Language Barriers and Asian American Students in The Woman Warrior
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Overcoming language barriers and unfavorable learning experiences appear in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Marvel Studio’s first Asian superhero film, as well as in novels and essays by Asian American writers. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), one of the most influential works of Chinese American fiction, is frequently taught and read as delineating the narrator’s discovery of her voice through acceptance of her mother’s conservative “talk-stories” and her Chinese heritage. Attributing the narrator’s silence as symptomatic of “being a Chinese girl,” however, does not account for how her communication skills sporadically deteriorate and how several bicultural women’s voices become inaudible at school and after graduation (166). This paper demonstrates that Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel questions conventional associations between learning English and becoming American through comparisons with the essays about adapting to new environments after immigrating from China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam: Binh Ha Hong’s “Reflections on Becoming American” (1999), Jubilee Lau’s “Chinese and Proud of It” (1996), and Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” (1990). Whereas these essays extol the American-educated daughters’ adjustments through allusions to their parents’ lack of English skills and its impact on the family’s socio-economic status, the frustrating experiences of students, parents, teachers in The Woman Warrior reveal that language barriers at elementary schools cause unresolved communication problems for multiple Chinese Americans.
Abstract
Overcoming language barriers and unfavorable learning experiences appear in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Marvel Studio’s first Asian superhero film, as well as in novels and essays by Asian American writers. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), one of the most influential works of Chinese American fiction, is frequently taught and read as delineating the narrator’s discovery of her voice through acceptance of her mother’s conservative “talk-stories” and her Chinese heritage. Attributing the narrator’s silence as symptomatic of “being a Chinese girl,” however, does not account for how her communication skills sporadically deteriorate and how several bicultural women’s voices become inaudible at school and after graduation (166). This paper demonstrates that Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel questions conventional associations between learning English and becoming American through comparisons with the essays about adapting to new environments after immigrating from China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam: Binh Ha Hong’s “Reflections on Becoming American” (1999), Jubilee Lau’s “Chinese and Proud of It” (1996), and Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” (1990). Whereas these essays extol the American-educated daughters’ adjustments through allusions to their parents’ lack of English skills and its impact on the family’s socio-economic status, the frustrating experiences of students, parents, teachers in The Woman Warrior reveal that language barriers at elementary schools cause unresolved communication problems for multiple Chinese Americans.
참고문헌 (21)
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