Ghosts In Amy Tan's The Woman Warrior

Standing in Strand, leaning against the non-fiction bookshelf, I find the first chapter and unwillingly begin to skim the passage. I half expected the first paragraph to be bombarded with words advocating and raging for women’s rights. I expected a war of the sexes because why else would the title of the book be The Woman Warrior? I see the words “said mother” and “China,” a little farther down I see “California” and “village;” I’m thrown off (“No Name Woman” 3). I call her a poser of Amy Tan—only to discover that Tan was the antecedent. As if graced by the presence of ghosts, I see a Chinese-American woman sitting an aisle away, beckoning me to purchase this book and its sequel, China Men. I see the face of myself in the blurry face of my

Perhaps the purpose of ghosts is that it is important in the Chinese culture. Yet as ambiguous as the topic of ghosts is prevalent in succession with her essays, Kingston finds her mother’s talk-stories to be ambiguous as well. The ambiguity of her attempt to understand her Chinese self stems from the privacy that is instilled in the culture: “’How can Chinese keep any traditions at all? They don’t even make you pay attention, slipping in a ceremony and clearing the table before the children notice specialness. The adults get mad, evasive, and shut you up if you ask” (“A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” 185). The lack of the recognition of the specialness leads to the assumption of anything that is different to be labeled as ghostly. In the light of Brave Orchid, Kingston’s mother, she is viewed as the shaman of the village and “built a reputation for being brilliant” (“Shaman” 63). The essays of The Woman Warrior analyzes and circulates around Brave Orchid’s talk-stories. As ghosts being the primary characterization of Kingston’s unfamiliarity and differences of the American culture and Chinese culture, Brave Orchid coats all her all unknowns in the formation of ghosts and animals. With this fictional approaching in Brave Orchid’s talk-stories in order to provide moral education to Kingston, but the ambiguity of applying fictional and reality into one leads Brave Orchid to be unable to separate the fiction from the reality. What Brave Orchid fails to recognize that her inability to comprehend things that are foreign to her, thereby naming them as ghosts, is the same process in which the American culture labels her as a ‘ghost’ when they don’t understand her. Her first experience in tasting the “pain [it] can inflict that [she] cannot endure” (“Shaman” 70) threw her off guard when her brother-in-law failed to recognize her: “’What is it,