chinese society
...mily story with a cultural story. The family story of the struggle girls often go through of differentiating themselves from their mothers makes the book accessible to people who do not have the experience of living as a minority in a majority culture. The cultural story runs parallel to this family story. As a member of a minority cultural group, Kingston had to negotiate between her mother's cultural values and her adoptive country's cultural values. As a child she found that both sides denigrated the other. That is, her mother regarded all Americans, including her children, as barbarians or ghosts, barely human and unmannerly, all because they were ignorant of the Chinese tradition. The Americans Kingston encountered at school regarded the Chinese children in a roughly similar way. Their Chinese culture was not taken into account as an explanation for their knowledge or lack of knowledge, and their difficulty speaking was regarded with indifference or cruelty. As a child, Kingston found her mother's Chinese customs embarrassing. She sided, as a measure of self-defense, with the dominant group, in her scorn of her mother's Chinese way of seeing. Only later, after she found a way to gain power in her successes academically, could Kingston come back to her mother and her culture with respect and love. Only then could she regain that part of herself that her mother nurtured. The benefit Kingston gained from thi...