Blogpost 4 Topic 3

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, written by Maxine Hong Kingston, and Woman Hollering Creek, written by Sandra Cisneros, offer contrasting portrayals of immigrant experiences based on the perspectives of two completely different characters. Kingston highlights the struggle of assimilation to American life for immigrants and Cisneros illustrates the disillusionment of immigrants caused by the idealized vision of the “American Dream.” Both authors utilize various literary devices to convey their messages across the board. Kingston’s story carries a more shameful tone while Cisneros embeds a miserable yet somewhat optimistic tone into hers. The two stories, though incoherent in nature, both depict the immense difficulties that immigration entails.

The narrator in Kingston’s memoir conveys a very shameful tone when she speaks about her experiences as an immigrant, seeing that she undergoes much negativity that impacts her perception of immigration as a whole. Throughout the entirety of the memoir, she carries an underlying tone of embarrassment for her culture--the narrator is stuck in a sort of limbo, unsure of whether to cling on to her Chinese traditions, which prove time and again to be incommensurable to American ones, or to completely assimilate to her newly-adopted lifestyle in America. Due to her lack of confidence in her English-speaking skills, the narrator “became silent.” Her hostility towards “that one girl who could not speak up even in Chinese school” is a direct reflection of her internal inhibitions towards herself--she so strongly loathed the little Chinese girl because in her she saw herself. This is made evident through the narrator’s blatant diction: “I hated her when she was the last chosen for her team and I, the last chosen for my team.” The narrator disliked the little girl because she knew that deep down she was a mirrored reflection of her. In her abusive encounter with the little girl, she violently insists that the girl say something, anything--this correlates directly to her own inability to speak when she first immigrated to America. She so desperately wanted the little girl to speak because it would have constituted as a form of redemption for her own muteness years ago.
Sandra Cisneros illustrates a completely different perspective on immigration through the character Cleofilas. Rather than having a shameful and embarrassed outlook on immigration, Cleofilas harnesses a pure sense of optimism, mixed with internal conflicts between her actual reality and her perception of reality, as portrayed by the “telenovelas” she watches. Her idealized vision of the “American Dream,” in which possibilities are endless and happiness is bountiful, is destroyed by her controlling and abusive husband. Despite her husband’s violent outbreaks, including an instance in which “he slapped her [...] until the lip split and bled an orchid of blood,” Cleofilas does not complain; she merely accepts her circumstances, praying for better days to come. Perhaps this is why the story is written in third person--Cleofilas is not given a first person voice because she is too afraid to speak up for herself and face her true reality. There comes a point, though, when she finally realizes that she had been living in an illusion; she decides to go back home to Mexico, leaving the ungraspable phantom that is the “American Dream” behind her.