The Woman Warrior

The specific genre of The Woman Warrior has been disputed due to Kingston's blend of perspectives, specifically traditional Chinese folktale and memoir. With this mixture, Kingston tries to provide her audience with the cultural, familial, and personal context needed to understand her unique position as a first-generation Chinese-American woman.[2]

Susan Stanford Friedman's assessment of autobiography with regard to women and minority groups explains Kingston's intricate blend of perspective and genre: women and cultural minorities often don't have the privilege of viewing themselves as individuals isolated from their gender or racial group. Kingston illustrates this condition through her use of Chinese talk-story, her mother's traditional Chinese perspective, and her own first-person view as a Chinese American.[2]

The book is divided into five interconnected chapters, which read like short stories.

The language of The Woman Warrior invokes a complex juxtaposition of cultural and linguistic voices. Kingston tries to capture and emulate the nuances of Chinese speech through her prose.[4] Trying to transmit a Sinitic language by means of an Indo-European language was no easy task, and one that Kingston had to pursue actively.[4] Nevertheless, The Woman Warrior is not pure talk-story. There is in fact a blending of first, second, and third person narration. The first-person narration of Kingston is her own American voice, the second-person is that of the Chinese talk-story, and the third-person (which only appears in "At the Western Palace") is a mixture; a talk-story transposed from Kingston's Chinese parents to her American siblings, and finally back to Kingston herself.[5] What results from this combination of voices can only be described as a "fusion language" unique to Kingston, almost like her own type of Creole language.

Writing in this "fusion language", which is an American language with Asian tones and accents, or rhythm, is a way that Kingston brings together Chinese and Western experiences. This "melding" of the two experiences – the images and metaphors—is what makes Kingston's style her own. Kingston admits that one of the ways she works to bring these two together is to speak Chinese while writing or typing in English.[6]

The completion of The Woman Warrior came from Kingston's on-the-spot writing of her thoughts. She wrote down anything—until some of it started falling into place.[7] It was this habit that allowed Kingston to complete The Woman Warrior in just three years while teaching at a boarding school that demanded she be on call twenty-four hours a day.[8]

The original title of The Woman Warrior was Gold Mountain Stories.[9] As Kingston states in a 1986 interview with Jody Hoy:

"The publishers didn't like a title that sounds like a collection of short stories; they never like to publish collections of short stories. I wasn't that happy with either of those titles, I think that calling that book The Woman Warrior emphasizes 'warrior.' I'm not really telling the story of war, I want to be a pacifist."[9]

In terms of Kingston's decision-making process in what to include and exclude from her story, she admits to using only what she deemed was "necessary" cultural imagery. She didn't want readers to approach her work as "exotic." What cultural references she did allow to remain in The Woman Warrior she considered to be more "American-friendly." This, of course, was a very subjective endeavor on her part, and, in a more recent reflection she had on The Woman Warrior, Kingston was quoted as calling the cultural references "really Chinese."[10]

Since its publication in 1976, The Woman Warrior has maintained a "vexed reception history that both attests to its popularity and questions it."[11] Much of the debate concerns "autobiographical accuracy, cultural authenticity, and ethnic representativeness,"[12] while the central concern is whether or not Kingston offers a faithful representation of Chinese and Chinese American culture.[13]

Asian American scholars have expressed strong criticisms of The Woman Warrior. Writer Jeffery Paul Chan criticized Kingston for posing the book as non-fiction despite the many fictional elements of its stories. He stated that Kingston gave a distorted view of Chinese culture: one that is partially based on her own experience, but mostly fictional. Chan also noted Kingston's mistranslation of the Cantonese term, "ghost", and Benjamin R. Tong, another Asian American writer, stated that this mistranslation was done deliberately to "suit white tastes so that her book would sell better."[14]

Benjamin R.Tong.

Jeffery Paul Chan.

Tong further stated, based on The Woman Warrior's fictionalized elements and inaccuracies about Chinese culture and history, that Kingston manipulates her white audience by giving them what they think is Chinese culture, which in reality is only a caricature based on Western stereotypes of Chinese people.[15]

Scholar Sheryl Mylan stated that Kingston constructs an Orientalist framework to separate herself from her mother and her culture, but in the process she replicates the ideologies of the American culture. Professor Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong stated that Kingston's "Orientalist effect" is the result of Kingston's failure to commensurately critique the patriarchal values or institutional racism of Western society, resulting in a lopsided and biased commentary regarding Chinese culture.[12] Scholar David Li suggested that The Woman Warrior functions as "a means of contesting power between the dominant culture and the ethnic community; whose value lies in foregrounding the representational issues that have accompanied growth of Asian American creative and critical production."[12]

Among the most caustic criticisms was author and playwright Frank Chin's, who accused Kingston of being "unChinese" and "a fake".[16] Chin criticized Kingston for giving her readers a fictional and exaggerated representation of Chinese people based on American stereotypes, and also criticized her readers for accepting these stereotypes.[17] Chin also accused Kingston of "practising an inauthentic Orientalism inherited from the apologetic autobiographies written in the Chinese American 'high' tradition."[18]

Frank Chin.

