She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born. Igor Alimov. Pirjo Ahokas. Sämi Ludwig. Asian American Literature in the International Context: …. Asian Highlands Perspectives JOURNAL. When I was a child, my family lived in a 'four-column' wood house made using four poles placed in a rectangular configuration in the center of the home. Four shorter poles were behind the central columns. Four-pillar wood houses had flat roofs with several compartments, and had a skylight in the center that allowed light into the home and allowed smoke from the hearth to escape. We lived in our wood house from November to April. As flowers began to bud and calves were born, we took out our black yak-hair tent and pitched it, which announced that we would soon start moving to our camp on the open grassland where we would stay through spring, summer, and autumn.

Rka phug Rdo rje don grub and CK Stuart. Farmers, Fugitives, Ghosts, and Exploding Grasshoppers: Everyday Life in Horse Race Village, a Tibetan Community on the Yellow River. Asian Highlands Perspectives Rta rgyugs Dajiu tan is a natural farming village that is part of Rka phug Gabu Administrative Village, northwest of Khams ra Kanbula Town, Gcan tsha Jianzha County, Rma lho Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Mtsho sngon Qinghai Province, PR China. Other aspects of the community are presented in terms of history, education, housing, eating, sleeping, archery, religion, livelihood, sources of cash income, stories, folktales, and photographs. Christopher J Vecoli. Codes of speaking and Chinese American immigrant generational conflict in Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior". emma bordet.

Siobhan Yeo. Deborah Morse. Simona Klimková , Alena Smieskova. Jeanie Wills. Elizabeth Joss. françois mitron. Hsiu-chuan Lee. ajer research. victoria cass. Raquel Díaz. Gayle K Sato. Matteo Cardillo. Suhaib H Malkawi. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Maxine Hong Kingston - The Woman Warrior. Eduardo Marroquin. Continue Reading Download Free PDF. Related Papers. Download Free PDF View PDF. dk Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Asian American Literature in the International Context: Readings on Fiction, Poetry, and Performance. Edited together with Rocío Davis. Münster: LIT Verlag, Rocío Davis and Sämi Ludwig. AHP 9 A Ngawa Tibetan Nomad Childhood. On the Legacy of Maxine Hong Kingston: The Mulhouse Book. Edited together with Nicoleta Alexoae Zagni. Champaign Chinese Magazine, v3, Codes in Conflict: The Ethnography of Communication and Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior".

The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan. The Woman Warrior. MAXINE HONG KINGSTON THE WOMAN WARRIOR Maxine Hong Kingston is Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. Those lucky enough to get contracts waved goodbye from the decks. They fed and guarded the stowaways and helped them off in Cuba, New York, Bali, Hawaii. All of them sent money home. She could not have been pregnant, you see, because her husband had been gone for years. No one said anything. We did not discuss it. In early summer she was ready to have the child, long after the time when it could have been possible. On the night the baby was to be born the villagers raided our house. Some were crying. Like a great saw, teeth strung with lights, les of people walked zigzag across our land, tearing the rice.

Their lanterns doubled in the disturbed black water, which drained away through the broken bunds. As the villagers closed in, we could see that some of them, probably men and women we knew well, wore white masks. The people with long hair hung it over their faces. Women with short hair made it stand up on end. Some had tied white bands around their foreheads, arms, and legs. Then they threw eggs and began slaughtering our stock. We could hear the animals scream their deaths—the roosters, the pigs, a last great roar from the ox.

Familiar wild heads ared in our night windows; the villagers encircled us. Some of the faces stopped to peer at us, their eyes rushing like searchlights. The hands flattened against the panes, framed heads, and left red prints. Their knives dripped with the blood of our animals. They smeared blood on the doors and walls. One woman swung a chicken, whose throat she had slit, splattering blood in red arcs about her. We stood together in the middle of our house, in the family hall with the pictures and tables of the ancestors around us, and looked straight ahead. When the men came back, we would build two more to enclose our courtyard and a third one to begin a second courtyard.

From this room a new wing for one of the younger families would grow. They ripped up her clothes and shoes and broke her combs, grinding them underfoot. They tore her work from the loom. They scattered the cooking re and rolled the new weaving in it. We could hear them in the kitchen breaking our bowls and banging the pots. They overturned the great waist-high earthenware jugs; duck eggs, pickled fruits, vegetables burst out and mixed in acrid torrents. The old woman from the next eld swept a broom through the air and loosed the spirits-of-the-broom over our heads. They cut pieces from the dead animals. Some of them took bowls that were not broken and clothes that were not torn. Afterward we swept up the rice and sewed it back up into sacks. But the smells from the spilled preserves lasted. Your aunt gave birth in the pigsty that night. The next morning when I went for the water, I found her and the baby plugging up the family well.

