Leaping Frogs, and other lore....

I have been reading Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and having a tough time demystifying her myths. It is a semi-autobiographical novel that seeks to link Kingston's Asian-American roots with her Chinese ancestry. She doesn't seem to be able to reconcile the two lives, and this novel is her attempt to give voice to her "No-Name" existence.

I find the Chinese legends interesting, but the graphic descriptions of some of her mother's Talk-story, rather disturbing. She tells of stoning a crazy woman, thought to be a Japanese spy, killing deformed babies, or worse yet, girl babies (thought to be necessary, with the Two-children limit imposed by the government, to allow families to try for a boy child). Because girls married, and then belonged to the husband's family, the logic was, no use wasting discipline on girls -- when you're raising girls, you're raising children for strangers.

I am not laughing about these legends, they seem rather brutal and gruesome to me, but then, I'm not Chinese, so maybe I just don't understand them -- give me some good old western style Greek mythology! There was never anything brutal or gruesome in those stories....!