The Balancing of Cultures in The Immigrant Youth

    Both Hunger of  Memory and Woman Warrior are stories from the lives of the children of immigrants struggling in a void between two cultures, which held them captive in their youth and shrouded them with a suffocating silence. This silence led to the voices that they share with us today through these books. They both grew up conflicted between what their heritage expected of them, and they American lives they were simultaneously living. Family, education, language, and religion all had their part in the obstacles that Kingston and Rodriguez overcame; these are the life lessons they are breaking the silence to teach to us. Though their Chinese and Mexican cultures are far from similar; the experiences and struggles that shaped their lives and inspired them to write are much alike.
    Rodriguez and Kingston lived through many of the same stories during their lives. Both of them for instance, were used as go-betweens for their families and the rest of America. There parents mistrusted the gringos, the ghosts, and depended on there sons and daughters to translate for them. Not only were they depended on as translators for simple language barriers, but to translate other aspects of the cultures as well. Kingston was forced to go back to the drugstore to tell the drugstore clerk to remove the curse he had accidentally put on his family; where her mother couldn’t understand a simple mistake had been, and they clerk could never understand why Kingston was demanding candy. Similarly, Rodriguez’s parents could never comprehend why the gringos would share their private lives so openly with the world; likewise Rodriguez’s friends would never be able to realize why his parents”never treated such visitors as part of the family” (195) as their parents did him. In both situations, Kingston and Rodriguez were the only ones who were able to see and live through both sides, alone with their knowledge.
    Caught in this silence, writing their lives down was synonymous to finally finding their voice. For Rodriguez it was a way of branching between the two parts of him. Sharing his story with the world was a way finally breaking out of the private life he had been conditioned to live by his parents, never sharing anything personal with anyone but family. At the same time, he kept true in his own way to his parents private ways by sharing his life not with real people, but with “a reader who only exists in [his] mind phantasmagorically” (197). For Kingston, sharing her story was more of a way of achieving her goal, to become a woman warrior. She shares with us the good and bad, the myths and truths, trying to teach and empower.
    Both Rodriguez and Kingston were trying to achieve some sort of empowerment through their writing, and trying to break out from being caught between two cultures. Kingston strived to become the woman warrior, the person her mother empowered her to be with her Chinese legends. For Rodriguez, it meant finally learning to share his life with others, sharing “things too personal to be shared with intimates”(201). It is about finding a balance between the privacy his parents treasured, and the being able to reveal and discover himself as well. The “very things my mother asked me not to reveal” (189), and Kingston’s as well, are really just the things that show us the struggles and concepts of both cultures.