Summary Of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s nonfictional novel, The Woman Warrior, Kingston tells five different stories separated in chapters. Kingston wanted to express to her readers what it was like living a life as a Chinese-American. Not only did she have difficulties along the way but she also had to manage fitting in. She is constantly being put on the spot due to her parent’s Chinese traditions and her American lifestyle. The structure of The Woman Warrior focuses on both Chinese myths and her experiences throughout her life. In this piece of work written by Maxine Hong Kingston, a Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, events of her California childhood and family stories that have shaped her individuality. In this novel, Kingston tells

Kingston wanted to show her readers the role of woman in the traditional Chinese society. She wanted to show how her life was growing up as a Chinese-American and how she was constantly fighting against her individuality and the community around her. Even though she often portrayed a bitter tone throughout her novel, she also showed a soft side in which she cared about others. Kingston’s childhood fantasy was to live the life of Fa Mu Lan, the woman warrior. Fa Mu Lan’s main goal was to protect her family, just how Kingston would want to protect hers. In “White Tigers”, “I gave him all the money we had taken on raids to take to my family” (Fa Mu Lan 41), this showed that Fa Mu Lan was thinking about her family even when she had so much going on in her life; so without a doubt it shows that Kingston would tell this story because she wanted to relate. She wanted to relate to Fa Mu Lan and protect a family of her

In the chapter “White Tigers”, Kingston talks about how her parents carved words and wrote her family into her back before she goes off to fight battles. With these words on her back it showed numerous amount of pain she had to go through. After her father had make the fine cuts, Kingston provides imagery when she explains the pain she went through; “It hurt terribly- the cuts sharp; the air burning; the alcohol cold, then hot- pain so various.” (Kingston 35), it allowed the readers to mentally feel how her pain felt. Besides using imagery to provide an image in the readers mind, Kingston uses diction, allowing readers to understand specific things in a way she wants it to be understood. Also in “White Tigers”, Kingston denotes obscene behavior and utter disdain of the Chinese woman’s integrity. Baron describes to Fa Mu Lan that “girls are maggots in the rice” and that “it is more profitable to raise geese than daughters” (43), It shows that Kingston is trying to demonstrate the views of Chinese woman as nutritionally unproductive and very useless. Using both diction and imagery, Kingston allowed the readers a better understanding of what she wanted to