A really interesting take on the Mulan story and on feminism. In short, sometimes stories that portray women as strong aren't actually helpful. The Mulan story sets an unreachable standard which is illustrated through the life of the modern main character and her super-woman mother. ( )

This is the memoir of a Chinese-American girl, primarily concerning her relationship with her mother. I loved it. It's a great set of stories about cultural assimilation, about trying to bridge yourself between two worlds, the world of your family and the world everyone else belongs to. How do you make sense of what your mother tells you when everyone else tells you something else? Kingston works these stories into her own life in a variety of fashions, whether it be imagining what life was like back in China and what significance it has for her, or weaving her own experiences into the legend of Fa Mu Lan. But when you come down to it, there's a level on which all the cultural stuff it just trappings; this is the tale of a child trying to figure out her parents, a tale of us have to reenact in our own lives. Kingston does her best, and the result is a compelling portrait of a woman filled with contradictions, a woman who shaped Kingston in ways she had never imagined.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1272297...

An interesting memoir of life as a Chinese girl growing up in California, very much concentrating on the Chinese family background and history, including untold stories, the nearness of myth and of symbolism, the alienness of the Californian environment (the "ghosts" of the title are non-Chinese people). A good read, also mercifully short. ( )

Maxine Hong Kingston tells how the ancient patriarchal Chinese society still oppressed her as an American born Chinese female. She tells of the struggle to find freedom and self-worth with a mixture of legend and personal experience. In the end she learns to speak for herself and find independence from and identity with her very strong mother. At times this book disturbed and confused me; but always, I was captivated by its intensity. ( )

Probably most intriguing about the structure of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, beginning with "No Name Woman” and ending in A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” is that it characterizes Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, told in the interesting format of non-sequential episodes, as one that begins in oppressed silence but ends in universal song. When looking at the three woman warrior figures in the book – her aunt, the No Name Woman; the rewritten legendary warrior in “White Tigers” (based upon the Mulan legend); and the poet and barbarian captive, Ts’ai Yen – the characteristics that unite them all are their determined attempts at asserting their own kinds of power, femininity, and individuality in patriarchal Chinese society. The methods through which they do so revolve around words written, spoken, or not spoken: from the silence practiced by No Name Woman, to the words written on the warrior’s back, to the songs created by Ts’ai Yen and, finally, to the stories that Kingston as the author uses to find the marks of the woman warrior within herself, and to do so in a way that allows the readers insight into a life that even the narrator is grappling to understand. The words that open Woman Warrior, which begins with the story of No Name Woman, are quite interestingly an admonition of silence: “’You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you’” (3). This admonition signifies a promise, and a breaking of a promise: The narrator’s mother Brave Orchid is showing courage and confidence in her daughter by sharing something that should not be remembered, yet at the same time, her mother is breaking the silence surrounding her sister-in-law, the titled No Name Woman. This is one of the first of many of the narrator’s mother’s talk-stories, ones that were told with a purpose to aid her children in life events, while sealing the bond between child and mother. The story of the woman warrior, who is the protagonist of “White Tigers,” is created in history and then transformed by the narrator into one of triumph through the breaking of silences. Inspired by Kingston’s childhood and the stories of Yue Fei and Mulan, the chapter becomes another way for the narrator to celebrate the breaking of silences, something that continues throughout the book. This union between mother and daughter the novel can be seen as the compromise of generations, an idea carried out in Kingston’s appropriation of myths and stories seen in the retelling of these woman warriors. Her mother, in fact, is the narrator’s guide of the methods in which to appropriate talk-stories for her own purposes. Kingston’s retellings are part of the idea that a culture growing up in one country can appropriate the lessons of their parents, who grew up in another. It is the idea and the hope that stories created by a patriarchal culture can still make room for its daughters, ultimately one the most important ideas Kingston communicates in her beautifully rendered book. ( )