The Cultural Conflicts And Integration In The Woman Warrior

Among all the Chinese American writers, Maxine Hong Kingston is one of the most well known contemporary Chinese American women writers who have made a great achievement. She is generally seen as the milestone and leading writer in the development of Chinese American literature. Her major works are The Woman Warrior (1976), China Men (1980), and Tripmaster Monkey (1989). The successful publication of The Woman Warrior has brought her the National Book Award, and recognition of her status in the American literature as a Chinese American writer that she is the most influential Chinese American author in the field of integration between Chinese and American cultures.In The Woman Warrior, Kingston mainly studied the cultural embarrassment that American Chinese were trapped in two cultures. From the perspective of root seeking, feminism, marginalized culture and youth's bewilderment, many researchers have studied The Woman Warrior. In fact, the issue of cultural clashes and integration between China and the western cultures shown in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is worth studying further. Therefore, the effort is made to interpret the conflicts and integration between Chinese and west cultures, with Edward T. Hall's thoughts about culture and intercultural psychology theories.In this paper, firstly, an introduction is given to Maxine Hong Kingston and to Chinese American literature, including the development and the status of Chinese American literary in order to highlight the difficulty of Chinese Americans' entering into the mainstream of American literature. Secondly, the conflicts between daughter and mother are the surface of culture clashes, and thus the cultural conflicts can be revealed by studying daughter-mother relationship. The paper lists the clashes in aspects of family, individualism, life style, ghosts, ideological system, gender and racial discrimination. Thirdly, the paper tells the difficulties in integrating Chinese and west cultures. The protagonist finds her gender identity as an androgynous woman and ethnic identity a Chinese American through breaking the silence between her and her mother, and provides other Chiese Americans with a good way to handle the problems in living "between-worlds".There are two meanings in the studying of The Woman Warrior from cultural perspective. Firstly, only through tolerating and understanding each other, can those people living in the crack between China and America reconscile the unavoidable cultural clashes. Secondly, the protagonist's process of identity-seeking and final resolution to conflicts with two cultures provide an active and realistic method to all the Chinese Americans struggling in the dilemma between two different worlds, and encourage them to set up an unique Chinese American identity to adjust themselves to American life. The study also functions as a reference to enhancing the exchange between two different cultures and helping to dercrease cultural conflicts at the current stage.