The Woman Warrior

My English class has started reading the book The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston, which is a memoir of a first generation Chinese girl in America. So far, from what we have read in the first chapter, "No Name Woman", the main character Maxine's, mother has told her a story about her disowned Aunt, she never knew about, because the Aunt had committed suicide, after she got pregnant, when her husband had been gone for years. So the mother presented the story as a lesson for Maxine to learn from, so that she doesn't follow in her Aunt's footsteps, and bring that kind of shame to her family. And after her mother leaves, the girl
After our reading today in class, we were asked to discuss two quotes from our reading in the first chapter.

After her mother tells there the story, about her aunt, Maxine starts thinking about her life as an emigrant of China, "Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America," (Hong Kingston, 5). From this quote, we learn about the unspoken lessons and hardships in the lives of Chinese America immigrants. This quote explains the great differences between the Chinese and American traditions, as well as how as a child you are brought up on the old, Chinese traditions, then as you get older, and mature, you realize that in America, the traditions and values are vastly different. So, the only way you are going to be able to succeed in America, is to change your ideas, morphing both you Chinese and the American traditions/ values/ ideas, together.

Later, Maxine starts describing her mother, "She plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the fields and eats food left for the gods," (Hong Kingston, 6). This quote tells us more about who her mother is, her character, and her values. From the first part of the quote, about Maxine's mother, planting a vegetable garden, and the odd shaped tomatoes, we see that her mother is a hard worker, who thinks more about practical needs, like food and nutrients, than aesthetics, like the beauty of her home, or the kind of food they eat. Then, when this quote talks about Maxine's mother eating the food for the gods, this shows that she does not believe in the superstitions, that most Chinese believe in, she believes in reality. The reality is that there is food and she is hungry, so she eats it. So this quote may also be giving light to the poverty and lack of food in Maxine's family, and Chinese American immigrants in general.