"The Woman Warrior"

While Maxine Kong Kingston’s story of “The Woman Warrior” descriptively informs the reader of the way life used to be in China, it is also attempting to provide the reader with an understanding of a much more complicated situation, familiar to many immigrants. Through telling the story of her disgraced and deceased aunt, the narrator provides insight to the struggle of a balance that emigrants must endure in their new home. This struggle is one of maintaining old traditions, while still trying to adapt to new ones in a new country.

Living in China in a time where women were meant to be plain, no nonsense, and sex was never spoken of; the narrator’s aunt becomes pregnant by someone that is obviously not her husband. Because her husband had been gone for years, the villagers began to notice her protruding belly. Because of this illegitimate pregnancy, the villagers attacked her home and livestock, bringing disgrace upon the family, and making an outcast out of the narrator’s aunt. This disgrace is something that the narrator’s father clearly still carries with him. “Don’t let your father know that I told you. He denies her.” (Pg. 5) The narrator’s mother clearly expresses the shame that her aunt brought upon the family, in an effort to prevent her own daughter from making the same “mistake”. It was “…a story to grow up on” for the narrator, and one she was meant to never repeat, even in a new land (Pg. 5).

After telling the situation of her aunt, the narrator then ties in the struggles that past and present can have on an immigrant. The narrator states, “Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.” (Pg. 5) How, trying to comply with the traditions of their parents, yet fit in with the surrounding society, does a first generation American create the perfect balance, be it a moral one or a cultural one? According to the narrator it takes a sense of understanding what exactly is Chinese to begin with, yet she finds difficulty in distinguishing between “…what is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?’ (Pg. 6)

The narrator then explores possible reasons for her aunt’s pregnancy in China, by suggesting such causes as rape, incest or lust. “Women in China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil.” (Pg. 6) Here the narrator is suggesting that it was a pregnancy caused by rape and one that she did not desire. The narrator suggests lust as a factor by stating, “…a wild woman, kept rollicking company.” She quickly rejects this idea though, as she couldn’t imagine a Chinese woman of such nature. “He may have been somebody in her own household,” suggests that incest had occurred. Through examining and contemplating the nature of her aunt’s pregnancy, the narrator seems to mention all causes that are present among American society as well. Sure, a woman’s home will not be attacked by an entire village if she conceives a child out of wedlock, but women in American society often do have to pay a price for this as well. Judgments, financial tribulations, and the lack of support for these women in our own society present the same sort of idea as in “The Woman Warrior”. It is the woman’s fault, it is the woman who must suffer, and this is the parallel that the narrator can draw between her ancestry and her present culture.