After reading the section Shaman in Maxine Hong Kingston’s book “The Woman Warrior”, I find Kingston’s mother to be infuriating. The Kingston’s mother decisions and stories only scar Kingston and make it hard for Kingston to fit into her new American world. This is seen throughout much of Shaman, for instance there is the slave trade story and the story about fighting ghost both of which complicate or shape Kingston’s views in very obscured ways.
The stories about ghost are first shared in the chapter when Kingston tells us that her mother went to China to take up an education in medicine. Her mother got a degree in “midwifery, pediatrics, gynecology, medicine, surgery, therapeutics, ophthalmology, bacteriology, dermatology, nursing, and bandage.”(57). Whilst in med school we hear stories of Kingston’s mother being a prominent shaman who wards of the ghost that attack and fed upon the babies that the mother delivers. After moving to the United States however Kingston’s mother the high regarded shaman had told her young daughter all about the ghost of her past. Kingston took these tales to heart thinking that in the new land every person that was not like her racially was a ghost but most of all the pale white ghost that she feared. By telling Kingston a plethora of stories that she was too young to hear Kingston grew up with the notion that the stories where real and that pushed her further away from her new American world as she constantly lived in fear.
The day that Kingston’s mom chose to partake in slavery probably changed Kingston the most however. As a girl Kingston remembers going to the market with her mother to buy a slave. Whilst at the market her mother ranted to her daughter telling her how much of a burden she was costing her “two hundred dollars american money” when slaves where free (83). This put down undoubtedly had negativly effected the raising of Kingston, being a memory that she would carry with her till she wrote this memoir. These feelings deminish self worth and pride obscuring the way that Kingston was taught to view herself.
In conclusion Kingstons mother was detrimental to her self asteam, and feelings of self worth negatively driving her childhood.
Discussion questions
- How does nurturing affect children and the way they grow up?
- Why does Chinese culture get stereo typed so deeply and the actual cultural gets hidden so extensively?
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