Woman Warrior

After finishing Kingston’s novel, I realize that I have never come to grips with the fact that I have been fortunate not to have faced the difficulties of immigration, among other things. I noticed a lot of similarities between Kingston and me, but I had to put everything in the perspective that she was growing up facing a culture that was foreign to her and her family, while I was born an assimilated member. The most striking of these was of Kingston’s reticence in class and to people in general, “A dumbness—a shame—still cracks my voice in two, even when I want to say ‘hello.’” (165) I know exactly what she is talking about—that cracking “dumbness”—when I try to squeak out a greeting or question in what I manufacture to be an anxious situation. As if one cue with my life, she notes that “A telephone call makes my throat bleed and takes up that day’s courage.” (165) I can’t begin to explain how much I despised making telephone calls to strangers when I was younger. But Kingston literally hit the nail on the head and described my anxiety regarding telecommunication perfectly.

It’s like we’re the same person![1]

The difference, however, is that Kingston’s shyness and anxiety is compounded by the fact that she grew up not knowing her culture and feeling foreign to those around her. I did not. Facing this reality puts my own struggle with communication in perspective. I did not have to try to be anything; I was already normal. Further, in her anecdote about how her mother forced her to ask the drugstore clerks to give her candy, Kingston says that her mother “thought she had the Druggist Ghosts a lesson in good manners.” (171) Once again, the awkward way in which she described herself doing this made me realize how difficult it would have been for me to be placed into a foreign setting: I am shy enough already. I would never be able to face the type of discrimination that immigrants did. Making Kingston’s plight even more apparent was her enjoyment of her extended bedstay when she got sick. “It was the best year and a half of my life. Nothing happened.” (182) Ask any of my friends and they will tell you how much I love doing absolutely nothing but hang around, sleep, eat, and watch tv. It is perhaps my favorite past time. But I do this to escape (far more than necessary, however) the hectic reality of being a student. Kingston did it because she didn’t have to face the difficulties of life in the United States.

I guess I realized that I was born and stayed in place that I could always call home. Kingston and other Asian immigrants did not have this luxury, stating that they felt they “don’t belong anywhere” (184) when facing the threat of deportation, feeling that they were being tricked by immigration services to turn themselves in. That statement reminded me very much of my freshman experience as a whole, now coming to close and leaving me in doubt more than ever of where it is that I belong. Also, it reminded me of a particular scene in Garden State.

Check 1:25 into this trailer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u82n0e1mgmQ

Feeling lost himself, Zach Braff says “You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? That idea of home is gone.” (Garden State) For once, I do feel, however microcosmically, that I am in libmo, a place of now home. But unlike the immigrants Kingston shows us, I don’t have to try to be something I am not. Moon Orchid’s estranged husband says that he can’t take her back because he is “living like an American.” (153) I will thank my stars that I have only had to transition from Dallasite to Austinite, from high schooler to college kid, and not Chinese to American.

[1]http://daniel9012.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/talkingstory.gif