ipl-logo

Woman Warrior Compare And Contrast Essay

1597 Words7 Pages

In the melting pot of diverse cultures in the United States, Asian Americans have been on a difficult path fraught with the challenges of racial discrimination and marginalization. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Bulosan Carlos' America Is In The Heart tell their own compelling stories, showing how they struggled with injustice and explored their own identities. This essay mainly revolves around the unique but echoing personal stories of the two narrators in the book, and analyzes the narrator's psychological changes to the environment in which Asian Americans live. These stories are composed of the narrator's dreams and imagination, reflecting the most authentic and natural expression of the narrator's spiritual world. Their …show more content…

Dreams serve as a repository for latent imagery and are an unconscious, natural occurrence. Imagination, on the other hand, is formed from experiences and the subconscious, revealing the genuine products of human cognition. In America Is In The Heart, Bulosan recalls and reconstructs his personal experiences through the depiction of his dreams, providing a means for him to search for his own identity. Similarly, in The Woman Warrior, Kingston shares ancient Chinese stories that have been adapted through her imagination. While originating from different places, both authors share the common identity of being Asian American. The stories they described serve as the most authentic expressions of their spirit, demonstrating their unwavering resistance against racial discrimination and their tenacious determination not to succumb to their challenging …show more content…

In the original story, Mulan's father was too old and weak to join the army, so Mulan disguised herself as a man to join the army instead of her father. In Kingston's version, Fa Mu Lan went to White Tigers Mountain to practice for fifteen years, led an army composed of farmers to overthrow the rule of a corrupt emperor, and finally turned back into an ordinary woman, returned to the family, and once again played the role of daughter and wife. The image of Fa Mu Lan most directly corresponds to the title of the book The Woman Warrior, and is also Kingston's fantasy self. "I would have to grow up a warrior woman. (Kingston 20)" Kingston's Fa Mu Lan is brave and upright, she fights against tyranny and sexism. In ancient times, only men were allowed to join the army, but Hua Mulan's power transcended gender and even became the protector of men. The biggest difference between Kingston's Fa Mu Lan and traditional stories lies in the right to choose. Mulan in The Ballad of Mulan cannot reveal herself as a female, while Kingston's Fa Mu Lan acts as a heroine to defeat the enemy. Kingston added an unconstrained plot in the process of Fa Mu Lan's practice. A rabbit jumped into the fire and became Mulan's food. "The fire went down for a moment, as if crouching in surprise, then the flames shot up taller than before. When the fire

Show More
Related

Patron Saints Of Nothing By Jay Reguero

486 Words | 2 Pages

There is often a time in Asian Americans’ lives when they experience a cultural disconnect: being too “White” for their Asian relatives, yet too “Asian” for their White peers. These feelings are true for Jay Reguero, the protagonist of Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay. Throughout the novel, Jay, a Filipino-American, struggles with feeling like an outsider in the Philippines because he cannot speak his mother tongue and has spent his entire life in the U.S. During his time in the Philippines, he attempts to connect with his culture but he is constantly reminded of how little he knows and understands about the Philippines. Therefore, this novel is about Jay’s struggle with his cultural identity and his feelings of guilt from not connecting

Read More

Essay On Farewell To Manzanar

1395 Words | 6 Pages

The author, Jeanne Wakatsuki, presents a meaningful story filled with experiences that shaped not only her life, but shaped the lives of thousands of Japanese families living in America. The book’s foreword gives us a starting point in which the reader can start to identify why the book was written. “We a told a New York writer friend about the idea. He said: ‘It’s a dead issue. These days you can hardly get people to read about a live issue.

Read More

Summary Of Should Women Be Allowed To Serve In Combat By Diane Henningfeld

581 Words | 3 Pages

Diane Andrews Henningfeld edited Should Women Be Allowed to Serve in Combat in the U.S Armed Forces, the purpose for writing this book gave the reader reasons why women should be in the army and how they should get what they deserve for playing a part in the war. In the opening lines it states “Women have been fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with men in the United States Army since the Republic’s beginnings undisputable historic facts.” This sentence tells us that the author is really bias toward women in the army. In introducing the book, Diane Henningfeld tells of us about how women should be in the U.S Army.

Read More

Farewell To Manzanar By Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

1013 Words | 5 Pages

Have you ever wondered what it might have been like to be a Japanese-American at the time of WWII, when your race was discriminated against, and you just couldn’t seem to fit in, no matter how hard you tried? The memoir Farewell to Manzanar, written by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, follows the life of Japanese-American Jeanne Wakatsuki through her child and teenage years. The book is set in the 1940’s, right about the time Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japan, and tension between Caucasians and Japanese-Americans was high. Jeanne struggles with her identity throughout her life, and especially during her junior high and high school years when she can’t join many clubs or feel accepted, just because she is different than the other

Read More

Examples Of Archetype Mulan

328 Words | 2 Pages

Stage 3: The Road of Trials Mulan realizes she must act as if she were a man and she must fit in a man’s way of life so that she

Read More

The Hero's Journey Gender

665 Words | 3 Pages

To be able to talk about heroes, gender, and Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, there needs to be a separation between the journey to become a hero and the plot of the story. Although an entire story can be solely based on “The Hero’s Journey,” it’s not limited to the journey. How events play out and character development among other things are apart from what Campbell describes. The journey he describes stays the same regardless of the gender of the protagonist. Gender can only affect the plot itself depending on type of world that is built.

