BLOG POST 4

“The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts” written in 1976 by Maxine Hong Kingston focuses on the stories of five different women. The focus of this blog will be on the memoir of Kingston as a young girl who had just immigrated to the United States of America with her family. The story is written in first person narrative and contains a lot of anecdotes that portray a young Chinese girl’s early experiences in the United States.  I sympathize with Kingston because as an immigrant, I have been through similar cultural changes and experiences. Through first person narrative and the use of anecdotes Kingston delivers an emotionally provoking story and successfully depicts an accurate account of an immigrant’s tough early years in a Western country.

Kingston gets an emotional response from the reader (especially readers who are immigrants) with her use of first person anecdotes in this memoir. By being placed in Kingston’s shoes we can see with a clearer lens, the struggle immigrants must go through to adapt to the United States. For the readers, like myself, who are/have been immigrants, this experience is relatable and thus we can sympathize with Kingston.  “She opened her mouth and a voice came out that wasn’t a whisper but it wasn’t a proper voice either. “An aspect of everyday life that an immigrant has to adapt to, is language. We see in this passage that a classmate of Kingston’s, is so frightened to speak because of the fear of making mistakes. The unfortunate reality Kingston is exposing is the criticism immigrants usually get for not being adept at speaking English. Since we are put in Kingston’s shoes, we can sympathize with her for the hardship she faces because we see the true fear and pressure put on the children to speak in a language that’s not even their own.

Furthermore, this can be extended to a metaphorical representation of western societies urging immigrants to speak and possess similar character traits to them. Immigrants usually get condemned for either not being fluent in English or speaking the language with a different accent. It is assumed that it is always an immigrant’s choice to leave their country and that they should be willing to fully adapt with ease to the way things work in the country they move to. Most of the time political and economic turmoil is what pushes immigrants from their countries.

Having experienced similar encounters to Kingston, I fully sympathize with her. Three years ago, I went to boarding school in the United Kingdom and although I was fluent in English, my accent was noticeably different from everyone around me. I got laughed at or asked why I said certain words and phrases in a different way, thus showing the pressure for immigrants to fully adapt to the new culture they live in. From a reader response approach, I feel that Kingston is criticising society for the lack of accommodation and understanding for different cultures. Although this was much more prominent in the 1970s, I feel that this issue is still very much alive in the western societies that exist today.