A Literary Analysis of the Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston Essay

Maxine Hong Kingston creates a self as a Chinese-American woman through models of selfhood in The Woman Warrior Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. She does this by writing stories and rewriting myths that identify parts of her self. The story of the No Name Woman shows Kingstons fears of being forgotten and her feminist views. The rewritten vision of Fa MuLan is a story that Kingston identifies with as a Chinese-American woman. She tells about her mother to show how they are the same in some ways. Kingstons stories and myths have strong representations of her selfhood throughout the book. The three strongest examples of this are No Name Woman, Fa MuLan, and her mother.The book The Woman Warrior Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts has much controversy over its labeling of nonfiction. Some Chinese-American authors1 oppose of this book being labeled non-fiction, because they say it is not historically correct. They say it also ruins parts of Chinese-American culture and tradition. I would have to disagree and go with the other side of the argument2. Kingston is trying to create herself through these stories by using Chinese stories to find meaning in this present day world.Despite the stress laid on attending to historical or textual materials, Kingstons goal is not to disseminate tradition in its original form but rather to keep cultural myths alive by drawing their relevance to the present (Woo, 185).She also uses the cultural stories to bring a more modern day meaning to them. But when she is puzzled about the meaning of her own life, she looks to them for guidance. Kingston seems to be trying to do in most of her stories is to identify those parts of the traditional culture which as she interprets them at least, promise to give her the most ancestral help in coping with the confusions and contradictions of her own everyday existence (Cook, 48).What makes this book seem like an autobiography, the...

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