Blog 4 Topic 3

          Maxine Hong Kingston is an author of a well-known book named ‘the woman warrior’ who talks of her mythical stories which she derived from the tales of her mother, she writes about her transition from childhood into puberty and how she lived as an immigrant in the United States. Sandra Cisneros a Mexican-American author of ‘the house on Mango street talks about a young girl of Mexican origin who writes about her life transition from living in a poor Latino neighborhood to living in a small street in Chicago with Puertoricans and Chicanos (Mexican-American) which was racially segregated and has an empowered ambition of moving out and getting her own house elsewhere.

Both of these authors write about characters that were immigrants and are caught in a strange environment where there are different cultural practices as opposed to their traditional way of life. In Maxine’s “The woman warrior”, the protagonist faces lots of conflict between Chinese and Western culture. In “the house on Mango Street”, the author portrays how she gradually adapts to her new immigrated life at America. They also both speak about how racial the white people were against them. Both characters migrated while they we at a young age with their parents and with ambitions of achieving successful lives in the future. They talked about their psychological state at that moment as an immigrant to America. Both of the cultures were accustomed to the degradation of the girl child as they were either used for sex or sold to older men. As it is seen in the book, the author talks about Espanranza; a character in Sandra Cisneros book was sexually assaulted by a man in a concert while Kingston speaks about how girls were termed as a curse and boys were a blessing in the Chinese custom

However, their depiction of immigrants’ lives is not all the same. As opposed to Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston talks about the mythical stories in China which used to motivate them in their daily living as they wanted to emulate the legends who lived in those particular times hence the difference between the characters’ ways of life. In Maxine’s “The Woman Warrior”, she use psychological imply to state her struggle at that moment as a new immigrant.