Every country has its ritual that’s custom to their culture. These rituals might be for religious reasons or beliefs that they have for a better life. These rituals are passed down from generation to generation and they’re brought with them wherever they go. Just like that Maxine Hong Kingston’s mother thought it would be a great idea to cut Kingston’s tongue, so she can speak any language fluently and pronounce every word in any language profoundly. Maxine Hong Kingston is an Asian immigrant from China who was not only a writer but a professor who shares her personal stories about the struggles she had with speaking. Publishing “The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among the Ghosts” in 1976 with the first chapter being “tongue-tied”. As some would say silence is the best, but for Maxine Hong Kingston it was her weakness. She began by telling the tale and ritual of what happened in China to make sure people would speak better and more fluently. But as she continues to tell her story, she tells the difficulty she had with adjusting to the American culture and fitting into American School. Her silence affected her and so many other Asian Americans, Comparing the difference she felt between American school and Chinese school and their culture. And what makes her story so credible is the honesty of her telling it from her point of view, not someone else’s. She’s giving us her real thoughts and emotions and her real genuine feelings of what she was going through. Throughout the story, she also shares how she was discriminated against and compares it to other ethnic groups. She also uses these similes and metaphors to emphasize her emotions in what she was going through to make us feel what she was going through. Truly targeting Americans and other Asian American immigrants and shed some light on how difficult it was to learn for some people to speak up and how different the American culture was from her Chinese culture.
In the beginning, Kingston brings us back to while she lived in China and how her mother cut her tongue to ensure that she could speak any language. But from the beginning, she was very silent and quiet. She tells us how even though she went to an American school and knows how to speak English she still felt uncomfortable, no one could hear her and they were judging her based on her silence. Doing this all from a first person’s perspective which is her perspective. This shows us the significance of this and knowing that she faced this makes her reliable. In the text it says, “I don’t remember her doing it, only her telling me about it, but all during childhood I felt sorry for the baby whose mother waited with scissors or knife..” This emphasizes how descriptive shares would allow you to feel what you were going to her mind. As the story progresses, she keeps some readers engaged with her purse first-person perspective because it is enlightening and tells us exactly what she was feeling at that moment. “My parents took the pictures home. I spread them out (so black and full of possibilities) and pretended the curtains were swinging open, flying up, one after another, sunlight underneath, mighty operas.” From this quote, we can tell her emotions, and the way she describes what she was doing here is painting a clear picture in our head. I think hearing it from her perspective strengthened her case to show the struggles she had a balancing and adjusting to the culture.
Her first-person perspective not only helped make us feel what she was going through but I show us how her silence affected her. How hard it was for her to fit into the American culture in American School. Maxine Hong Kingston offers an itemized portrayal of the difficulties she experiences as a Chinese American. She portrays learning in an American school, the generalizations, and open segregation from educators and individual American students. “Reading out loud was easier than speaking because we did not have to make up what to say, but I stopped often, and the teacher would think I’d gone quiet again. I could not understand “I.” The Chinese “I” had seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American “I,” assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight?” From this quote, we can tell that she was struggling. She had a hard time speaking English. The boys who were so well behaved in the American school played tricks on them and talked back to them. The girls were not mute. They screamed and yelled during recess. Nobody was afraid of children hurting themselves or of children hurting school property.” Here she’s comparing And throwing shade at the American System because of all the things that they can do that they don’t do in the Chinese School which makes the kids more comfortable. All of this brings us back to the fact that she wasn’t comfortable in the American setting and it was hard for her to fit in because of how different it was from what you were used to hence why she struggled.
