What are the talk-stories in the woman warrior?
What is talk story in The Woman Warrior? In The Woman Warrior, Kingston has experimented with a new kind of "talk-story" writing in blending family stories, cultural myths, fantasy, autobiographical details, and history, as she attempts to model her work on the familial talk-story culture she was nurtured in. Click to see full answer.
What is the woman warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston about?
Jan 18, 2022 · In The Woman Warrior, Kingston experimented with a new generation of “talking stories.” family histories merge, cultural myths, fantasy, autobiographical details, and history as he tried to model his work on the conversational culture of the family he grew up in. Contents hide 1 What is the purpose of conversational stories about a warrior?
What is the theme of the woman warrior?
"'Talking-Story' in The Woman Warrior: An Analysis of the Use of Folklore" Carol Mitchell In the following essay, Mitchell delineates Kingston's integration of oral storytelling into her written narrative in The Woman Warrior. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston, is one of
How many chapters are in the woman warrior?
Nov 10, 2021 · In The Woman Warrior, Kingston has experimented with a new kind of “talk-story” writing in blending family stories, cultural myths, fantasy, autobiographical details, and history, as she attempts to model her work on the familial talk-story culture she was nurtured in.
What is a talk story?
“Talk Story” is a Hawaiian expression that means “to chat informally” or “to shoot the breeze.” A linguistic scholar describes it as “a rambling personal experience mixed with folk materials”, while author Maxine Hong Kingston uses the term to describe a Chinese / Chinese-American storytelling style, which is “an oral ...
What does Kingston mean by talk story?
As defined by American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, talk-story is "an oral tradition of history, mythology, genealogy, bedtime stories and how-to stories that have been passed down through generations, an essential part of family and community life.
What is talk story in No Name Woman?
Throughout The Woman Warrior, Kingston will refer to her mother's historical tales as "talk-stories," culturally based, primarily oral stories whose general purpose is didactic.
What role does talk story serve for the narrator in Woman Warrior?
During the narrator's childhood her mother "talks-story," telling the children myths, legends, family narratives and other memorate from China. Just as those narratives were used to help structure and explain life experiences, so the novel is talking-story in order to explain the past.
What is Hawaii's talk Story?
“Talk story”, one of the great oral traditions in Hawaii is the act of sharing history, ideas, opinions and the events of the day with other people at any time and in any place.
What is unique about Kingston's method of storytelling?
Kingston's nontraditional style of storytelling—her multiple conflicting narratives and her tendency to blend myth and personal history, for example—mirrors her complex process of identity formation, but it is also more active than that.May 2, 2018
What does the story of the No Name Woman come to mean for Kingston?
"No-Name Woman" is one of the more frequently anthologized sections of The Woman Warrior because it encapsulates so many of the rest of the text's themes: the ambiguity and complexity of "talk-story," the place of women in traditional Chinese society, and the difficulty of growing up as a Chinese- American.
What purpose does Kingston have in telling her aunt's story?
In “No Name Woman,” Maxine Kingston's mother tells her a story of her aunt that committed adultery which therefore led to her segregation from her own family and villagers. Kingston's mother asserts that the story should not be told by anyone and the story's purpose was to strike fear in her daughter.
Why does the narrator's mother tell her the story of her aunt?
The narrator's mother was telling her what happened to her father's sister. Her mother made the narrator promise never to tell her father or anyone else about her aunt because she brought great dishonor to her family. The narrator knows that she is braking this promise to her mother by telling this story to the reader.
Why is moon orchid crazy?
Afterward, when Moon Orchid tries to live on her own in Los Angeles, she proves wholly unable to adjust to American life and slowly goes insane, having paranoid delusions about Mexicans trying to kill her.
What is the main conflict in The Woman Warrior?
The Woman Warrior: The Conflict Of American And Chinese Culture For The Main Character. The incongruous memoir, “The Woman Warrior, written by Maxine Hong Kingston, illustrates how woman's hardships in the Chinese society have followed emigrants to the New World.
What is the theme of the girl who wouldn't talk?
Theme: One should not change others, if others don't want to change.
What is the purpose of talk story in a woman warrior?
During the narrator’s childhood her mother “talks-story,” telling the children myths, legends, family narratives and other memorate from China. Just as those narratives were used to help structure and explain life experiences, so the novel is talking-story in order to explain the past.
