Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoirs in The Woman Warrior are not the American ideal. As Americans we have been trained almost to believe that all the stories of immigrants or their children are going to be hopeful and heroic, of people overcoming hardships and leaving a hard life in their home country to come to America—the place they and all of their families and friends have been dreaming of since they were born. We don’t think of the difficulties they really go through when they come here. I’ve realized after going through the past few readings in class that I don’t really think about what immigrants are going through either. 
Most of us think that anyone would be happy to be American, but we don't think about what it means to adapt to American life.
We expect them to want to be here more than anything else, to pick up American culture and place it before their own the minute they arrive. We don’t think about the difficulties of adjusting to American culture and the American people, who would arguably be a hard, perhaps even arrogant, group to deal with if you stepped back and thought about it. I remember that when I finished this book in high school, I didn’t really see it as a memoir for Kingston and read it more as a testament to her cultural experience only. I failed to see that her cultural experiences were her experiences and that they colored everything that she did. In telling her story, Kingston needed to explain No-Name Woman and the background stories of her mother and aunt. We wouldn’t be able to understand her struggles in the final section as well without this information. The final chapter is the most personal and what I was expecting when I knew I’d be reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s “memoir,” but what I’ve come to realize after reading through the whole book is that this is just a sum of all her family’s experiences. She explains No-Name Woman to illustrate the difficulties girls in her culture can be faced with and then relates it in the last chapter to her difficulties being a girl in America. She describes her mother, a strong and headstrong woman, who comes to live a radically different life in the states then she had in China as a respected doctor. Finally, she describes Moon Orchid’s life to illustrate the disparate differences between American and Chinese marriages: Moon Orchid is eventually sent to a mental institution where she became “thinner each time,” Brave Orchid visited her, “shrunken to the bone.” (Kingston, 160) All of these experiences allow Kingston’s readers to understand her more completely and react more appropriately to her personal memories in the last chapter than if we had to read it immediately. Kingston is unafraid to show herself in a strange and very unflattering light in this book. She has difficulty as a schoolgirl trying to fit in and associates some of her difficulties with her culture. In class for example she attributes her silence to being Chinese and says, “The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl.” (Kingston, 166) She describes her need to confess her “sins” to her mother and brutally harasses the “silent girl” in her class, all experiences that anyone telling a memoir would be hesitant to describe.
I always feel strange putting up random people's pictures on my blog, but this shows how people's lives aren't lived in a vacuum but are shared with others.
http://www.hoagy.org/people/graphics/fam1.jpg
Kingston’s organizational structure in her memoir, as well as her honest writing style, allow her readers to more easily understand the immigrant experience and the experiences of those intimately connected to non-American cultures. We all profess to a culture other than just being “American,” but I for one don’t realize just how different my American experience is from others’. Kingston’s book describes the complications of an immigrant experience and just how much culture pervades our every action.
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