He denies her. Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. The villagers are watchful. She tested our strength to establish realities. Those in the emigrant generations who could not reassert brute survival died young and far from home. Those of us in the rst American generations have had to gure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America. The emigrants confused the gods by diverting their curses, misleading them with crooked streets and false names. They must try to confuse their o spring as well, who, I suppose, threaten them in similar ways—always trying to get things straight, always trying to name the unspeakable.

The Chinese I know hide their names; sojourners take new names when their lives change and guard their real names with silence. Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies? My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by Necessity, a riverbank that guides her life. She plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the elds and eats food left for the gods. Whenever we did frivolous things, we used up energy; we ew high kites. After the one carnival ride each, we paid in guilt; our tired father counted his change on the dark walk home. Adultery is extravagance. Could people who hatch their own chicks and eat the embryos and the heads for delicacies and boil the feet in vinegar for party food, leaving only the gravel, eating even the gizzard lining—could such people engender a prodigal aunt?

To be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was a waste enough. My aunt could not have been the lone romantic who gave up everything for sex. Women in the old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil. I wonder whether he masked himself when he joined the raid on her family. Perhaps she had encountered him in the elds or on the mountain where the daughters-in-law collected fuel. Or perhaps he rst noticed her in the marketplace. He was not a stranger because the village housed no strangers. She had to have dealings with him other than sex. Perhaps he worked an adjoining eld, or he sold her the cloth for the dress she sewed and wore.

His demand must have surprised, then terri ed her. She obeyed him; she always did as she was told. When the family found a young man in the next village to be her husband, she had stood tractably beside the best rooster, his proxy, and promised before they met that she would be his forever. She was lucky that he was her age and she would be the rst wife, an advantage secure now. The night she rst saw him, he had sex with her. Then he left for America. She had almost forgotten what he looked like.

When she tried to envision him, she only saw the black and white face in the group photograph the men had had taken before leaving. The other man was not, after all, much di erent from her husband. They both gave orders: she followed. Be here again next week. And she might have separated the rapes from the rest of living if only she did not have to buy her oil from him or gather wood in the same forest. I want her fear to have lasted just as long as rape lasted so that the fear could have been contained. No drawn-out fear. But women at sex hazarded birth and hence lifetimes. The fear did not stop but permeated everywhere. In a commensal tradition, where food is precious, the powerful older people made wrongdoers eat alone. Instead of letting them start separate new lives like the Japanese, who could become samurais and geishas, the Chinese family, faces averted but eyes glowering sideways, hung on to the o enders and fed them leftovers.

My aunt must have lived in the same house as my parents and eaten at an outcast table. My mother spoke about the raid as if she had seen it, when she and my aunt, a daughter-in- law to a di erent household, should not have been living together at all. But they had sent her back to her own mother and father, a mysterious act hinting at disgraces not told me. Perhaps they had thrown her out to deflect the avengers. When the goods were divided among the family, three of the brothers took land, and the youngest, my father, chose an education. They expected her alone to keep the traditional ways, which her brothers, now among the barbarians, could fumble without detection. The heavy, deep-rooted women were to maintain the past against the ood, safe for returning. But the rare urge west had xed upon our family, and so my aunt crossed boundaries not delineated in space. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms. But perhaps my aunt, my forerunner, caught in a slow life, let dreams grow and fade and after some months or years went toward what persisted.

Fear at the enormities of the forbidden kept her desires delicate, wire and bone. She looked at a man because she liked the way the hair was tucked behind his ears, or she liked the question-mark line of a long torso curving at the shoulder and straight at the hip. Why, the wrong lighting could erase the dearest thing about him. It could very well have been, however, that my aunt did not take subtle enjoyment of her friend, but, a wild woman, kept rollicking company. Unless I see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help. To sustain her being in love, she often worked at herself in the mirror, guessing at the colors and shapes that would interest him, changing them frequently in order to hit on the right combination. She wanted him to look back.

On a farm near the sea, a woman who tended her appearance reaped a reputation for eccentricity. All the married women blunt-cut their hair in aps about their ears or pulled it back in tight buns. No nonsense. Neither style blew easily into heart-catching tangles. And at their weddings they displayed themselves in their long hair for the last time. A bun could have been contrived to escape into black streamers blowing in the wind or in quiet wisps about her face, but only the older women in our picture album wear buns. She brushed her hair back from her forehead, tucking the aps behind her ears. When she closed her ngers as if she were making a pair of shadow geese bite, the string twisted together catching the little hairs. Then she pulled the thread away from her skin, ripping the hairs out neatly, her eyes watering from the needles of pain.