What is a talk story?
When you Talk Story in Hawaii, it is much more personal. It can be several anecdotes tied to a lesson or just a funny ending. It’s an amazing concept because it makes you stop and consider the person in front of you as a person.
What does Kingston mean by talk story?
Talk-story is typically understood as oral tradition, but Kingston’s memoir preserves them in text. These stories, however, only become codified as fiction because Kingston must imbue them with details that have been left out.
What does the sitting Ghost represent in The Woman Warrior?
elsewhere. A ghost is therefore defined as what goes away and does not come back. (19) Seen from this angle, the ghost metaphor in Kingston‟s The Woman Warrior stands for Chinese Americans who are torn between two extremes and who can neither die and return to their true origins nor stay alive in a fake home.
What is the central idea of the woman warrior?
Critical Essays The Theme of the Voiceless Woman in The Woman Warrior. Fundamental to The Woman Warrior is the theme of finding one’s own, personal voice. Interspersed throughout the memoir’s five chapters are numerous references to this physical and emotional struggle.
What does it mean to talk story in Hawaii?
In Hawaii, ‘talk story’ is pidgin for talking with old friends, passing time by chit-chatting, or rekindling old times.
How do you tell a story in a conversation?
Telling a story through speech requires your audience to imagine it. So let them participate and visualize. You might try asking what they think happened before actually telling them. Don’t ask simple yes or no questions.
What is the story of a woman warrior?
...A Warrior's Triumph The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston presents the story of a girl trapped between the cultures of her surrounding environment and that which her mother and family have forced upon her. Knowing only the Chinese way of life, this girl's mother attempts to familiarize her daughter, whom is also the narrator, with the history of their family. The mother shares this heritage through the use of stories in hopes the narrator will be prepared for her ultimate return to China, which is a life completely foreign to her own. Through these stories and the strong influence of the surrounding American culture, the narrator's life and imagination spin off in a new direction. She is confronted by many obstacles, which cause problems with not only her mother, but also with her attempt to discover her personal identity. Although the narrator's assimilation to the American culture causes numerous conflicts with her mother, she is able to overcome adversity and come of age as a Chinese-American with the help of her mother's stories . In Kingston's first story, "No Name Woman ," the reader is first introduced to the stories of the narrator's mother. This particular tale involves an aunt that the narrator never knew, who was shunned from her family for having an affair. It was through this story that the narrator learned...
Where did talk stories come from?
The term “talk story” originates from the Hawaiian pidgin language. This language developed throughout the 19th century when laborers from China, Portugal, Japan, Korea, Russia, and several other countries came to conduct business on Hawaiian plantations. Since the plantations consisted of many different foreigners, a common language was needed. As a result, the Pidgin Hawaiian language evolved. These new immigrants adopted Hawaiian words and phrases. In an interview with Susan Brownmiller, Maxine Hong Kingston says “talk-story” is “actually an Hawaiian pidgin phrase, borrowed street language from her adopted city” (Brownmiller 178). “Talk story” is also a style of learning used by teachers. Hawaiian classrooms are highly diverse; therefore, talk story enables the students to speak, learn, and listen to each other. According to English Language Arts and Content Area Director Shira Hillyer, “It is a celebration of children...
What is the woman warrior about?
As a memoir, The Woman Warrior is Maxine Hong Kingston ’s effort to tell her own story. By telling her own story, though, Kingston mostly finds herself telling the stories of others—those in her family, those around her, and the myths of the Chinese and American cultures between which she is caught. She interweaves these personal stories, family ...
What is the style of storytelling that Kingston uses?
Kingston’s nontraditional style of storytelling—her multiple conflicting narratives and her tendency to blend myth and personal history, for example—mirrors her complex process of identity formation, but it is also more active than that.
How to tell your parents they were burned up in the fire?
Tell them your birth certificate and your parents were burned up in the fire. Don’t report crimes; tell them we have no crimes and no poverty. Give a new name every time you get arrested; the ghosts won’t recognize you. Pay the new immigrants twenty-five cents an hour and say we have no unemployment.
What is the meaning of stories?
