Girlhood Among Ghosts
Girlhood Among Ghosts
Girlhood Among Ghosts
She is an American writer, much of whose work is rooted in her experience as a first
generation Chinese American.
Hong’s parents came to America from China in 1930s.
She was born on 27th October,1940 in California, U.S.
Graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 1962.
Married with aspiring actor Earll Kingston.
Moved to Hawaii, where she held a series of teaching jobs for 10 years.
First book, The Woman Warrior: Memoires of a Childhood Ghosts.
First book won the National Book of Critics’ Circle Award for non-fiction.
Also published short stories, poems and articles.
Notable works:
The Fifth Book of Peace
Hawaii One Summer
To Be The Poet
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
I Love a Board Margin to My Life
China Men
Author
The central character in Girlhood Among Ghosts.
Struggling with her parents’ expectations of her culturally Chinese girl in an American city.
Feels sad that her mother sliced her frenum.
Shy, awkward, and introspective.
Didn’t speak to anyone at her first year of her school.
Tries to make herself seem “ American-feminine” by talking as little as possible.
She liked the Negro students best because they laughed the loudest, walked her to school and home
protecting from Japanese kids.
It was difficult for her to pronounce “I” and “here”.
Authors’ Mother
Superstitious
Discriminative
SUMMARY
SUMMARY
The gist of the story is about the struggle to cope with an alien environment.
‘The cutting of the tongue’ implies silence and female castration. In China, if a woman
maintains silence then she was said to have lived up to be the ideal woman.
The phrase “a ready tongue is an evil” advocates that the girl narrator is taught by her
mother that the use of the ready tongue in China shall cause her trouble caused by the anti-
female prejudice existing in the Chinese traditional culture.
The mother is referring America as the ghost country.
…
Not even being able to say ‘hello’ fluently makes the narrator blame herself for her
inarticulacy.
The child narrator finds that all the Chinese girls of her age vowed to maintain silence in
the playground, at lunch, and everywhere. She realizes that Chinese girls never had voice
and comes to the conclusion that “silence had to do with being a Chinese girl”.
The narrator perceives that Chinese school was more free in comparison and is gradually
able to improve her vocabulary.
Still, the narrator along with her sister and other Chinese friends have a long way to
express themselves unreservedly.
THE END