Read More

Women In Yvain And The Magic Ring

1456 Words | 6 Pages

Many of the women in these stories are portrayed as strong, independent women who, in many cases, are the hero themselves. Women in Chrétien and La Motte-Fouqué’s stories are given strong roles in order to highlight and emphasize the important virtues of peace, bravery, and power which ultimately transfers the role of the hero from men to women. In order to understand why the women in Yvain and The Magic Ring are considered to be the true heroes, the definition of a true hero must first be fully defined. Many will describe a hero as a character who performs deeds to remove people from danger.

Read More

A History Of Asian American Strangers From A Different Shore Sparknotes

609 Words | 3 Pages

A History of Asian Americans, Strangers From a Different Shore, written by Ronald Takaki, displays an extensive history of Asian Americans as he combines a narrative story, personal recollection and spoken assertions. As long as we can remember, many races such as the Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese and Japanese have dealt with some type of discrimination upon arriving to the United States. A particular part in the book, Chapter 11, mainly focuses on Asian immigrants and Southeast Asian refugees from the 1960s to the 1980s that were treated as the “strangers at the gate again.” Ronald Takaki refers to them as “strangers at the gate again” as a figure of speech for the people who are from Asian background who have struggled to settle in the United States, only to find out that old

Read More

Examples Of Assimilation In Fahrenheit 451

1028 Words | 5 Pages

Living as a Chinese-American, the narrator had to take on American attributes in order to be accepted -- for example, while normal Chinese women spoke with strong and assertive voices, the narrator adopted a whisper in order to appear “American-feminine. ”(1) As a result, however, her shy demeanor caused her to be an unpopular outcast. She saw herself in another Chinese-American girl at her school, as they had certain, negative similarities. “I hated the younger sister, the quiet one.

Read More

Japanese-American Family

474 Words | 2 Pages

In this piece of literature we see this Japanese-American family suffer many injustices because of their race. Julie Otsuka does a magnificent job showing the family’s reaction to these injustices by switching

Read More

The Tain: Gender Roles In Irish Literature

1477 Words | 6 Pages

In the Tain, ladies utilize their sexuality, influence, physicality, riches and even some heavenly capacities to demonstrate that they 're as equivalent as men are. Despite the fact that men in the Táin are ordinarily depicted as the most grounded and most imperative, their energy gets to be powerless under the lady 's impact. Women are shown manipulative in this narrative. The male protagonists of the story like Cú Chulainn, Ailill and Ferdia would have accomplished nothing if not for the endeavors of the females Queen Medb, Macha and Fedelm. Irish women were as strong and bold as men.

Read More

Essay On I Hotel By Karen Yamashita

800 Words | 4 Pages

Karen Yamashita is a testament to the idea that Asian America is a political movement, not a racial identifier. Yamashita’s novel, I-Hotel, tells the story of the Asian American community during the 1960s and 70s in California by weaving one story throughout ten seemingly separate novellas, with each one representing a room in a hotel. In I-Hotel, Yamashita champions magical realism, a literary style when otherworldly events are written as fact. By writing I-Hotel in this style, Yamashita provides the reader with a firmer understanding of real-life events these magical depictions often mirror. In her genre-defying fictional novel, I-Hotel, scholar and professor Karen Tei Yamashita warps illusion and reality in most of her ten novellas.

Read More

Gender Roles In The Woman Warrior

433 Words | 2 Pages

Maxine Hong Kingston's use of talk stories in The Woman Warrior emphasizes that individuals will find a more fulfilling life if they defy the traditional gender norms place on them by society. While contemplating beauty standards in Chinese society in “No Name Woman” Maxine Kingston thinks, “Sister used to sit on their beds and cry together… as their mothers or their slaves removed the bandages for a few minutes each night and let the blood gush back into their veins” (9). From a young age girls are expected to be binding their feet and are told that it is to look beautiful, but in reality that is not why. When a womans feet are bound they are restrained and silenced. These girls could be free and happy but they are restrained by men through this binding.

Read More

The Woman Warrior Sparknotes

1084 Words | 5 Pages

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston is a memoir filled with folklore and imagination, that takes the reader on a journey through growing up as a Chinese-American woman navigating the conflicting worlds. This journey is told through the young daughter's naive understanding of her mother's descriptive talk stories. The first chapter “No-Name Woman” is an excruciating tale of how the father’s sister was exiled from the family, killed her assumed daughter, and committed suicide for adultery. This scary tale was told to women of the family once they started menstruating and felt to me like a tactic to shame rather than educate the young girls This story, like the others, was filled with connotations that teach shame, what’s to be kept unspoken,

Read More

Gender Roles In The Film Mulan

487 Words | 2 Pages

In the movie, Mulan, by Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook, they use the character, Mulan, to represent feminism and gender roles of women, such as bringing honor to their family through marriage, and how women are deemed to be “inferior” in the eyes of men, for example, when women are not able to participate in war, allowing Mulan to act and fight for what she believes is to be right. Although having a feeling of superiority over women, men tend to act more based on pride and honor than what they believe is to be just, thus making them seem unruly and disgusting. During the ancient Chinese Dynasty, many of the women were looked down upon, making the men have a feeling of superiority over them. Men are usually portrayed to uphold the family honor

Read More

More about Woman Warrior Compare And Contrast Essay

Related Topics

Open Document