Blog 4 Topic 4

Maxine Hong Kingston’s the Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts describes the life of a generation of immigrates that is between Americans and Chinese. Compared to other groups of people, this generation of immigrants has the most difficulties living in American culture. In this article, many aspects are described, and as a first generation people living in US, I find many of the description in article to be very realistic.

At the beginning of the article, there is a 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 "horw dare he come to the wrong house?" However, it turns out that she asks the narrator to go to the drug store and let them make up for their mistake, which the mother think is going to bring her family unlucky. Ironically, she doesn't know how to revenge for this delivery, so she forced the narrator, who is just a small girl, to do the job. Her mother’s whole thinking is very superstitious, and her stubbed traditional thinking makes her think that the wrong delivery “tainted [her] house with sick medicine”. The narrator speaks English and has taken school in America, so she knows this plan is not going to work out if she just translates what her mother says. Although the mother may find it normal to think that a wrong delivery of prescription will bring, such theory is not shared by people in the US, and the narrator is aware of this. Stuck between the Chinese culture and American cultures, the narrator has to come out with solutions that satisfy both her mother and the drug seller at the same time, without telling them the truth. For a 7-year-old girl, this is cruel for them to do. The narrator successfully tricks her mother and the drug seller, so that her mother can believe her correct idea, and the seller thinks narrator’s family is very poor. For narrator, this is also a secret that she has to hide from both her mother and the drug seller for the life to continue, but the pressure on her to live like this through the whole life is also huge.

Using the previous story about the wrong delivery, the article successfully illustrates narrator’s problem in talking to strangers through the story of talking to people in drug, and in the following part of story, the problem is exaggerated through a story that the narrator forcing a very quiet girl in school to speak at the lavatory. I sympathize both the narrator and the quiet girl in the story. They don’t get many friends from the American school and they spend much time overcoming their fear to speak English. The quiet is very misery because everyone around wants her to talk, when she simply doesn’t want to talk. The narrator uses bullying to force that quiet girl to talk for the girl’s sake, but as time gets late and as narrator’s work doesn’t have any effect at all, the narrator starts to feel regret of what she did. If I am the author, I will definitely write a similar story. In this kind of story, which has one kid teaches another kid, not only will the problems with kids be exposed, the problems with parents' teaching methods will also be exposed. In this story, the author reflects kids’ general problem with speaking in English and reflects that phenomenon that the parents abusively using negative enforcement to force their kids to talk, which turns out to be useless at most of situations. Kids often feel even uncomfortable to talk when they are highly expecting to talk.