In Kingston's defense, reviewer Deborah L. Madsen claimed that this accusation showed Chin's tendency to privilege the low, working-class tradition of Chinese American writing as "authentic", which is not Kingston's tradition. Madsen claimed that autobiographical Chinese American writing is full of competing discourses that differ both culturally and racially, and as Chinese American writers seek both Chinese ethnicity and American citizenship, the result may be "a subversion of racial authenticity", which she believed to be the case with Kingston.[19] Other reviewers, such as Jeehyun Lim, believed that the criticism accusing Kingston of representing the Chinese American community as barbaric "misreads her play with ideas of foreignness and nativeness."[20]

In 1982, Kingston herself wrote a rebuttal essay entitled "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers" in which she disparaged her critics whom she believed were insisting she represent the Chinese to some standard of excellence. "Why must I 'represent' anyone besides myself?" Kingston asked.[21] Others, however, noted that Kingston's stories are fictional and therefore do not represent herself, either. The San Francisco Association of Chinese Teachers warned: "Especially for students unfamiliar with the Chinese background, [The Woman Warrior] could give an overly negative impression of the Chinese American experience."[22] Even a Chinese American female scholar sympathetic to Kingston wrote that "for a minority author to exercise such artistic freedom is perilous business because white critics and reviewers persist in seeing [fictional] expressions by [Kingston] as no more than cultural history."[22]

• Chinese American literature
• List of Asian American writers

• Huang, Judy (2001), Asian-American Literary "Authenticity": Frank Chin's 1991 Criticism of Maxine Hong Kingston In 1975, retrieved 2009-04-11.
• Huntley, E.D. (2001), Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion., Greenwood Publishing Group, ISBN 0-313-30877-2
• Kingston, Maxine Hong (1989), The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Random House, ISBN 0-679-72188-6
• Lim, Shirley Geok-lin (Spring 2008), "Reading Back, Looking Forward: A Retrospective Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston", MELUS, 33 (1): 157–170, doi:10.1093/melus/33.1.157, retrieved 2009-04-10. (EBSCO subscription required for online access.)
• Madison, Deborah L. (2006), "Chinese American Writers of the Real and the Fake: Authenticity and the Twin Traditions of Life Writing" (PDF), Canadian Review of American Studies, 36 (3): 257–271, doi:10.1353/crv.2007.0005, retrieved 2009-04-08.(EBSCO subscription required for online access.)
• Moyers, Bill (March 25, 2007), "Bill Moyers Interview (PBS transcript)", Bill Moyers Journal, retrieved 2009-04-04.
• Sau-ling, Cynthia Wong (Spring 1988), "Necessity and Extravagance in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior:Art and the Ethnic Experience", MELUS, 15 (1): 3–26, doi:10.2307/467038, JSTOR 467038.
• Mitchell, Carol. "'Talking-Story' in The Woman Warrior: An Analysis of the Use of Folklore". Kentucky Folklore Record. 27.1–2 (January–June 1981) 5–12. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed Jeffrey W. Hunter and Polly Vedder. Vol 121. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. 5–12 Literature Resources from Gale. Gale. Collin College, McKinney, TX. 15 Apr. 2008 <http://go.galegroup.com>.
• Petit, Angela. "'Words so strong': Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" introduces students to the power of words". Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 46.6 (Mar. 2003): 482. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Collin College, McKinney, TX. 21 Apr. 2008 <http://search.ebscohost.com>.
• Schueller, Malini. "Questioning Race and Gender Definitions: Dialogic Subversions in The Woman Warrior". Criticism. 31.4 (Fall 1989) 421–437. Rpt. Ii Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed Jeffrey W. Hunter and Polly Vedder. Vol 121. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. 421–437. Literature Resources from Gale. Gale. Collin College, McKinney, TX. 15 Apr. 2008 <http://go.galegroup.com >.
• Kingston, Maxine Hong. "No Name Woman". 1975. Making Literature Matter. Ed. John Schilb and John Clifford. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006. 1154–1163.

• Fonesca, Anthony J. (2005). Madsen, Deborah L. (ed.). Maxine Hong Kingston. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Asian American Writers. 312. Detroit: Gale. pp. 163–180.