Blog 4 Topic 4

As a second-generation Hispanic, I can relate to a certain amount to what Maxine Hong Kingston writes about in her story, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. In my own opinion, Kingston does not in fact portray the experience of immigrants properly. In her story, she expresses how when she was a child she attended an American school and had an enormous fear of public speaking. For example, “I stand frozen, or I hold up the line with the complete, grammatical sentence that comes squeaking out at impossible length”. According to Kingston she claimed that whenever she is forced to speak in public, she instead tends to remain mute or has difficulty saying words. When I was attending elementary school, I shared a similar fear of talking in public, mainly because I hardly knew how to speak English and because I previously attended a Spanish school. However, unlike her, I grew over my fear of public speaking and eventually learned how to speak English properly. Most immigrant children tend to learn English to fit in to society and to not be noticed as immigrants by the public. Moreover, Kingston also states, “It was when I found out I had to talk that school became a misery, that the silence became a misery”. Like what I stated before, I believe that the authors experience is different to that of my own. But, the difference between my own experience and the authors is the time in which we grew up. During her time, all immigrant children were afraid of participating and gaining the attention of the public, due to the fear of being deported back to their home country.

In the story, Kingston also does not mention that her parents ever gain their independence, which means she remains an immigrant for a long time. Unlike Kingston’s story, I was born in the U.S. but had parents from Mexico that immigrated to the U.S. who gained their independence over time. This is one change that has occurred since the time that Kingston began writing her story. Now in this current age people can gain American citizenship by taking a test. Due to this test, both children and adults benefit because then they are granted numerous rights that they originally are not given. However, because of this some parents would not let their children attend field trips. Kingston states, “our parents never signed anything unnecessary”. For some parents, even today, they fear that their children will be captured by the police and then be deported, along with the parents. One thing that Kingston does not include in her story is that parents leave their original country to give their family a better life. In my experience, immigrant children already understand that they are in the United States for a better life, and that their parents work hard for that benefit. Overall, Kingston neglects to express how lucky she is to be in a country where she could be free, but instead she continuously speaks about how afraid she is to speak. In my opinion she does not write about the struggles her family went through to reach the U.S. and of the struggles she went through in her life while hiding from the immigration department.