Tuesday, April 3, 2012

An Unforgiving Relationship


           In the book The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Kingston plays a lot with the role of the mother-daughter relationship.  In the first few chapters, as the reader I paid a lot of attention to this relationship which seems to be full of turmoil and resentment.  While reading it, I thought back a lot to my relationship with my mother and friends of mine’s relationships with their mothers and did a lot of comparing.  To me, it seems that Brave Orchid, although very accomplished in China, shows little to no love or compassion for her children.  The narrator even says at one point “From afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally.  They only say, ‘When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls,’ because that is what one says about daughters.  But I watched such words come out of my own mother’s and father’s mouths” (p.52). 

Personally, I was upset with how the narrator felt her mother felt towards her, because I feel the relationship between a mother and daughter is very important.  During the fourth chapter, however, perspectives shift and change a bit.  Brave Orchid in the beginning of the chapter says many unkind things about her children; she seems embarrassed and not proud of them.  While waiting at the airport for Moon Orchid, the children come and tell Brave Orchid that her plane has arrived and her response is, “She was glad her children were not useless” (p. 115).  Brave Orchid glares at them and calls them lazy, but when Moon Orchid’s daughter tells Moon how smart her children are and that they can speak Chinese to her, Brave Orchid quickly becomes proud of her children and tells Moon that they too can speak to her in Chinese.  I wonder if the way Brave Orchid’s children act during this chapter, unfriendly and rude to their aunt, is a response to her “tough love” raising them.  The interaction between the Brave Orchid and the narrator at the end of the third chapter made me wonder if Brave Orchid brought these actions from her daughter and other children upon herself. 

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