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The woman warrior cultural identity
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``The woman warrior`` written by Maxine Hong Kingston is a collection of memoirs. It has a hybrid form: it is a myth, fiction, as well as autobiography. ``The woman warrior`` is a book about finding and discovering yourself in the circumstances of a Chinese family and an American upbringing, always fluctuating between the two worlds, wondering about your true self. In ``A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe`` a very important theme is the Identity Plot.
Gene Luen Yang offers a humanistic perspective on western imperialism in China during the late nineteenth century to early twentieth century in his graphic novel Boxers, a tragic narrative about Chinese grassroots resistance against foreign occupation in which an armed revolution ultimately fails. The novel focuses on religious identity, and cultural connections in the face of invasion. Boxers highlights the negative effects of imperialism through clashes between different religions, ideologies and power structures. Therefore, the criticism of western imperialism presented in Boxers could support a world systems theory approach to international relations because it shows to exploitation through westernization and the squandering of cultural
Xiong uses battles, executions, assassinations, and scandals to appeal to readers of any genre. Once a reader gets into the book they are hooked in the epic events of the book and the deep look into the ruling class. Unfortunately, Xiong’s novel might somewhat difficult to get into for many readers with no experience in Chinese history. Xiong also attempts to utilize dialogue that often comes off as underdeveloped or simplistic.
“No Questions, No Answers: China and A Book from the Sky” by Stanley K. Abe is a short text centered around Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky exhibit and how it affected/caused various ideals in both China and foreign environments. Abe starts off with a story about Yang and how her inadequate skills at Chinese calligraphy caught up to her when she came to the west for a book signing. Thus, giving a sense of how it is to be Asian and entering western society. This story is told in order to give an little background in understanding how the west views Asian culture/people and gives a lead in to how this notion would affect A Book from the sky.
Chapter six examines the anti-Chinese sentiment with the emerging class antagonism and turmoil between white capitalists and workers. The unwelcomed arrival of Chinese immigrants brought along their own social organizations such as the huiguan, fongs, and tongs. These types of social organizations secured areas of employment and housing for Chinese immigrants in California. This social structure that was unknown to Anglos led them to also categorize Chinese on the same level as Indians by depicting them as lustful heathens whom were out to taint innocent white women. These images were also perpetuated onto Chinese women, thus, also sexualizing them as all prostitutes.
Maxine Hong Kingston, a chinese woman who grew up in America, recounts her experiences first-hand in The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Blending her own aspirations and characters throughout her book, Kingston delves upon lines of fiction and nonfiction, growing both characters and situations which rely on the basis of each other to form a coherent story. Kingston is able to effectively use character traits to develop unique situations, manipulate stream of consciousness techniques, and employ continuity and change to lend her characters to a story. Kingston effectively walks characters into unique situations that exist solely due to the unique traits of that character.
In the novel “American Born Chinese” by Gene Luen Yang (2006), it talks about three different people’s stories. The author starts off with telling a story about a monkey called the Monkey King, who lives in the jungle, seeking for higher power to become considered a god in the book. The author also tells a story about an American born Chinese boy named Jin Wang, who moves from San Francisco and struggles with fitting in at a new school. The last story the author tells is about a boy named Danny who has his cousin Chin-Kee from China visit every year. Danny ends up struggling to keep his reputation in adequate shape at school after his cousin visits causing him to switch schools often.
Jin is faced with being one of the very few Asians at his Junior High School, while everyone else is American. Of course Jin is going to feel out of sorts, especially when his teacher introduces him to the class as “Jin Jang”, and saying “He and his family moved to our neighborhood all the way from China”, when Jin’s real name is Jin Wang and his family moved from San Francisco (30). Gene Luen Yang uses this humility to display that it takes a considerable amount of open
Reid also documented his way of looking into the Asian century by looking at the crime, the drug use, family, children and the education within the
Similarly, David Hwang’s 10-minute play “Trying to Find Chinatown” centers on an encounter between Ronnie, a Chinese-American street musician, and Benjamin, a Caucasian tourist from Wisconsin who identifies himself as Asian-American, in the busy street of New York. In the play, “each character defines who he believes he is: Benjamin is convinced he is a Chinese American, and Ronnie sees
As possible as it was for them to have different experiences it was also possible for them to somewhat have similar experiences. Due to them both being in China, although in slightly different times, it is easy to compare their travel accounts. A similarity that occurred in both of their travel accounts is that they both wrote from what they knew. All that they had observed was mainly because of the way and where they had been raised and how that triggered their train of thought. Another similarity is that in both travel accounts religion was discussed.
While Kingston is evidently affected by her mother’s talk-stories, she does not know what to believe. She struggles to find a sense of home as she has never been to China and America is filled with ghosts, the foreign and unknown. Brave Orchid faces a similar problem in which America is alien but China is far away and inaccessible. “Shaman” illustrates that hard work pays off in China but does not give way to progress in the United States, at least for Brave Orchid. While the Kingston’s mother was able to become a doctor
In Rowe’s monograph, he explores and challenges the existing approaches to the Qing empire, from the orthodox interpretation fuelled by John K. Fairbanks to the three revisionist turns that emerged, and, in doing so, successfully achieves a balance between historiography and history. Rowe’s work is markedly revisionist, exploring the continuity and challenges behind the changes; socially, economically and politically, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as opposed to the orthodox view of seeing China as a
The Woman Warrior, Memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts, explores Kingston’s identify formation in relation to her mother and female relatives. Kingston uses the first person to narrate five distinct short stories. Each of them contains a central female character. The unique feature of this book is the rearrangement of the traditional Chinese myths, legend of Fa Mu Lan and Ts’ai Yen. The combination of fantasy and reality is closely intertwined in the stories.
‘The Good Earth’ and the Possibility of ‘Anti-Orientalist’ Orientalism In 1931, American author Pearl S. Buck published The Good Earth, an English-language novel depicting a peasant’s life in rural China. The novel was immediately a financial and critical success; after selling millions of copies, it would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. Buck’s writing was praised for its evenhanded and insightful portrayal of Chinese culture and society. Retrospectively, however, many scholars have criticized it as a well-intentioned but reductionist and Orientalist treatment of China. Using Said’s conception of Orientalism as an analytical framework, this essay examines and evaluates charges of Orientalism in The Good Earth.