Stories are how people understand themselves, and how they relate to others. In fact, by showing that stories are simultaneously messy and malleable, and that storytelling is always a negotiation between self, community, and culture, Kingston makes storytelling a metaphor for the complex and contradictory process of constructing one’s own identity. ...
What is the gap in Kingston's stories about China?
The gaps in Kingston’s stories about China mirror the gaps in her knowledge of China overall. Kingston’s insistence on telling stories that are full of gaps and contradictions is meant to demonstrate fundamental truths about identity, and particularly multi-cultural identity.
How many wives did the Emperors have?
At the Western Palace Quotes. “A long time ago,” began Brave Orchid, “the emperors had four wives, one at each point of the compass, and they lived in four palaces. The Empress of the West would connive for power, but the Empress of the East was good and kind and full of light.
Who imprisoned the Emperor in the Western Palace?
You are the Empress of the East, and the Empress of the West has imprisoned the Earth’s Emperor in the Western Palace. And you, the good Empress of the East, come out of the dawn to invade her land and free the Emperor. You must break the strong spell she has cast on him that has lost him the East.”.
What is the title of the book at the Western Palace?
The title of "At the Western Palace" refers to another of Brave Orchid's talk-stories, about an emperor who had four wives.
What is the story of Fa Mu Lan?
The story of Fa Mu Lan is contrasted sharply with Kingston's own life in America, in which she can barely stand up to her racist bosses. Kingston realizes, however, that her weapons are her words. "Shaman" focuses on Kingston's mother, Brave Orchid, and her old life back in China.
What is the first chapter of No Name Woman?
The first chapter, "No-Name Woman," begins with one such talk-story, about an aunt Kingston never knew she had. Because this aunt had brought disgrace upon her family by having an illegitimate child, she killed herself and her baby by jumping into the family well in China.
What is the past of Brave Orchid?
To a young Kingston, Brave Orchid's past is as astounding as it is terrifying, and many of the images from her mother's talk-story —Chinese babies left to die, slave girls being bought and sold, a woman stoned to death by her villagers—haunt Kingston's dreams for years to come.
Where does Moon Orchid die?
She eventually goes crazy and dies in a California state mental asylum. The final chapter of the memoir, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," is about Kingston herself.
What is the story that Kingston tells in the chapter?
Prominent among the many talk-stories Kingston heard while growing up is one involving a woman warrior accomplished in martial arts, a story that Kingston narrates in the chapter's first paragraph as a segue between No Name Woman's history and the tale of Fa Mu Lan.
Why does Kingston think she heard the Fa Mu Lan story?
Much of the confusion occurs because Kingston initially believes that she first heard the Fa Mu Lan story only after she became an adult, but then she remembers that she and her mother used to sing about the woman warrior when she was yet a child.
What does the bird look like in Fa Mu Lan?
Earlier in the chapter, Kingston noted the bird that led Fa Mu Lan up into the mountains: "In the brush drawings it looks like the ideograph for 'human,' two black wings," and the mountains themselves "look like the ideograph 'mountain.'". By drawing attention to how much these ideographs — revenge, bird, and mountain — look like ...
Why does Kingston not recognize that her mother uses the story of Fa Mu Lan?
Desperate to win her mother's approval and to do something "big and fine," Kingston does not recognize that her mother uses the story of Fa Mu Lan to make the point that sacrificing oneself for the family and village is more important than gaining individual success.
Why does Fa Mu Lan build a fire?
On the brink of despair because she is famished, Fa Mu Lan builds a fire to warm herself and is joined by the white rabbit, which hops close to the woman warrior, sitting next to the fire. Fa Mu Lan resists killing the rabbit, but the animal freely jumps into the flames and turns into meat, "browned just right.".
How long does Fa Mu Lan train?
Fa Mu Lan gladly agrees to stay with the old couple and so spends the next fifteen years undergoing intensive martial arts training in mental and physical activities and disciplines. The seventh year of Fa Mu Lan's training culminates in a test in which she must demonstrate her survival skills.
What does the rabbit sacrifice for Fa Mu Lan mean?
It made me a gift of meat.". This important episode, which symbolizes Fa Mu Lan's attaining enlightenment by refusing selflessly to kill the rabbit, which in turn sacrifices itself for Fa Mu Lan, parallels a similar mythical ordeal attributed to Buddha, the venerated Eastern mystic who preached self-enlightenment.
