Essay --

The American and Chinese culture have a different perspective of what ghost really are. The word ghost has many different meanings in The Woman Warrior. As Maxine was growing up apart from her family’s culture but in a different culture, she knows she is alone. Americans have many different customs than the Chinese do. The ghost change depending on everyone’s point of view. Her mother, Brave Orchid, would describe these different people as ghost, because they weren’t of her culture. The only important people are the Chinese people. They didn’t speak the same language or worked as hard as they did. In the memoir, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Kingston uses the motif of ghosts, to establish the separation between different cultures as an individual yearns to understand who she is. One way the Chinese culture interprets the word ghost is people who disgrace their own family. As in Maxine no name Aunt, she had a baby outside her marriage so she became a disgrace to her family. They called her â€Å"Ghost! Dead ghost! You have never been born† (Kingston 14). Maxine is ...