Opening her ngers, she cleaned the thread, then rolled it along her hairline and the tops of her eyebrows. My mother did the same to me and my sisters and herself. Sisters used to sit on their beds and cry together, she said, as their mothers or their slaves removed the bandages for a few minutes each night and let the blood gush back into their veins. Once my aunt found a freckle on her chin, at a spot that the almanac said predestined her for unhappiness. She dug it out with a hot needle and washed the wound with peroxide. More attention to her looks than these pullings of hairs and pickings at spots would have caused gossip among the villagers.

They owned work clothes and good clothes, and they wore good clothes for feasting the new seasons. But since a woman combing her hair hexes beginnings, my aunt rarely found an occasion to look her best. Women looked like great sea snails—the corded wood, babies, and laundry they carried were the whorls on their backs. The Chinese did not admire a bent back; goddesses and warriors stood straight. Still there must have been a marvelous freeing of beauty when a worker laid down her burden and stretched and arched. Such commonplace loveliness, however, was not enough for my aunt. She plied her secret comb. And sure enough she cursed the year, the family, the village, and herself. Even as her hair lured her imminent lover, many other men looked at her.

Uncles, cousins, nephews, brothers would have looked, too, had they been home between journeys. Perhaps they had already been restraining their curiosity, and they left, fearful that their glances, like a eld of nesting birds, might be startled and caught. Poverty hurt, and that was their first reason for leaving. But another, final reason for leaving the crowded house was the never-said. She may have been unusually beloved, the precious only daughter, spoiled and mirror gazing because of the a ection the family lavished on her. When her husband left, they welcomed the chance to take her back from the in-laws; she could live like the little daughter for just a while longer.

And one day he brought home a baby girl, wrapped up inside his brown western-style greatcoat. My grandmother made him trade back. When he nally got a daughter of his own, he doted on her. They must have all loved her, except perhaps my father, the only brother who never went back to China, having once been traded for a girl. Brothers and sisters, newly men and women, had to e ace their sexual color and present plain miens. Disturbing hair and eyes, a smile like no other, threatened the ideal of ve generations living under one roof. To focus blurs, people shouted face to face and yelled from room to room. The immigrants I know have loud voices, unmodulated to American tones even after years away from the village where they called their friendships out across the elds.

Walking erect knees straight, toes pointed forward, not pigeon-toed, which is Chinese-feminine and speaking in an inaudible voice, I have tried to turn myself American-feminine. Chinese communication was loud, public. Only sick people had to whisper. But at the dinner table, where the family members came nearest one another, no one could talk, not the outcasts nor any eaters. Every word that falls from the mouth is a coin lost. Silently they gave and accepted food with both hands. A preoccupied child who took his bowl with one hand got a sideways glare. A complete moment of total attention is due everyone alike. Children and lovers have no singularity here, but my aunt used a secret voice, a separate attentiveness.

He may have been somebody in her own household, but intercourse with a man outside the family would have been no less abhorrent. All the village were kinsmen, and the titles shouted in loud country voices never let kinship be forgotten. Parents researched birth charts probably not so much to assure good fortune as to circumvent incest in a population that has but one hundred surnames. Everybody has eight million relatives. How useless then sexual mannerisms, how dangerous. It hexed the boys, who would or would not ask me to dance, and made them less scary and as familiar and deserving of benevolence as girls. But, of course, I hexed myself also—no dates. Love me back. If I made myself American-pretty so that the ve or six Chinese boys in the class fell in love with me, everyone else—the Caucasian, Negro, and Japanese boys—would too.

Sisterliness, dignified and honorable, made much more sense. Attraction eludes control so stubbornly that whole societies designed to organize relationships among people cannot keep order, not even when they bind people to one another from childhood and raise them together. Marriage promises to turn strangers into friendly relatives—a nation of siblings. In the village structure, spirits shimmered among the live creatures, balanced and held in equilibrium by time and land. But one human being aring up into violence could open up a black hole, a maelstrom that pulled in the sky. The villagers punished her for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them. If my aunt had betrayed the family at a time of large grain yields and peace, when many boys were born, and wings were being built on many houses, perhaps she might have escaped such severe punishment.

But the men—hungry, greedy, tired of planting in dry soil—had been forced to leave the village in order to send food-money home. There were ghost plagues, bandit plagues, wars with the Japanese, oods. My Chinese brother and sister had died of an unknown sickness. Adultery, perhaps only a mistake during good times, became a crime when the village needed food. The round moon cakes and round doorways, the round tables of graduated sizes that t one roundness inside another, round windows and rice bowls—these talismans had lost their power to warn this family of the law: a family must be whole, faithfully keeping the descent line by having sons to feed the old and the dead, who in turn look after the family.

