The Woman Warrior

Food appears in the book as a symbol of belonging, survival, love, and integration. Food rituals and table manners are a potent symbol of Chinese family culture. Kingston describes a prescribed silence while eating and the use of round tables as images of secrecy and group loyalty. To eat together is to be part of a united group.

In its ability to delineate boundaries, food also has a protective role: a new baby is rubbed with an egg to keep him safe, and a gift of candy can neutralize a curse. Eating is also symbolically linked with the ability to live with the past, as one can defeat a ghost by eating and digesting it.

The book’s many ghosts symbolize the continuing and immediate reality of the past. Ghosts appear in many forms, most of them menacing. Dead ancestors leave messages demanding origami offerings; strange spirits try to sap one’s strength as one sleeps. What is dead does not vanish but lives on differently, alongside the more conventionally alive. Kingston’s ghosts symbolize both her ambivalence about the tragedies and silences in her familial and cultural past and her inability to escape them.

Ghosts also pervade the present, as Kingston’s family perceives non-Chinese Americans as ghosts. In this way ghosts symbolize otherness and draw a clear boundary between Kingston’s immigrant family and everyone else. It also demonstrates Kingston’s dual identity as a Chinese American, as she adopts Western behaviors and mannerisms and yet still feels separated from, or not fully part of, Western society. This idea is further emphasized when a young Kingston and friends pretend to be ghosts in the form of newspaper boys.