Who narrates the story of Brave Orchid's mother?
Summary and Analysis. At the Western Palace. Kingston, who in "Shaman" narrated the personal talk-story of her mother, Brave Orchid, now relates the failed assimilation into American culture of Brave Orchid's younger sister, Moon Orchid, whose inability to adapt to a new, American way of life destines her first to insanity and then to death.
How many wives did the Emperor have in Brave Orchid?
On the way to Los Angeles, Brave Orchid narrates a talk-story about an emperor with four wives, from which this chapter gets its ironic title. "A long time ago," Brave Orchid begins, an emperor had four wives, each of whom lived in a palace located at one of the earth's four major compass points.
What does the flower of the moon orchid mean?
Brave Orchid represents frugality and tradition; Moon Orchid is frivolous, extravagant, and ephemeral. Their contrasting identities are best embodied in their names: Brave Orchid is "brave"; Moon Orchid, whose name means "flower of the moon," is like a planet circling the sun, a body in orbit around her distant husband.
Why does Moon orchid stay with Brave orchid?
Moon Orchid's stay with Brave Orchid and her family also exposes the ever-present cultural gap between Brave Orchid and her children. This rift is caused, in part, by Brave Orchid's failure to realize that many traditional Chinese customs are not adaptable to American culture.
What happens to Moon orchid at the Western Palace?
Moon Orchid is institutionalized in an asylum and soon thereafter she dies. Like No Name Woman, she "slipped away entirely," without proper identity and status. Language again plays an important role in Moon Orchid's demise here at the end of "At the Western Palace.".
What does the Brave Orchid look like when the husband arrives at the car?
He had black hair and no wrinkles.
How old is Brave Orchid?
The chapter opens at the San Francisco airport, where sixty-eight-year-old Brave Orchid has been waiting for over nine hours for Moon Orchid's arrival. She is irritated that her children are wandering around the airport rather than sitting quietly with her.
What is the warrior motif in The Woman Warrior?
The warrior motif is an extremely important part of Kingston's memoir, referring as it does to Fa Mu Lan, Brave Orchid, and Kingston herself. Much of The Woman Warrior is a struggle—between mother and daughter, daughter and society, and so on—making the warrior motif especially appropriate.
What are ghosts in The Woman Warrior?
Ghosts are probably the most frequently recurring motif in The Woman Warrior and also the most difficult to pin down. Ghosts refer to both American and Chinese, humans and animals, the living and the dead. There are malevolent ghosts that do harm, such as the "sitting ghost"; ancestral ghosts that look after the living; and everyday ghosts that do what everyday ghosts do, such as the "newsboy ghost." It is the very elusiveness of ghosts that make them so powerful in the memoir. Kingston grew up listening to so many of her mother's talk-stories that in writing the memoir, she can no longer tell what is real from what is imagined. Did she really have an intellectually disabled boy follow her around, or is he just another ghost, a creation of her memory? Kinston must shine lights into the corners of her past to determine what is real.
What does Kingston tell Brave Orchid at the end of her memoir?
Though she is frequently upset by her mother's talk-stories , at the end of the memoir she tells Brave Orchid with pride that she tells talk-stories too. In a symbolic gesture of reconciliation, the memoir ends with a talk-story that is half Kingston's and half her mother's. Previous section Themes Next section Symbols.
How many talk stories are there in Brave Orchid?
There is at least one talk-story in every chapter, most often told by Brave Orchid to Kingston when she is a little girl. Furthermore, the memoir begins and ends with important talk-stories, one about No-Name Woman and another about Ts'ai Yen.
What are some ghosts that do harm?
There are malevolent ghosts that do harm, such as the "sitting ghost"; ancestral ghosts that look after the living; and everyday ghosts that do what everyday ghosts do, such as the "newsboy ghost.". It is the very elusiveness of ghosts that make them so powerful in the memoir.
Is Brave Orchid a warrior?
Brave Orchid at times a warrior, at times an inspiration to her daughter, and at times a bitter enemy. She is clearly the most forceful and free-willed woman in the memoir, especially in comparison to her sister, Moon Orchid. There are a number of instances, fictional or otherwise, when Brave Orchid fights battles, ...