The villagers came to show my aunt and her lover-in-hiding a broken house. The villagers were speeding up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted to see that her in delity had already harmed the village, that waves of consequences would return unpredictably, sometimes in disguise, as now, to hurt her. This roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see its circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby. Awaken her to the inexorable. People who refused fatalism because they could invent small resources insisted on culpability. Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars. After the villagers left, their lanterns now scattering in various directions toward home, the family broke their silence and cursed her. Death is coming. Dead ghost! When she felt the birth coming, she thought that she had been hurt. Her body seized together. She turned on her back, lay on the ground. The black well of sky and stars went out and out and out forever; her body and her complexity seemed to disappear.

An agoraphobia rose in her, speeding higher and higher, bigger and bigger; she would not be able to contain it; there would no end to fear. Flayed, unprotected against space, she felt pain return, focusing her body. This pain chilled her—a cold, steady kind of surface pain. Inside, spasmodically, the other pain, the pain of the child, heated her. For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space. She saw them congratulating one another, high joy on the mornings the rice shoots came up. When these pictures burst, the stars drew yet further apart. Black space opened. She got to her feet to ght better and remembered that old-fashioned women gave birth in their pigsties to fool the jealous, pain-dealing gods, who do not snatch piglets. Before the next spasms could stop her, she ran to the pigsty, each step a rushing out into emptiness. She climbed over the fence and knelt in the dirt.

It was good to have a fence enclosing her, a tribal person alone. Laboring, this woman who had carried her child as a foreign growth that sickened her every day, expelled it at last. She reached down to touch the hot, wet, moving mass, surely smaller than anything human, and could feel that it was human after all— ngers, toes, nails, nose. She pulled it up on to her belly, and it lay curled there, butt in the air, feet precisely tucked one under the other. She opened her loose shirt and buttoned the child inside. After resting, it squirmed and thrashed and she pushed it up to her breast. It turned its head this way and that until it found her nipple. There, it made little snu ing noises. She clenched her teeth at its preciousness, lovely as a young calf, a piglet, a little dog.

She may have gone to the pigsty as a last act of responsibility: she would protect this child as she had protected its father. It would look after her soul, leaving supplies on her grave. But how would this tiny child without family nd her grave when there would be no marker for her anywhere, neither in the earth nor the family hall? No one would give her a family hall name. She had taken the child with her into the wastes. At its birth the two of them had felt the same raw pain of separation, a wound that only the family pressing tight could close. A child with no descent line would not soften her life but only trail after her, ghostlike, begging her to give it purpose.

At dawn the villagers on their way to the fields would stand around the fence and look. Full of milk, the little ghost slept. When it awoke, she hardened her breasts against the milk that crying loosens. Toward morning she picked up the baby and walked to the well. Carrying the baby to the well shows loving. Otherwise abandon it. Turn its face into the mud. Mothers who love their children take them along. It was probably a girl; there is some hope of forgiveness for boys. Your father does not want to hear her name. She has never been born. I have thought that my family, having settled among immigrants who had also been their neighbors in the ancestral land, needed to clean their name, and a wrong word would incite the kinspeople even here. But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment. And I have. People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further—a reverse ancestor worship.

Her betrayal so maddened them, they saw to it that she would su er forever, even after death. Always hungry, always needing, she would have to beg food from other ghosts, snatch and steal it from those whose living descendants give them gifts. She would have to ght the ghosts massed at crossroads for the buns a few thoughtful citizens leave to decoy her away from village and home so that the ancestral spirits could feast unharassed. At peace, they could act like gods, not ghosts, their descent lines providing them with paper suits and dresses, spirit money, paper houses, paper automobiles, chicken, meat, and rice into eternity—essences delivered up in smoke and ames, steam and incense rising from each rice bowl.

In an attempt to make the Chinese care for people outside the family, Chairman Mao encourages us now to give our paper replicas to the spirits of outstanding soldiers and workers, no matter whose ancestors they may be. My aunt remains forever hungry. Goods are not distributed evenly among the dead. My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to me because now, after fty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes. I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute. We could be heroines, swordswomen.

Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound. It was a woman who invented white crane boxing only two hundred years ago. She was already an expert pole ghter, daughter of a teacher trained at the Shao-lin temple, where there lived an order of ghting monks. She was combing her hair one morning when a white crane alighted outside her window. She teased it with her pole, which it pushed aside with a soft brush of its wing. Amazed, she dashed outside and tried to knock the crane o its perch. It snapped her pole in two.

Recognizing the presence of great power, she asked the spirit of the white crane if it would teach her to ght. It answered with a cry that white crane boxers imitate today. Later the bird returned as an old man, and he guided her boxing for many years. Thus she gave the world a new martial art. This was one of the tamer, more modern stories, mere introduction. My mother told others that followed swordswomen through woods and palaces for years. Night after night my mother would talk-story until we fell asleep. And on Sundays, from noon to midnight, we went to the movies at the Confucius Church. At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking- story.

