Straw Into Gold Sparknotes

The stories ‘The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Straw into Gold’ both have themes circulating their cultures. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston is a story where the narrator is a young girl with a deep rooted hatred for a quiet student as she is the opposite of a chinese woman's nature, as the book progresses she becomes more aggressive with her discontent for the young girl for her timid personality. Her resentment towards the student pushes her to physically assault her in which after the narrator falls ill and forgets how to speak herself. In Straw into Gold by Sandra Cisneros the main character is invited to a dinner party by her latin-american cohorts. As being Latin-American herself, her cohorts expected that she would know how to make tortillas,

At the beginning of the book the narrator/main character explains the difference between an American-Chinese woman and a Chinese woman, “Normal Chinese women’s voices are strong and bossy. We American-Chinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American-feminine. Apparently we whispered even more softly than the Americans.” (1, Kingston) In this quote she depicts the difference, how to fit in with american girls they had to change the way Chinese women normally talk to fit in with the cultural norm in america, this need to change who they really are most likely upset the narrator in which she took it out on the quiet girl whom paralleled with the American-Chinese nature. “I hated the younger sister, the quiet one.” (1, Kingston) The narrator depicts her hatred more and more in the text, but she emphasizes how the younger sister is quiet and does not speak and when she does it is in a very low whisper. The point is that the narrator is more upset at the fact that the younger sister is quiet than anything else. This timid personality is something American-Chinese women have inherited in a new country with different

The experience of being in a cultural setting very similar to her own brought back memories and things that she had long forgotten. “When I was a little girl we traveled to Mexico City – in the colonia Tepeyac would be perhaps the only home I knew, and that nostalgia for a home would be a theme that would obsess me.” (1, Cisneros) The home in Mexico City is the only home she knew and that was something she had forgotten about, as the story progresses and she has finished her nostalgic thoughts she thanks texas, “but most important, Texas brought Mexico back to me.” (3, Cisneros) She thanks the state for returning her origins to her, origins she had forgotten and pushed away. In Straw into Gold the main character/narrator revisits her past and culture and becomes closer to it than she ever