In "The Woman Warrior" Kingston offers her readers a perspective on what it is like to be "in the first American generations [and] figure out how the invisible world the [Chinese] emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America” (5). In exploring this role, Kingston also scrutinizes the role of both Chinese American and Chinese females.

This is what I imagine the new immigrant family to look like... minus two daughters. The woman's face doesn't not strike me as particuraly pleased, but maybe that's just because the Chinese don't smile in photos.


In understanding the role of the former however, one must first understand the latter. In my attempt to do this I found myself asking what perpetuated the mindset that "'girls are maggots in the rice... [and] it is more profitable to raise geese than daughters'" (43)? I found countless examples of "the liability argument" throughout the text, but I also found obvious contradictions.

However symbolic the refrence may be I don't feel like it's appropriate. Not because I take offense necessarily at being- inherently called a maggot- but just because it's so cliched to call someone you don't like a maggot.

For example, when Fa Mu Lan is taken her mother says, "'we'll have to harvest the potatoes without her help this year" (22), and when she returns home her parents "killed a chicken and steamed it whole, as if they were welcoming home a son..." (34). What confuses me about these specific examples (and the chapter as a whole really) is how they're an utter contrast to what was actually practiced. Instead of expressing happiness at being relieved of a daughter (as one would expect), the mother understands that the family has just lost a valuable worker. She even grieves! Though one could argue the merits of a male over those of a female it still remains that a female plays a valuable and significant role in the traditional Chinese family. How well would a family get along without their two daughters helping them harvest an entire field? How would a mother be able to keep up the sewing for an entire family without a daughter? Though women were assigned miniscule tasks they still played a vital role within a family.

The other contradiction would be Mu Lan's reception. If this story is set in traditional China-- where “’the midwife or a relative would take the back of a girl baby’s head in her hand and turn her face into the ashes” (86)-- why was the family so happy to see Mu Lan had returned? Perhaps it was because she was 22 and no longer a liability, but they wouldn't have had silent tears and they wouldn't have cooked her an entire chicken.


The chicken the family probably ate... at least something similar to it.

However, I feel that the greatest contradiction- and, in turn, the most confusing aspect of this chapter- is the fact that Kingston's narrator's mother tells her this story. Why is a stroy that has such strong themes of feminism and family a popular children's story? It doesn't make since! Why teach your daughters through stories that they need to be Woman Warriors, when you're also telling them that "[they] failed if [they] grew up to be but wives or slaves” (19)?! And, if I can extend my tangent on this soap box jsut a bit more, I think that the possible feminist movement within this story is completely squashed when Mu Lan says, “only now I would get so lonely with the tent so empty that I slept outside” (41) because her husband and SON aren't there. wtf.

In reading about the narrator's life as a girl in a traditional Chinese family, the reader is also forced to bare witness to the difficulty of being a Chinese American. Aside from realizing that “[her] American life has been such a disappointment” (45), the narrator's "successful days" are defined as follows: “..successful days, when so much laundry came in, my mother did not have to pick tomatoes. For breaks we changed from pressing to sorting” (87). I wonder if this is a result of the family's low socio-economic background (not likely) or of the dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship. Perhaps one could argue that it's a combination of the two, but I feel that when confronted with accusations like “’During the war, though, when you were born, many people have older girls away for free. And here I was in the United States paying two hundred dollars for you” (83) puts a severe damper on one's ability to enjoy a day (much less a life) with a mother whose "enthusiasm for me is duller than for the slave girl…” (82). The narrator can't enjoy her American life because she lives in a household that doesn't appreciate her, and that insist on maintaining the traditional ways.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe3Y-nXHsFI
(Bring Honor to us All, Mu Lan)

This song reminds me of the single purpose females- in China or in America- served for most traditional Chinese families.