Character Analysis: The Woman Warrior

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Introduction:

Maxine Hong Kingston was born in 1940 in Stockton, California. Kingston’s parents, Tom and Ying Lan Hong, ran a laundry shop. Maxine got her degree from Berkeley in 1962 and in the same year, she married actor Earll Kingston. Kingston moved to Hawaii, where she taught English. In 1990, Kingston began teaching at Berkeley. {1}

Her novel The Woman Warrior is essentially a collection of memoirs but it came across as multi –genre work combining Chinese folktales, and the lives of Chinese-American women living in the United States. This novel is widely taught in different academic disciplines around the world and it won National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. Her work discusses Chinese

The novel is divided into five chapters, each one has its own story and narrative. The first one is titled “No Name Women”. This chapter of the novel discusses the story of the forgotten aunt, the one that shall not be named .Kingston’s mother tells her this story in order to warn her about the consequences of doing something that might bring shame to herself and her family. The aunt was a married woman whose husband has left long time ago and left her behind. One day the aunt discovers that she is pregnant and that she is carrying an illegitimate child. And by the irony of fate; the village attacks her house led by the man who got her pregnant in the first place, panicked of the scene; she escaped and eventually gave birth. That night she killed herself and the baby by jumping into a well. Kingston says that her aunts’ ghost still haunts her because she revealed the story to the

It is about how Moon Orchid’s husband left her a long time ago and went to America; how he got married and never sent her. Brave Orchid insists on her sister to confront her husband about her situation and when she does she is frozen in her place because she doesn 't speak any English. She collapses and gradually becomes crazy. Eventually she is sent to a state mental Asylum where she dies. The final chapter titled “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” discusses Kingston’s early life and her teenage time. She talks about how her mother cut the piece of the tongue that caused her trouble when trying to talk in English. She goes on talking about how she was frustrated about her life, being lost between two cultures and putting it a girl that represented her case. The chapter ends with a story about Ts’ai Yen; how she was kidnapped by the Hsiung-nu barbarians and she returned with “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” a song the Chinese still celebrate about to this