Instantly I remembered that as a child I had followed my mother about the house, the two of us singing about how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive from war to settle in the village. I had forgotten this chant that was once mine, given me by my mother, who may not have known its power to remind. She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman. The call would come from a bird that ew over our roof. I would be a little girl of seven the day I followed the bird away into the mountains. The brambles would tear o my shoes and the rocks cut my feet and ngers, but I would keep climbing, eyes upward to follow the bird.

We would go around and around the tallest mountain, climbing ever upward. I would drink from the river, which I would meet again and again. We would go so high the plants would change, and the river that ows past the village would become a waterfall. At the height where the bird used to disappear, the clouds would gray the world like an ink wash. Even when I got used to that gray, I would only see peaks as if shaded in pencil, rocks like charcoal rubbings, everything so murky. There would be just two black strokes—the bird. Suddenly, without noise, I would break clear into a yellow, warm world. New trees would lean toward me at mountain angles, but when I looked for the village, it would have vanished under the clouds. The door opened, and an old man and an old woman came out carrying bowls of rice and soup and a leafy branch of peaches.

Do you have any cookies? I like chocolate chip cookies. They gave me an egg, as if it were my birthday, and tea, though they were older than I, but I poured for them. The teapot and the rice pot seemed bottomless, but perhaps not; the old couple ate very little except for peaches. When the mountains and the pines turned into blue oxen, blue dogs, and blue people standing, the old couple asked me to spend the night in the hut. I thought about the long way down in the ghostly dark and decided yes. The inside of the hut seemed as large as the outdoors.

Pine needles covered the oor in thick patterns; someone had carefully arranged the yellow, green, and brown pine needles according to age. When I stepped carelessly and mussed a line, my feet kicked up new blends of earth colors, but the old man and old woman walked so lightly that their feet never stirred the designs by a needle. A rock grew in the middle of the house, and that was their table. The benches were fallen trees. Ferns and shade owers grew out of one wall, the mountainside itself. The old couple tucked me into a bed just my width. The rope was tied to the roof, and the roof opened up like a basket lid.

I would sleep with the moon and the stars. In the morning light I could see her earlobes pierced with gold. We can train you to become a warrior. The old man untied the drinking gourd slung across his back. He lifted the lid by its stem and looked for something in the water. At rst I saw only water so clear it magni ed the bers in the walls of the gourd. On the surface, I saw only my own round re ection. The old man encircled the neck of the gourd with his thumb and index nger and gave it a shake. As the water shook, then settled, the colors and lights shimmered into a picture, not re ecting anything I could see around me. There at the bottom of the gourd were my mother and father scanning the sky, which was where I was. The water shook and became just water again. You can go pull sweet potatoes, or you can stay with us and learn how to ght barbarians and bandits.

You can be remembered by the Han people for your dutifulness. So the hut became my home, and I found out that the old woman did not arrange the pine needles by hand. She opened the roof; an autumn wind would come up, and the needles fell in braids—brown strands, green strands, yellow strands. The old woman waved her arms in conducting motions; she blew softly with her mouth. I thought, nature certainly works differently on mountains than in valleys. At night, the mice and toads looked at me, their eyes quick stars and slow stars. Not once would I see a three-legged toad, though; you need strings of cash to bait them. The two old people led me in exercises that began at dawn and ended at sunset so that I could watch our shadows grow and shrink and grow again, rooted to the earth. I learned to move my ngers, hands, feet, head, and entire body in circles.

After ve years my body became so strong that I could control even the dilations of the pupils inside my irises. After six years the deer let me run beside them. I could jump twenty feet into the air from a standstill, leaping like a monkey over the hut. Every creature has a hiding skill and a ghting skill a warrior can use. When birds alighted on my palm, I could yield my muscles under their feet and give them no base from which to fly away. But I could not fly like the bird that led me here, except in large, free dreams.

During the seventh year I would be fourteen , the two old people led me blindfolded to the mountains of the white tigers. A wind buoyed me up over the roots, the rocks, the little hills. We reached the tiger place in no time—a mountain peak three feet three from the sky. We had to bend over. The old people waved once, slid down the mountain, and disappeared around a tree. The old woman, good with the bow and arrow, took them with her; the old man took the water gourd. I would have to survive bare-handed. Snow lay on the ground, and snow fell in loose gusts—another way the dragon breathes. I walked in the direction from which we had come, and when I reached the timberline, I collected wood broken from the cherry tree, the peony, and the walnut, which is the tree of life.

Fire, the old people had taught me, is stored in trees that grow red owers or red berries in the spring or whose leaves turn red in the fall. I took the wood from the protected spots beneath the trees and wrapped it in my scarf to keep dry. I dug where squirrels might have come, stealing one or two nuts at each place. These I also wrapped in my scarf. It is possible, the old people said, for a human being to live for fty days on water. I would save the roots and nuts for hard climbs, the places where nothing grew, the emergency should I not find the hut. This time there would be no bird to follow. The rst night I burned half of the wood and slept curled against the mountain. I heard the white tigers prowling on the other side of the re, but I could not distinguish them from the snow patches. The morning rose perfectly. I hurried along, again collecting wood and edibles.

