Comparing The Woman Warrior: Memoirs Of A Girlhood Among Ghosts

The importance of Story-telling and embracing your culture There are numerous novels that focus on the immigration of people to The United States. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston is an example of one of the numerous novels that touch on the experiences that these people have been through. Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko is an example a little different where it shows that the people are sort of being pushed out of their land. Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silk both use a form of story-telling (talk-story) to tell the stories of their protagonists. In these novels it is clearly seen that this form of writing is important in retaining and embracing a person’s and or a group’s cultural Identity. This paper is going to focus on the importance of talk-story. Maxine Hong Kingston uses talk-story to tell the stories of her childhood in The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. In using this form Kingston learns how to retain the customs of The Old China ways that her parents, especially her mother tells her and her siblings about. Kingston having been born in

It is important that they used this form of writing because; it’s this form of writing that teaches each protagonist to gradually start to embrace their culture identity. Kingston uses the story-telling form in a more linear way, while Silko goes back and forth in a non-linear way. Without the story-telling aspects these protagonists would both still be lost in their identity. It wasn’t until they fully accepted both of their cultures that they started to heal and learn about their cultures and in return learn to embrace their cultures