“The Woman Warrior ” by Maxine Hong Kingston is an intense memoir that blends elements of myth, fiction, and autobiography to explore the differences in the Chinese-American experience. Chapter 2, “White Tigers,” Is the main section of the book that explores issues of identity, femininity, and cultural expectation. At the start of this book, it is very confusing and seems to be misleading in many different directions with no real meaning. At the end of the first two chapters, it begins to resolve itself and you begin to see the bigger picture. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at this chapter and examine some of its most significant symbols and figure out what they mean.
The chapter opens with a retelling of the legend of the woman warrior Fa Mu Lan, a figure who disguises herself as a man to create her own army and take back everything her village has lost. Kingston uses this legend as a starting point to explore the idea of gender roles in Chinese culture, particularly as they relate to women. Throughout the chapter there is a repetitive quote “there is no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls” (pg 46). The repetition in this starts to point you in a direction where women are treated like nothing other than a disgrace to their family and culture if they aren’t slaves or housewives. The story continues when the character follows a bird up a mountain to find an old couple living there. The couple tells her that if she stays they will turn her into a warrior woman who can defeat entire armies. When she is told this she begins her journey of training. After years of being taught how to be a warrior she then starts her journey by faking herself to be a man and beginning to create her own army. This is the start of the revenge for her family. While she starts to defeat everyone in her path she reunites with her husband. She becomes pregnant and has a baby while on the journey to take back everything. She has to change her appearance and hide the baby under her armor so that nobody can notice that she is a woman. If the people found out they would no longer respect her and it would be a disgrace to China. Once she defeated the emperor and began to return home she remembered she only had one more task left and that was to defeat the baron who drafted her brother. Once she finds him the last thing that he says to her is “It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters” (pg 42). Once again that saying is brought up in this chapter. Another person says that women are no good for anything. This is the perfect reason why she wanted to become a warrior woman to show that gender doesn’t limit you to being able to do the same things that men do. Throughout the chapter, you get a sense that the Chinese culture frowns upon women doing basically anything and that they aren’t treated anywhere equal to men.
At the end of the chapter the story is related to her and how she is treated in America by her parents. The warrior woman is a reference to modern day women. Instead of battling in a war she had to get straight A’s. “Which meant I was getting straight A’s for the future of my husband’s family, not my own.” (pg 47) Everything that she was doing was never for her own good but for the reputation of her husband and his family to look good. The memoir that Maxine Kingston was writing about was referring to her own life as she related her childhood stories to what she experienced as a citizen in America. Through this discussion of “White Tigers,” Kingston reveals how women in Chinese society are often defined solely by their relationship to men. This creates a kind of cultural pressure that can lead women to prioritize their male relationships over their own families.
As we reflect on “White Tigers,” two significant questions emerge:
- Why was Chinese culture against women being able to be treated equal to men?
- If women were able to prove that they could do things men can do, why were they so frowned upon for it and not respected?
Works Cited:
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York :Vintage Books, 1989.
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