The most important part of her story was struggling to speak. Even in her native language, it was hard for her. She was always quiet and afraid of what she would say, and even when she spoke it’s silent and people rarely heard her so they asked to repeat and from that, she just got discouraged and annoyed. This is ironic compared to when she said at the beginning of her story about getting her tongue cut so she can speak better in any language, and it wasn’t just her it was a lot of other Asian immigrants that were going through the same thing. That didn’t help when the teachers and other people looked at you differently and discriminated against you because of the way you couldn’t speak up. The general tone of the content is made by the accentuation made by Kingston on the attributes of the tussle felt during perusing by the utilization of different sayings. Remarkably, she was experiencing mental torment because of her status of trouble and dismay. She doesn’t comprehend why she needed to experience a custom that has made her life trouble in an American school. To her mom, it was important to experience the cut of the tongue even though she doesn’t comprehend why other youngsters were not cut. But it’s a sadistic and hopeless tone when she speaks about her struggle of speaking up. “… I became silent. Dumbness—a shame—still cracks my voice in two, even when I want to say “hello” casually, or ask a simple question in front of the check-out counter, or ask directions of a bus driver. I stand frozen, or I hold up the line with the complete, grammatical sentence that comes squeaking out at impossible length.” Speaking was just so hard for her, she struggled to speak. It didn’t matter it could have been the smallest thing but she could have asked because she was afraid and it scared her. “During the first silent year, I spoke to no one at school, did not ask before going to the lavatory, and flunked kindergarten. My sister also said nothing for three years, silent in the playground and silent at lunch. There were other quiet Chinese girls not in our family, but most of them got over it sooner than we did. I enjoyed the silence.” This shows us how much she didn’t realize how much who’s speaking was affecting her. She knew she was silent, and she flunked kindergarten but she didn’t think it was a big deal because of what she was taught in Chinese School. and she wasn’t the only one going through this. Some of her other Chinese friends and most Asian girls preferred to stay quiet because they just felt they didn’t fit in and it was best to be quiet. Please really show how helpless she was; it was just something she couldn’t fix because something that was built inside of her. The tone that she used to describe how she felt when talking and speaking made her feel helpless because if she didn’t know what to do because it was just something she couldn’t fix.
I emphasize her tone and her perspective with all the similes and metaphors in the diction she uses to back up her emotions and her experience so we can live through what she went through. She uses metaphors and similes not only to compare the discrimination she faced but how she connected herself to other races. We can feel her powerful voice in her writing when she’s talking about the American girls’ accounts and how it’s the same to the boys. While in the Chinese culture they intend the girls to stay silent. This discernment makes the Chinese girls calm since that is anticipated from them by their public. The words she uses while depicting her circumstance makes her benefit compassion from that aided her major topic. “We Chinese can’t sing ‘land where our fathers died.’” She argued with me about politics, while I meant because of curses. But how can I have that memory when I couldn’t talk? My mother says that we, like the ghosts, have no memories.” As shown here Kingston was getting discriminated against and told that she can’t sing because of hair culture, and in the metaphor, she uses to call out Americans as “ghosts” to highlight how they viewed Americans and how much they’re different from them. “She sounded as if she were trying to sing through weeping and strangling. When it was my turn, the same voice came out, a crippled animal running on broken legs. You could hear splinters in my voice, bones rubbing jagged against one another.” The amount of metaphors, similes, and descriptions used here Not only helps us sort of know what she’s sounding like but it gives a more in-depth view of what she thinks she sounds like when she’s speaking, even in her own culture and language. Through the use of these metaphors diction and similes could feel what she’s going through and help us picture and imagine the struggle she was facing and how she saw herself.
Throughout this entire story, we have experienced what Kingston was going through and struggling through as a child. We get to see what happens and what she has to go through. How she wasn’t able to speak and others not because she wasn’t good at it was because of her personality and how she was brought up. Through the use of her metaphor diction and similes paints a clear picture of the experience and know-how she saw herself. The way she used her help with tone to show her struggles. And her writing from her perspective in the first-person point of view showed us it investigates the Chinese social legacy, which contrasts, from the American one. The language obstruction is a significant concern brought out by Kingston in her battle to articulate words accurately. Who’s the beginning of the story? You think she’s going to be this great speaker and this brave person but it’s shown such irony because even if in China you do this ritual to be better and speaking it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a great speaker in any language. And anyone who’s American or an Asian- immigrant who is reading this will understand her experience and feel for her, because of the emotion that she tied into her story.
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