Woman Warrior Reader Response

Woman Warrior is a book that I found to be confusing to read through. The book is a collection of stories that Maxine Hong Kingston takes in their original form and then retells them to show how the weak, in this case women, have emotions, value, etc. However, it was difficult for me to understand this until I read the article I chose to give my presentation on. While I did find some of the stories interesting, such as the story of Brave Orchid chasing out the sitting ghost and the story of Mu Lan, I feel that this book would be hard to interpret unless I had read my article. I felt that Kingston never gives any context to how she is telling her stories. She launches into her retellings so smoothly that you hardly even notice that she has changed the story around on you. Not only that, but she talks about many traditional Chinese customs in her book that I also found hard to understand and interpret until I did some further research. Overall, I would have to say that I enjoyed the book. I don't think that I will ever read it again, but it gives us an interesting insight into the lives of immigrants, and into the way that women were viewed and treated in Chinese culture. Kingston's purpose, as stated in my article, is to give women an identity because they had none before in her retellings.