Maternal Love in the Warrior WomanWhat constitutes a mother-daughter relationship? In our society, the media generally portrays mothers as caring and loving people. We see a mother rocking her newborn in a diaper ad in Woman's World magazine, while another lovingly gives her child cold medicine in a TV ad. In fact, today it is even considered a beautiful thing, rather than a crude and revealing act, for a mother to breastfeed her child in public. In light of this, for Maxine Hong Kingston's mother, maternal instincts clearly did not play such a role in her relationship with her daughter, both emotionally and physically. Through "Shaman", the third chapter of his novel, Kingston makes his readers understand that the bonds which attached him to his mother were made up of anything but love. She tells the story of her mother, a determined young student, distant from her peers. She had studied medicine in order to prove her worth as a scholar, as well as that of a strong and steadfast woman. It seems that it was this quality that she carried with her throughout her life. While other mothers choose to protect their children from unnecessary harm, the author's mother had “given [her] images to dream about – nightmarish babies who came back [red] again and again” (86). She instilled in her young daughter such a strong fear of war and bombing that she "often dreamed that the sky [was] covered from horizon to horizon with rows of planes, airships, rockets and of flying bombs” (96). Kingston had further learned to view all Americans as ghosts and was repeatedly informed that one day they would return home so they could buy "real" furniture and "smell flowers for the first time" (98). Finally, even as an adult, we see her mother passing on to her the sense of guilt, "responsibility for time, responsibility for the oceans between," for essentially preventing her from being a warrior woman (108). In a physical sense, we never see Kingston's mother touch her or even hear her say "I love you." When she was a child, the author remembers that her mother's "enthusiasm for [her] was more annoying than that for the young slave" her mother had loved so much in China. (82).