Maxine Hong Kingston wrote The Woman Warrior as a collection of stories from her childhood. She is a daughter of Chinese immigrants who grew up in America and struggled between the culture she lived in and the Chinese one her mother tried to preserve. One aspect of Chinese culture that is different between Maxine and her mother, Brave Orchid, is the distinction between ghosts for each person. Maxine and her mother encounter different types of ghosts and therefore have different reactions than others. Brave Orchid was born in China and lived there for many years before making the journey to America to join her husband. She grew up with traditional Chinese culture, which included ghosts. In ancient China, ghosts were considered spirits of the dead. Brave Orchid grew up with this idea and reacted to ghosts as if they were spirits. While Brave Orchid was in China without her husband, she went to the Keung School of Midwifery. One night as he went to the haunted room to spend the night to prove that it did not contain a ghost. While he was sleeping, he encountered the type of ghost that was prominent in ancient China. Kingston states, “He pushed against the creature to lift himself out from under it, but it absorbed this energy and became heavier” (169). The brave Orchid fought with the ghost and later brought her roommates back to cleanse the room of the spirit. While the original type of ghost is what Brave Orchid experiences first, she also uses the term ghost when identifying any character who is different from her and her family. Brave Orchid instills in her children that anyone different from them is a ghost. It demonstrates her reaction when a delivery man brings the wrong medicine to the dry cleaners and she finds herself... middle of paper... and we ourselves were like ghosts. They called us some kind of ghost” (Kingston 183). Maxine and the other children were never given truthful information because the adults feared the ghosts they would tell. Maxine and Brave Orchid have had different encounters with different types of ghosts. Brave Orchid encountered spirits while in ancient China and referred to anyone outside of her culture as a ghost. Maxine was raised to believe that anyone other than herself is considered a ghost, so her encounters with ghosts were more or less as if she were interacting with another human being. He had no communications like his mother had when he was at school in China. Maxine never had to cleanse a room of spirit, she simply had to avoid people who were different from her. Works Cited Kingston, Maxine Hong. The warrior woman: memories of a childhood among ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1976. Print.