GIRLHOOD AMONG

GHOSTS Presented by: GROUP D

MEMBERS:
Labesh Raj Giri
Drishya Shrestha
Ayushka Khanal
Smriti Chaulagain
Shiraf Rana
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
CHINESE-AMERICAN AUTHOR
Author

 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

 Awards and Honors

 National Medal of Arts (2014)
 National Book Award (1981)
Character Analysis

 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

 Writer is unhappy with knot-maker

 she was feeling sorrow
 sometimes she felt proud with her mother powerful act
 she used to asked many questions
 Remained silence in the kindergarten due to the speaking problem
 she used to paint with the layer of black which make no sense
 But she enjoyed silence
 She used to do wrong deed so as to make other laugh
 she like negros friend who used to protect her from Chinese kids
 she realized she had to talked and speak to pass kindergarten
 she understand silence is common among Chinese girls
Continued
• Did not know how to do many of things in an American way
• Japanese and other children were unfriendly
• She did not understand American “I” and “Here”
• At the school boys behaved rudely and girls were not silent either
• At the end of the session, they were free.
• Even here Kingston and her sister found it difficult to speak clearly
• For much of her life, she feels torn between her Chinese heritage and her American destiny
• She swing between the two world of china and America
• Her childhood silence seems to be originate from the conflict between her Chinese
upbringing and the way of American schools
• But Kingston represent it as symbolically caused by her mother, who seems to have cut her
tongue. She is therefore unable to express herself at American school.
Continued
• Born in America to a Chinese family she 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.
INTERPRETATION
 INTERPRETATION
 KINGSTON’S TOUNG WAS CUT BY HER MOTHER

 DIFFICULTY IN INTERACTING WITH PEOPLE

 JAPANESE STUDENTS WERE TOUGH AND NOISY

 KINGSTON DIDN’T SING PATRIOTIC AMERICAN SONGS

 KINGSTON’S YOUNGER SISTER RESITES IN THE BEGINNING

 …

 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