Woman warrior 读后感.doc

Han-1Han Lan Class:081111Professor Kay Siebler6 November 2013A response to the excerpt of the Woman WarriorEven finishing reading the excerpt of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, I was confused of the meaning the author Maxine Hong Kingston wanted to narrate. The excerpt is not enough for me to understand the thesis. I searched a belief version of the book and materials about the author. By reading, an image exposing cultural conflicts emerges before me, and I seem to see a dogged woman struggling against the reality and change herself into a woman warrior eventually.Cultural conflicts can hardly be avoided living abroad. After World War Two, a special group became the focus of the society-the immigrants in western countries from Asia. Maxine Hong Kingston, suffering bicultural dilemma and trying to give an unique insight to the idea of feminism by writing the Woman Warrior, is one of the second generation of Asian American immigrants. Her masterpiece The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts mainly shows her life experience as a typical Asian American as well as the life of women around her. While going to kindergarten, the author once drank out of a toy saucer when the water spilled out of the cup. Everyone laughed for she was unaware Americans dont drink out of saucers. Her mother was a doctor in China but Maxine described her as a woman with Chinese traditional superstition. She regarded the pills from the drugstore as a misfortune and asked her daughter to go and make druggists stop the curse by giving her reparation candy. In addition, her Hawaiian teacher couldnt understand why her Chinese Han-2students were unwilling to sing “land where our fathers died”. It was not because of politics but curses in her Chinese students opinions. Its oppressive and difficult for Maxine live in a dilemma. One side, her mother drilled Chinese traditional ideas into her. On the other side, she was affected by WSAP. The cultural conflicts were fully embodied on her.“Ghosts” was meaningful to Maxine. I learned the meaning of “Ghosts” in the title from web site. It explained, Chinese American women were living with “Ghosts”, which came from outside world and were rooted deeply into their inner hearts. Sexual discrimination and cultural conflicts were the most threatened ghosts they came across. I didnt agree with the idea entirely. What we understand “Ghosts” as the memory of something bad that has happened may be more appropriate. There existed a girl who was more unwilling to talk than author. They were in the same boat for their dumbness.Maybe the girl represented Maxine herself, and Maxine hated herself in present world and hated another one like her. For escaping from the depressive reality and looking for a way out, she wanted to force the girl to talk by taking out on her. She thought she could free the girl and herself as long as the girl broke the silence. She failed as the girls sister came. The next eighteen months Maxine was sick in bed with a mysterious illness. She thought it was retribution for she was indeed a kind girl, as the words said in her work “The world is sometimes just”. In the sixty-fouth paragraph, when Maxine were ready to leave the hospital, what she saw was meaningful, “ The sky and trees, the sun were immense-no longer framed by a window, no longer grayed with a fly screen. I sat down on the sidewalk in amazement-the night, the stars.” (40) When she met the poor girl again in school, the girl remained unchanged everywhere. At this time, Han-3Maxine must have understand something in the depth of her heart. Even if she managed to force the girl to talk, it didnt mean the girl and herself would change their living condition. What she did was to set a “ghost” on herself and the gi