zadel 's review for:

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

5.0

---

“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.

The villagers punished her for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them.

“Bad girl,” my mother yelled, and sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn’t a bad girl almost a boy?

Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure. Then I get bitter: no one supports me; I am not loved enough to be supported. That I am not a burden has to compensate for the sad envy when I look at women loved enough to be supported.

Perhaps human beings just die, and that’s the end. I don’t think I’d mind that too much. Which would you rather be? A ghost who is constantly wanting to be fed? Or nothing?

Like the dragons living in temple eaves, my mother looked down on plain people who were lonely and afraid.

“Why didn’t you write to tell her once and for all you weren’t coming back and you weren’t sending for her?” Brave Orchid asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s as if I had turned into a different person. The new life around me was so complete; it pulled me away. You became people in a book I had read a long time ago.”

Ha! You can’t stop me from talking. You tried to cut off my tongue, but it didn’t work.