How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies? (1.12).
Kingston questions the idea of authenticity when it comes to Chinese identity in America. Her larger work in the memoir is to blur the lines between reality and fantasy, suggesting that there is no one truth.
Quote #2
I have believed that sex was unspeakable and words so strong and fathers so frail that "aunt" would do my father mysterious harm. I have thought that my family, having settled among immigrants who had also been their neighbors in the ancestral land, needed to clean their name, and a wrong word would incite the kinspeople even here. But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment. And I have (1.47).
Kingston reflects that she has believed in her family's stories without question for too long. She realizes that she relied on her family to set the boundaries of reality for her before she realized her own ability to decide for herself.
Quote #3
"The first thing you have to learn," the old woman told me, "is how to be quiet." They left me by streams to watch for animals. "If you're noisy, you'll make the deer go without water" (2.23).
In Kingston's myth of herself as a training warrior, she advocates the strength in silence and listening. Letting there be space and sound for others can then be seen as an ethical choice.
Quote #4
When you have been walking through trees hour after hour – and I finally reached trees after the dead land – branches cross out everything, no relief whichever way your head turns until your eyes start to invent new sights. Hunger also changes the world – when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing. I saw two people made of gold dancing the earth's dances. They turned so perfectly that together they were the axis of the earth's turning (2.37).
While training to be a warrior, Kingston writes how her sense of interacting with the world changed. This seems to suggest that one's life experiences shape the reality that one lives.
Quote #5
"Let's tie it to a flagpole until it dries," I said. We had both seen the boxes in which our parents kept the dried cords of all their children. "This one was yours, and this yours," my mother would say to us brothers and sisters, and fill us with awe that she could remember (2.109).
Kingston hopes to carry on her mother's tradition. She is happy that her mom remembers such intimate details about her life because it shows that her life is worth remembering, worth telling stories about.
Quote #6
"We've never met before. I've done nothing to you."
"You've done this," I said, and ripped off my shirt to show him my back. "You are responsible for this." When I saw his startled eyes at my breasts, I slashed him across the face and on the second stroke cut off his head" (2.132-133).
Kingston takes the political to be personal; even if the baron has not directly hurt Kingston, she reacts against his sexist behavior. Kingston identifies as a female avenger, someone who looks out and stands up for womankind.
Quote #7
I could not figure out what was my village. And it was important that I do something big and fine, or else my parents would sell me when we made our way back to China. In China there were solutions for what to do with little girls who ate up food and tantrums. You can't eat straight A's (2.146).
Kingston worries that she will never get the opportunity to unleash her inner warrior. Her fear here, however, does not seem to be for her own sense of pride but out of concern that her parents will find her unworthy if she does not prove heroic. On one level, she interprets the stories of Fa Mu Lan that her mother tells her as threats to show how she is lacking as a woman.
Quote #8
I refused to cook. When I had to wash dishes, I would crack one or two. "Bad girl," my mother yelled, and sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn't a bad girl almost a boy?
"What do you want to be when you grow up, little girl?"
"A lumberjack in Oregon" (2.163-165).
Kingston demonstrates that a part of her self-identity was in reaction to her mother's and society's expectations of her. But what does it mean to have an identity dependent on others' ideas?
Quote #9
It seemed to hurt her to tell me [that Chinese people often say the opposite] – another guilt for my list to tell my mother, I thought. And suddenly I got very confused and lonely because I was at that moment telling her my list, and in the telling, it grew. No higher listener. No listener but myself (5.179).
Kingston wishes to share herself with her mother, but realizes that she has so many complex thoughts that there is no other person who could know all her stories other than herself. She worries that stories can only do but so much to connect people.