My artistic canvas by Eesha Gudiseva

Examples from The Woman Warrior:

“I have believed that sex was unspeakable and words so strong and fathers so frail that "aunt" would do my father mysterious harm. I have thought that my family, having settled among immigrants who had also been their neighbors in the ancestral land, needed to clean their name, and a wrong word would incite the kinspeople even here. But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment. And I have”

Through her aunt’s story, Kingston begins to question her families stories, realizes that her family always set the rules and that she is not able to decide for herself

“The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people understand the resemblance soon so that I can return to them. What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms for revenge are “report a crime” and “report to five families.” The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words— “chink” words and “gook” words too—that they do not fit on my skin.”

By telling Fa Mulan’s story Kingston is able to realize that writing is a form of combat and that her words are powerful, empowers her to write more

“Maybe because I was the one with the tongue cut loose, I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat.”

In the chapter, Kingston is using stories from her childhood with a mix of stories from her mother to describe the change she went through from adolescence to adulthood.

The House on Mango Street Examples

“All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight.”

Shows how much ethnicity plays into esperanzas self identity, making fun of white people who are afraid to come into her neighborhood

“I want to be

like the waves on the sea

like the clouds in the wind,

but I'm me.

One day I'll jump

Out of my skin

I'll shake the sky
like a hundred violins”

Describes a girl who wants to be free but is unable to due to society pushing her back, makes esperanza realize that she is trapped

“They are the only ones who understand me. I am the only one who understands them. Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine. Four who do not belong here but are here”

By comparing herself to the trees she is adding to the idea that she is alone, and does not belong on mango str

“I make a story for my life, for each step my brown shoe takes. I say, "And so she trudged up the wooden stairs, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she never liked."

“You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are.”

“I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much"

Esperanza has come to terms with The House on Mango Street and that where she grows up will always be apart of her and she cannot let that go

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