I am all about Woman Warrior right now. As soon as I opened this book and read the opening line from Kingston’s mother to a young Kingston, “You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you,” I was enraptured by this biography/memoir/novel/masterpiece (Woman Warrior, 3). Of course, since Kingston proceeds to tell all of her readers exactly what her mother tells her, it is an extremely powerful and ironic first sentence of a story that is all about breaking the rules. Kingston, I quickly realized after picking up the book, is the woman warrior she names her book after. 
I feel a special kinship to Kingston. Though my situation was nowhere near as dire as her own, I can relate to her suffering of being of the unwanted sex in her family and culture and her actions of make-believe in a small way. My grandmother had a very sad life. She suffered from bipolar disorder and alcoholism and was a woman, on top of all that, who was very set in her ways. Her children don’t talk much about it but I can sense that life at home with their mother was not something they look back upon fondly. My father (her son) was supposedly the golden child because he was the only boy out of 4 children – and my grandmother wanted only boys. Something about the importance of the last name passing on, for antiquated reasons similar to that of the Chinese culture Kingston grew up amidst – made my grandmother say something to my mother (her daughter-in-law) just after she gave birth to me that has always stuck with my mom. I was 7 pounds 0 ounces lying in my mother’s cradled arms and my grandmother looked down at me then back up at my mother and said, “I’m sorry it wasn’t a boy. Hopefully next time.”How can you look at a little baby - especially one as cute as me ha ha - and say something like that? Luckily for me, my parents never once bought into the ideology that "boys are better"..jpg)
(My dad holding me as a baby. image is author's own.) Naturally when my brother was born two years later, she was overjoyed. Holidays were pretty much the only times I saw my grandmother but those were painful on their own. My brother would receive kisses and laughter and gifts like a massive train set that spanned the entire house while I – desperate for some of my grandmother’s attention – would only be noticed by her if it involved some kind of scolding for eating all the caviar and my gifts would include a used paperback book. It sounds crazy, but that’s how it was. I think she loved me, but I think that her mental disorder and her old fashioned beliefs of right and wrong got in the way of her being able to show me.
(I did not feel loved by my grandmother, but I think that deep down she loved me. image is author's own.) Kingston feels the same sentiment when she explains, “from afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally. They only say ‘when fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls’,
“ (Woman Warrior, 52). In this sense, I was luckier than Kingston, who had to deal with rejection all around her based on being a girl and not just from one person. She says, “I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, ‘girls are necessary too’; I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession,” (Woman Warrior, 53).
To escape from that, I sometimes played what my mother called my “imaginary games” where I would run all over the backyard pretending to be someone else. Some days I was a basketball star, other times I was a strong female character from a Disney movie like Mulan. When I read that Kingston imagined herself as Fa Mu Lan “the girl who took her father’s place in battle” I was amazed that we had both resorted to the same fantasies about ourselves to give us strength (Woman Warrior, 20).
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