Woman Warrior Essay

Woman Warrior Essay

Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel, The Woman Warrior is a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories that chronicles her childhood in California. It gives the reader a feeling of how it feels like to be a Chinese American girl growing up with traditional parents in a world that is quite different from theirs. Throughout the novel, both she and her mother refer to the outside world as “ghosts.” The subtitle given to the book is Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. To figure out the meaning behind this subtitle, one has to try to see what Kingston means when she and her family use the term “ghost.”

When people think of ghosts, it can be said that thoughts of death and non-existence come to mind. When this term is used in her family, it shows that the outside world is non-existent, or useless to them. Whenever a non-Chinese person is talked about, that person is referred to as “ghost.” These non-Chinese people are strange to Kingston’s family. Kingston’s