Blog Post 4 Topic 4

            In “The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts” by Maxine Hong Kingston, the readers are able to sympathize with the protagonist who is a Chinese-American because she has to juggle being Chinese and being an American. The story follows the protagonist as a young girl who goes to primary school at an American school and then going to a Chinese school. The two environments are drastically different in their teaching style and how the protagonist behaved at the two school. The readers then see how the protagonist struggles with the idea of certain Chinese superstitions or ideas. Towards the end of the play, the protagonist physically abuses another young girl probably out of hatred that this girl is perpetuating the image of a stereotypical Chinese-American female.

            As a reader and as a first generation, it is quite easy to sympathize with the protagonist because she is a young girl who is torn between two different worlds. On the one hand she is the quiet Chinese girl at an American school who is too afraid to speak and gets confused between the “…Chinese ‘I’…” and the “…American ‘I’…”. Yet at home she refuses to revert back to traditional ideas that her mother imposes on her. We can also sympathize with how she learns one thing in American school and her mother tells her another thing. An example of this is “…during the next eclipse [they would] slam pot lids together to scare the frog from swallowing the moon” while the protagonist tried to explain to her mom that the the eclipse is just “a shadow the earth makes when it comes between the moon and the sun”. At the end of the story we can again sympathize with the protagonist when she physically abuses the young girl because she has an internal anger towards the way Chinese-Americans act or are expected to act. The protagonist may have done a terrible thing by abusing the young girl, but it was her way of expressing her feelings toward living in a foreign world where they expect the Chinese to sit back and be quiet while at the Chinese school she would be loud and talk, yet she feels as though she can not “… entrust [her] voice…” to either culture. She feels like she can not find a voice as an American or as a Chinese. She is too Americanized to be Chinese, but too Chinese to be American.

            Even though times has changed, the immigrant or first generation experience written in this story is still very relevant and probably very true for many people today. It is difficult to try to immerse oneself in a new foreign culture, while trying to retain their heritage, language, and traditions. As shown in the story, the protagonist became aware of how illogical her mother was when the druggist delivered prescriptions that were not theirs or how her mother would slam pots and lids together during an eclipse. There is a feeling of embarrassment and shamefulness that follows the immigrant or first generation person because their culture does not blend in with what they are taught in school or what they see in society in this new country. They feel out of place because suddenly their way of life is not the right way and they are afraid to get ridiculed. It still holds very true that no matter what background the reader comes from there can be a consensus that they don’t necessarily have a voice as an American or as a traditional person of color. They have been immersed in the American culture long enough to point out certain misconceptions that their culture has therefore they have become too Americanized for their people. Yet at the same time they still retain so much of their culture that to Americans they are still too foreign. This feeling of being in the middle and not belonging transcends time and is still the case for many immigrants and first generation person today.