Shaman Lit. Circle

In English we were assigned to read the third chapter of The Woman Warrior, "Shaman", and my role this time was the Biographical Critic, who analyzes what we know and learn about the author from the chapter.

In "Shaman", we learn a lot about Maxine's mother, Brave Orchid, and her family's life back in China. The chapter starts out when Maxine brings out her mother's diploma and graduation photo's from a medical school in the city of Canton, and uses her imagination and her mother's talk-story to make-up her mother's experiences, and then goes on to describe how her life had been like in China, in comparison with the life that she had to live when she came to America. From "Shaman", we learn that in China, Brave Orchid had two other children who both died, and after the second died, she decided to go to the Keung School of Midwifery, to become a doctor with the money that her husband was sending her from America. And while there she encountered her first ghost whom she drove out and showed her bravery to all the other students, as well as teaching them how not to fear the ghosts, and how to rid ghosts from any place.

So, when Brave Orchid returns to her village, she is treated with the utmost esteem and respect, because she could not only cure the sick , deliver babies, but also banish the ghosts. We also learn about how smart Brave Orchid had been when caring for the sick, as we learn about her secret of success, which was that she would never treat a patience who was going to die, so all her patience would be get better and live.

But when Brave Orchid's husband asked her to leave China to live in America, she repeats several times in her talk-story of who far she fell when she came to America. Fore in China, she was regarded as a magician or Shaman for all she could do, then in America, she works in a laundry mat, or the tomato fields, something that she is constantly complaining about, saying that there lives would have been much better if they had stayed in China. However in the ending of the chapter, we learn how the family could never go back to China, because the Communist had taken all their property, after their last uncle was murdered.