What do you think this short passage means?

Question

I'm curious to see someone else's interpretation of it.
It is from the book "The Woman Warrior" by Maxine Hong Kingston

Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She tested our strength to establish realities. Those in emigrant generations who could not reassert brute survival died young and far from home. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in sold America.
The emigrants confused the gods by diverting their curses, misleading them with crooked streets and false names. They must try to confuse their offspring as well, who, I suppose, threaten them in similar ways—always trying to get things straight, always trying to name the unspeakable. The Chinese I know hide their names; sojourners take new names when their lives change and guard their real names with silence.
Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, on family, your mother who marked your growing stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

The narrator is taking curiosity in her Chinese heritage, and she wants to know what the Chinese culture is really like instead of what most people already know, like the food, New Year. Also, the culture her mother left behind. Her mother probably saw freedoms in the US that China did not give her, so some of the stories the narrator's mother told were biased toward that, and therefore what she heard about China was not all true. She wants to discover China in her own terms.

The second paragraph is establishing how immigrants left China because the culture wronged them in one way or another. "The emigrants confused the gods by diverting their curses, misleading them with crooked streets and false names." They want the US so take away all the pains that led to them to come to the US, and they "confuse" and "threaten" their children to prevent them from experiencing what they experienced. But in the end, their children are curious of their heritage, but they are left with two descriptions of China, the one their parents left and the one they have yet discovered.

But I could be wrong. LOL

Source(s):

ap English language and composition.
we analyze a whole bunch of stuff haha

Asker's Rating:

Asker's Comment:

thanks for the detailed answer.
=]
i agree with you
;D