ABSTRACT:
The Woman Warrior is the Chinese-American author Maxine Hong Kingston’s fictional memoir which interweaves the forms of memoir, history, and Chinese mythology while articulating her experience of growing into adulthood in a culturally and ethnically diverse environment. Born into recently immigrated Chinese parents in America, the protagonist has to move between two cultures and languages daily, constantly feeling alien to both. The memoir centers on the mother-daughter relationship in which the mother embodies the mother tongue/land/culture and functions as the repository of the Chinese cultural values and narratives. As a woman thrown into an alien culture which marginalizes her and her way of life, she is determined to pass on her own culture’s values and stories to her daughter, for this is her way of claming her identity and ensuring her survival. Encountering the Chinese culture through her mother’s memories and stories while having the immediate experience of living in America, the daughter is in a state of in-betweenness and is equally displaced in both cultures. Her challenging task is to learn to translate her mother’s narratives in ways that will eventually enable her to cope with the dichotomies of cultures and to develop a hybrid identity. This paper aims to examine how the young protagonist, in the process of growing into adulthood and constructing a self identity, learns to reconcile both cultures and finds a bicultural and bilingual voice to articulate her experience of moving between cultures.