The Woman Warrior - DJ #1

The Woman Warrior - DJ #1

Quote 1:
"There were ghost plagues, bandit plagues, wars with the Japanese, floods. My Chinese brother and sister had died of an unknown sickness. Adultery, perhaps only a mistake during good times, became a crime when the village needed food." - page 13, paragraph 2, Maxine

Significance:
In Maxines (narrator) home country, it was a hard life. The Chinese culture had a lot of punishments and supperstitions realated to spiritual belifs and therefore had many restrictions on what and wasn't allowed to be done. This phrase above also tells me that adultery might had been only taken very seriously if or when a village or family was in need of money and food. In their need of food, the family might have used the excuse of adultery to raid someones house and steal their food or take their animals for food. Otherwise, the phrase above is telling me that they would not think to use this as an excuse to break into someones house, it would just mean that the person guilty of doing it would curse themselves and their family forever.

Personal Connection:
Well, here in the U.S, we have crimes such as adultery still going on and we have other terrible things happing due to sexual assult and it seemes as though it happened in China too.

Question 1:
From reading this first part of The Woman Warrior, do you think that the narrators (Maxine) aunt was raped? Because she states that her aunt always gave up her family for beauty and men, so I'm still wondering if she was that relentless as to what the consequences might have been.

Quote 2:
"The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whoese weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute." - page 16, last paragraph, Maxine

Question 2:
So we are introduced to alot of the authors (Maxine) relatives in this first part of the sotry and I am still confussed wether or not her aunt (Aiaa pg, 13) drowned herself with the baby. Any thoughts on that?

Quote 3:
"I watched powerful men count their money, and starving men count theirs." - page 30, paragraph 3, Maxine

Significance:
In their home country, there is extreme poverty and even her family stuggled to make a substancial living, but it was even harder for them when the village people came and raided all of their belongings taking everything and destroying everything that was on their property. I thought that it was really cruel and unneccesary to sloughter all of their animals. It was hard making a living and so I think that this is why Maxine's family laster leaves for America. Along with the fact that her family is being split up to go fight in war in America.

Personal Connection:
All the time, there will be people who are wealthier than yourself, but we have to remember that there are always people who are struggling with extreme cases of poverty, and so it just reminds me how thankful I am to have a home, a fmily, an education, to have clothes on my back and much more. It just hurts me to think that there are people on the street trying to make a dollar go as far as they can, but in reality, things these days cost much more than just a dollar.

Question 3:
Do you think that Maxine really has enough self-control to hold herself back from going to help save her new husband and her brother? or will she go without considering what the old folks told her about waiting and not wasting the 7 1/2 years of her life training?

Vocab for DJ #1:
abhorrent (pg 11) - utterly opposed, or contrary, or in conflict
atavism (pg 12) - the reappearance in an individual of characteristics of some remote ancestor that have been absent in intervening generations
talisman (pg 13) - any amulet or charm
spasmodically (pg 14) - pertaining to or of the nature of a spasm
alighted (pg 24) - to settle or stay after descending
peony (pg 24) - any of various plants or shrubs of the genus Paeonia
self-immolation (pg 28) - voluntary sacrifice or denial of oneself
transmigration (pg 28) - the passage of a soul after death into another body