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The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts follows author Maxine Hong Kingston's memories of growing up as a child of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco. The story is written in first narrative. The author not only provides a voice for herself but also for other immigrants like her who did not had the opportunity to speak out and tell their stories. Most importantly, the story indicates an important issue for most immigrants---the cultural difference.

       I’m the first generation immigrant coming with my family to America three years ago. I came to study in a community college in Seattle. As a Chinese, I can see myself in The Woman Warrior. Maxine felt very uncomfortable when talking in English with others. “I stand frozen, or I hold up the line with the complete, grammatical sentence that comes squeaktng out at impossible length.”  I had the same feeling with Maxine. I had a statistic class in my first quarter in college. Every week, we had one discussion class. The instructor will choose some students randomly to teach other students one statistic question. Although those questions were not difficult to me, I felt like a dummy when I stand in front of the whole class.  When there were some students still confused about that question and kept asking me some questions which I couldn’t find proper vocabularies in English to answer, just like Maxine, I stand frozen, and my brain went empty. Maxine also mentioned that everytime people asked her to repeat what she said, her voice got weaker and finally she was unwilling to talk to some one else. I can definitely understand her. That makes me feel that I’m different with other people, and I feel embarrassed about it. Maxine’s situation reveals an important problem immigrants usually face---language. Language is the basic tool for living in a society, and it’s also an obstacle for immigrants to integrate into the local society. How can a person live a happy life if he/she can’t state his/her own thoughts well? English is not our first language. We use Chinese at the time we were born. Even though I studied English in China for more than ten years, my way to think and arrange my words is still in Chinese mode. Our homeland’s language is our cultural root. It’s impossible to change our language habit immediately, therefore, more importantly, we should have a better mentality when we face those language problems. Just like Maxine says “I am making progress, a little every day.”

       The story also states an immigration problem—tradition. There is one plot talking about the narrator’s mother wants her to get “revenge” from drugstore for their mistake in one wrong delivery of drug. She is so angry when "he had a pale blue box of pills, but nobody was sick". Her mother cursed the delivery boy to be "the dead ghost", and says "how dare he come to the wrong house?" She believes the wrong delivery of drug is a curse and a crime, and she says it’s Maxine’s fault if Maxine doesn’t go to the drug shop and get back some reparation candy. Even as a Chinese, I would say this is very ridiculous, but still, it’s a Chinese tradition that agreed with many old Chinese people. People in the drug store, who grow up with the American culture would treat this as insanity. Like most immigrants, Maxine is stuck between the Chinese culture and American culture. It’s hard to transfer from one culture to another culture, but Maxine made a change. She let the drugstore think she is poor, and get the candy successfully. As immigrants, we can understand our own traditions, but it’s impossible let other people in USA understand them. Personally, I would say Maxine’s choice is smart but a little sad, because from another aspect, she can’t keep all of her cultural identity. In order to integrate into local society, immigrants have to change some cultural traditions. I used to celebrate every traditional festival with my family in China, but after we come here, there’s no vocation for celebrating those festivals, and we can do is only to accept the change.

       Maxine had a very hard time to integrate into the American society, and I sympathize with the suffering in her childhood. However, if I’m the author, I might have a different story to tell. The narrator in my story wouldn’t suffer so much as hers. Her story was written in 1976, almost 50 years ago. Things have changed so much today. Although immigrants still face some problems about culture shock, the huge gap between each culture is decreasing gradually. Globalization and technology is changing the world. 50 years ago, when immigrants met some language difficulty, they can do nothing but find the paper dictionary, but we have iphone and laptop today. 50 years ago, American people maybe do not understand Asian culture at all, but today some American people can say fluently Chinese and even use chopsticks, and some Chinese can say fluently English and know western manners as well.  

       Overall, Woman Warrior is a masterpiece in the literature. It showed us the true situation of immigrants in USA at that time. Personally, I think as immigrants, at least the first generation, should never abandon our original cultural identity. Even though some changes are necessary, we shall never forget who we are and where we come from.