I ate nothing and only drank the snow my fires made run. The rst two days were gifts, the fasting so easy to do, I so smug in my strength that on the third day, the hardest, I caught myself sitting on the ground, opening the scarf and staring at the nuts and dry roots. That night I burned up most of the wood I had collected, unable to sleep for facing my death—if not death here, then death someday. The moon animals that did not hibernate came out to hunt, but I had given up the habits of a carnivore since living with the old people. On the fourth and fth days, my eyesight sharp with hunger, I saw deer and used their trails when our ways coincided.

Where the deer nibbled, I gathered the fungus, the fungus of immortality. At noon on the tenth day I packed snow, white as rice, into the worn center of a rock pointed out to me by a nger of ice, and around the rock I built a re. In the warming water I put roots, nuts, and the fungus of immortality. For variety I ate a quarter of the nuts and roots raw. Oh, green joyous rush inside my mouth, my head, my stomach, my toes, my soul—the best meal of my life. One day I found that I was striding long distances without hindrance, my bundle light. Food had become so scarce that I was no longer stopping to collect it. I had walked into dead land. Here even the snow stopped. I did not go back to the richer areas, where I could not stay anyway, but, resolving to fast until I got halfway to the next woods, I started across the dry rocks. Heavily weighed down by the wood on my back, branches poking maddeningly, I had burned almost all of the fuel not to waste strength lugging it.

Somewhere in the dead land I lost count of the days. It seemed as if I had been walking forever; life had never been di erent from this. An old man and an old woman were help I had only wished for. I was fourteen years old and lost from my village. I was walking in circles. Or was that yet to come? I wanted my mother and father. The old man and old woman were only a part of this lostness and this hunger. One nightfall I ate the last of my food but had enough sticks for a good re. I stared into the ames, which reminded me about helping my mother with the cooking and made me cry. It was very strange looking through water into re and seeing my mother again. I nodded, orange and warm. A white rabbit hopped beside me, and for a moment I thought it was a blob of snow that had fallen out of the sky. The rabbit and I studied each other. Rabbits taste like chickens. My mother and father had taught me how to hit rabbits over the head with wine jugs, then skin them cleanly for fur vests. Let me put on another branch, then.

I had learned from rabbits to kick backward. Perhaps this one was sick because normally the animals did not like re. The rabbit seemed alert enough, however, looking at me so acutely, bounding up to the re. But it did not stop when it got to the edge. It turned its face once toward me, then jumped into the re. The re went down for a moment, as if crouching in surprise, then the ames shot up taller than before. When the re became calm again, I saw the rabbit had turned into meat, browned just right. I ate it, knowing the rabbit had sacri ced itself for me. It had made me a gift of meat. When you have been walking through trees hour after hour—and I nally reached trees after the dead land—branches cross out everything, no relief whichever way your head turns until your eyes start to invent new sights.

They were light; they were molten, changing gold—Chinese lion dancers, African lion dancers in midstep. I heard high Javanese bells deepen in midring to Indian bells, Hindu Indian, American Indian. Manes grew tall into feathers that shone—became light rays. Then the dancers danced the future—a machine-future—in clothes I had never seen before. I am watching the centuries pass in moments because suddenly I understand time, which is spinning and xed like the North Star. The man and the woman grow bigger and bigger, so bright. All light. They are tall angels in two rows. They have high white wings on their backs. Perhaps there are in nite angels; perhaps I see two angels in their consecutive moments.

I cannot bear their brightness and cover my eyes, which hurt from opening so wide without a blink. When I put my hands down to look again, I recognize the old brown man and the old gray woman walking toward me out of the pine forest. Afterward, whenever I did not eat for long, as during famine or battle, I could stare at ordinary people and see their light and gold. I could see their dance. When I get hungry enough, then killing and falling are dancing too. The old people fed me hot vegetable soup. Then they asked me to talk-story about what happened in the mountains of the white tigers. I told them that the white tigers had stalked me through the snow but that I had fought them o with burning branches, and my great-grandparents had come to lead me safely through the forests.

I had met a rabbit who taught me about self-immolation and how to speed up transmigration: one does not have to become worms rst but can change directly into a human being—as in our own humaneness we had just changed bowls of vegetable soup into people too. That made them laugh. I would want to tell them about that last moment of my journey; but it was only one moment out of the weeks that I had been gone, and its telling would keep till morning. Besides, the two people must already know. In the next years, when I suddenly came upon them or when I caught them out of the corners of my eyes, he appeared as a handsome young man, tall with long black hair, and she, as a beautiful young woman who ran bare-legged through the trees. In the spring she dressed like a bride; she wore juniper leaves in her hair and a black embroidered jacket. I learned to shoot accurately because my teachers held the targets.

