"Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds"

Bonnie Park

In the chapter titled "White Tigers" in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Kingston explores the traditional misogynistic tendencies of the Chinese culture. Maxims like "Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds," (46) and "There is no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls," (46) hint not only at a strong cultural distrust of women, but also at the idea that bearing children and raising them is an investment-- investment of time, money, pain, and effort in exchange for the hopes of vicarious fulfillment and profit through the offspring when the 'stock' has fully matured. Kingston portrays her own rejection of such ideas by refusing to get straight A's, refusing to marry to show her, "father and mother and the nosy emigrant villagers that girls have no outward tendency," (47).

Yet Kingston can not help but wish that she could return from Berkeley as a boy so that she too, and not only her brothers could have her "parents welcome her with chickens and pigs". (47) The inability to prove herself just as worthy of love and affection and trust as her brothers is an overarching theme in the chapter. Kingston yearns to belong in her family and in the culture of her parents, yet can not find reconciliation with the misogyny and the double standards which are exhibited in every aspect of the Chinese culture. She points out that, "There is a Chinese word for 'I', which means 'slave'". (47) While her soul struggles to find peace with her ethnic and cultural roots, she finds it impossible to embrace a culture which can not embrace her gender.

This theme of the suppression and insignificance of women in the traditions of the author's ancestors is significant to the novel, as it is an overarching one, and one which recurs throughout the memoir. Kingston explores the difficulty of becoming a "woman warrior" or a "female avenger" in her own ethnic culture as well as in her environmental culture and raises the question of the probability of overcoming the difficulties faced by her existence as a female, as an ethnically Chinese individual, and as an American.