Summary of 'Girlhood Among Ghosts' by Maxine Hong Kingston

You may have expected the text to be a “supernatural” one, based on the impression of the title alone. Yeah… Bean there… Uh oh! I mean… Been there, Done that! Turns out, it’s some lingo-culture text. D@mn! Here’s the summary for the “Girlhood among ghosts” by Maxine Hong Kingston.

For more notes of BBA Second Semester English II, CLICK HERE!

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Girlhood among Ghosts

-Maxine Hong Kingston

For most immigrants, finding an identity and carving out a personal space in an alien culture with its peculiar life-style, heritage, traditions, and language is difficult. Living on the edge of two distinct communities makes it harder to adjust to the standards of the new culture, and at the same time retain all the values of the old one. She dramatizes the conflict of growing up among contradictions and confusions between the home and alien cultures and languages.

For much of her life, she feels torn between her Chinese heritage and her American destiny. She oscillates between the two worlds of China and America, functioning vis-à-vis both, yet wholly belonging to neither. Ultimately, however, she is able to reconcile the two disparate cultures and incorporate them into her own story.

Her childhood silence seems to originate from the conflict between her Chinese upbringing and the ways of American schools. But in the story, Kingston represents it as symbolically caused by her mother (China), who seems to have cut her tongue, slicing the frenum when she was a child. She is therefore unable to express herself at American school.

Born in America to a Chinese family, Kingston is much of a product of two cultures as of two distinct education systems. At this point, Kingston manages to blend the cultural inheritances, the two separate world within her.

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For more BBA Second Semester notes on English II, CLICK HERE!

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©LinkinMyth: Summary-Four levels of ‘Girlhood Among Ghosts’ by Maxine Hong Kingston