Often when sighting along an arrow, there to the side I would glimpse the young man or young woman, but when I looked directly, he or she would be old again. After I returned from my survival test, the two old people trained me in dragon ways, which took another eight years. Copying the tigers, their stalking kill and their anger, had been a wild, bloodthirsty joy. Tigers are easy to nd, but I needed adult wisdom to know dragons. Unlike tigers, dragons are so immense, I would never see one in its entirety. But I could explore the mountains, which are the top of its head. I could touch the stones the old woman wore—its bone marrow. I had worked the soil, which is its esh, and harvested the plants and climbed the trees, which are its hairs. I could listen to its voice in the thunder and feel its breathing in the winds, see its breathing in the clouds.

Its tongue is the lightning. In the spring when the dragon awakes, I watched its turnings in the rivers. The closest I came to seeing a dragon whole was when the old people cut away a small strip of bark on a pine that was over three thousand years old. The resin underneath ows in the swirling shapes of dragons. I brought the leaves to the old man and old woman, and they ate them for immortality. I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. Pearls are bone marrow; pearls come from oysters. The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium. Its voice thunders and jingles like copper pans. It breathes re and water; and sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many. I worked every day. When it rained, I exercised in the downpour, grateful not to be pulling sweet potatoes. I moved like the trees in the wind. I was grateful not to be squishing in chicken mud, which I did not have nightmares about so frequently now.

They were eating the biggest meal of the year, and I missed them very much. I had felt loved, love pouring from their ngers when the adults tucked red money in our pockets. My two old people did not give me money, but, each year for fteen years, a bead. By looking into the water gourd I was able to follow the men I would have to execute. Not knowing that I watched, fat men ate meat; fat men drank wine made from the rice; fat men sat on naked little girls. I watched powerful men count their money, and starving men count theirs. When bandits brought their share of raids home, I waited until they took o their masks so I would know the villagers who stole from their neighbors. The old man pointed out strengths and weaknesses whenever heroes met in classical battles, but warfare makes a scramble of the beautiful, slow old ghts. I saw one young ghter salute his opponent—and ve peasants hit him from behind with scythes and hammers. His opponent did not warn him.

You can see behind you like a bat. Hold the peasants back with one hand and kill the warrior with the other. Let it run. To console me for being without family on this day, they let me look inside the gourd. My whole family was visiting friends on the other side of the river. Everybody had on good clothes and was exchanging cakes. It was a wedding. Wherever she is, she must be happy now. She will certainly come back if she is alive, and if she is a spirit, you have given her a descent line. We are so grateful. How full I would be with all their love for me. I would have for a new husband my own playmate, dear since childhood, who loved me so much he was to become a spirit bridegroom for my sake.

We will be so happy when I come back to the valley, healthy and strong and not a ghost. by Brittany Kingston. by Jayne Kingston. by Tara Kingston. BooksVooks Genres Autobiography Maxine Hong Kingston The Woman Warrior pdf. FREE The Woman Warrior PDF Book by Maxine Hong Kingston Download or Read Online Free Author: Maxine Hong Kingston Submitted by: Maria Garcia Views Request a Book Add a Review The Woman Warrior PDF book by Maxine Hong Kingston Read Online or Free Download in ePUB, PDF or MOBI eBooks. The Woman Warrior PDF Details Author: Maxine Hong Kingston Book Format: Paperback Original Title: The Woman Warrior Number Of Pages: pages First Published in: Latest Edition: April 23rd Language: English Awards: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award , National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction Genres: Autobiography , Memoir , Non Fiction , Feminism , Cultural , China , Classics , Formats: audible mp3, ePUB Android , kindle, and audiobook.

Popular Books Page Views. Related Books Reads. Anisfield-Wolf Book Award , National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction Autobiography , Memoir , Non Fiction , Feminism , Cultural , China , Classics ,. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts pdf by Maxine Hong Kingston. China Men pdf by Maxine Hong Kingston. The Fifth Book of Peace pdf by Maxine Hong Kingston. Warrior Soul Warrior Soul Warrior Soul pdf by Chuck Pfarrer.

Get Book. Skip to content. First published in , it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American. Released on Author : Maxine Hong Kingston Publisher: ISBN: Category : Authors, American Languages : en Pages : View Book Description An account of growing up female and Chinese-American in California. Author : Sau-ling Cynthia Wong Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : View Book Description With the continued expansion of the literary canon, multicultural works of modern literary fiction and autobiography have assumed an increasing importance for students and scholars of American literature.

