deal with these letters demonstrates their method of closure out or destroying what they do not like or understand, "I was nine years old when the letters do my parents, who are rocks, cry. My father screamed in his sleep. My m opposite wept and crumpled up the letters. She set fire to them page by page," (Kingston 1976).
Superstition is often the mode of belief of her parents and culture. However, once more these superstitions are conveyed from one generation to the next through words. Not happy with the situation that she does not understand the superstitions, the girl uses a dictionary when her relatives
Through words, her education, reading, and writing skills, the narrator in conclusion finds her genuine self. It is a self she has come to value in spite of other people's valuations, assumptions, judgments and superstitions. In talking about her wisdom and academic capabilities, including the praise of her teachers, Maxine discovers her self-worth independent of others' perspectives, "I can do ghost things even better than ghosts can. Not everybody thinks I am nothing. I am not going to be a slave or a wife. I'm getting out of here," (Kingston 1976). scorn the obstacles in the way of her journey of self-discovery, Maxine has triumphed over cultures, family members, and gender distinctions.
She has, in essence, become a human being.
Thus, the word, silence, expression of voice and other images of words pervade the novel in the girl's journey to finding her own, genuine voice, one that crosses dualistic boundaries of culture, gender, and ethnicity. In an interview, Kingston has tell of The Woman Warrior, "The book came out at the height of the feminist movement, and I did not feel good about that because I wanted my book to be read as a book about human beings" (Lewis 2004). In other words, Kingston was afraid the book would be pigeonholed, much as she has been as first a woman in a culture that values boys and then as Chinese in American culture.
Ker Conway, J. (1999). When Memory Speaks. New York, NY: Vintage.
Lewis, A. (Feb 2004). Maxine Hong Kingston. Progressive, 68(2), 35-39.
use of superstition makes no palpate to her, "I keep looking in the dictionaries under those syllables?I don't find any other words that make sense," (Kingston 1976). The narrator attempts to find her own sense, identity and meaning against a desktop of dualistic cultures, beliefs, and understandings.
Shu, Y. (Summer 2001). Cultural politics and Chinese-Am
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