This exciting new series assembles key documents and criticism concerning these works that have so recently become central components of the American literature curriculum. Each casebook will reprint documents relating to the work's historical context and reception, present the best in critical essays, and when possible, feature an interview of the author. The series will provide, for the first time, an accessible forum in which readers can come to a fuller understanding of these contemporary masterpieces and the unique aspects of American ethnic, racial, or cultural experience that they so ably portray.

This case book presents a thought-provoking overview of critical debates surrounding The Woman Warrior, perhaps the best known Asian American literary work. The essays deal with such issues as the reception by various interpretive communities, canon formation, cultural authenticity, fictionality in autobiography, and feminist and poststructuralist subjectivity. The eight essays are supplemented an interview with the author and a bibliography. When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talking-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Throughout her childhood, Maxine Hong Kingston listened to her mother's mesmerizing tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upwards.

Growing up in a changing America, surrounded by Chinese myth and memory, this is her story of two cultures and one trenchant, lyrical journey into womanhood. Complex and beautiful, angry and adoring, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is a seminal piece of writing about emigration and identity. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in and is widely hailed as a feminist classic. Author : Gale, Cengage Learning Publisher: Gale Cengage Learning ISBN: X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 25 View Book Description A Study Guide for Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.

This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs. Author : Soon-Leng Chua Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : View Book Description This is a powerful study of what it is like to grow up Chinese in America. The dichotomy of values and the cleaving of a life in two cultures, which must yet be lived in one united whole, make this both compelling and informative. Author : Lois Beardslee Publisher: University of Arizona Press ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : View Book Description The WomenÕs Warrior Society is a remarkable gathering of characters and voices used to expose truths about Native American life. In tightly woven prose, Lois Beardslee tells stories about people from all over North America and from either side of the line between abused and abuser.

Both individual and archetypal, Native and non-Native, male and female, her characters take up arms against widely accepted stereotypes about Native people. The women warriors in these tales have lived through a variety of mishaps, experiencing the consequences brought on by misinformation and the misguided efforts of institutions and individuals. Armed with this experience, they gather in unlikely ÒsweatlodgesÓÑfrom kitchen tables to public librariesÑtransforming into she-wolves who, lips curled, snarl at their own victimization and assert that hope for future generations is maintained through creativity, determination, and the preservation of traditional values. This is political writing at its most honest and creative. BeardsleeÕs style is poetic and lyrical, and her voice, shifting as it does, both grips us with terrible tone and comforts us with familiar assurance.

A fierce call to action, this book reads like a song cycleÑboth singing to us and demanding that we sing in response. Beardslee creates new strategies and measures of success. Her warriors dance, bark, howl, and transform themselves in unexpected ways that invoke tears, laughter, even awe. They are, above all, driven, successful, and eternally hopeful. Author : Susan Shifrin Publisher: Routledge ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : View Book Description Exploring the ways in which women have formed and defined expressions of culture in a range of geographical, political, and historical settings, this collection of essays examines women's figurative and literal roles as "sites" of culture from the 16th century to the present day. The diversity of chronological, geographical and cultural subjects investigated by the contributors-from the 16th century to the 20th, from Renaissance Italy to Puritan Boston to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to post-war Japan, from parliamentary politics to the politics of representation-provides a range of historical outlooks.

The collection brings an unusual variety of methodological approaches to the project of discovering intersections among women's studies, literary studies, cultural studies, history, and art history, and expands beyond the Anglo- and Eurocentric focus often found in other works in the field. The volume presents an in-depth, investigative study of a tightly-constructed set of crucial themes, including that of the female body as a governing trope in political and cultural discourses; the roles played by women and notions of womanhood in redefining traditions of ceremony, theatricality and spectacle; women's iconographies and personal spaces as resources that have shaped cultural transactions and evolutions; and finally, women's voices-speaking and writing, both-as authors of cultural record and destiny.

Throughout the volume the themes are refracted chronologically, geographically, and disciplinarily as a means to deeper understanding of their content and contexts. Women as Sites of Culture represents a productive collaboration of historians from various disciplines in coherently addressing issues revolving around the roles of gender, text, and image in a range of cultures and periods. Author : Gale, Cengage Learning Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning ISBN: X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 15 View Book Description A study guide for Maxine Hong Kingston's "Women Warrior: Memoirs of Girlhood Among Ghosts", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary themes for Students: War and Peace series. For any literature project, trust Literary themes for Students: War and Peace for all of your research needs.

Later, it would be said, they turned into the band of swordswomen who were a mercenary army. Perhaps he worked an adjoining eld, or he sold her the cloth for the dress she sewed and wore. She will certainly come back if she is alive, and if she is a spirit, you have given her a descent line. In early summer she was ready to have the child, long after the time when it could have been possible. At the height where the bird used to disappear, the clouds would gray the world like an ink wash.

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