casually repeated by her loving family: “It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.” Kingston skillfully juxtaposes the family’s poverty and prejudices against the girl’s dreams and the stories told by her mother, Brave Orchid.

These unresolved tensions have created ambivalent feelings in the author, as she readily admits. Fantasies of revenge for ancient wrongs contrast with her own experience that fighting and killing are “not . . . glorious but slum grubby.” Yet she aspires to be like the warrior so that her family will accept her female strength. They say, “When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls,” because that is what Chinese say about daughters. She believes they love her, but she had to get out of “hating range” in order to become strong. Later, wrapped in successes as an American woman, Maxine still resists the restrictive roles thrust on females, while envying other women, who are “loved enough to be supported.” Even as an adult, she recognizes that China still “wraps double binds around my feet.”

With women throughout the world seeking their own identity and learning independence, Kingston’s timely memoir is a scrapbook of experiences that are universal and yet particular: The Chinese word for the female I is “slave.” The dream of having one’s own room appears in Communist photographs of “a contented woman sitting on her bunk sewing. Above her head is her one box on a shelf. The words stenciled on the box mean ’Fragile,’ but literally say ’Use a little heart.’ The woman looks very pleased. The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own.”

Her mother, Brave Orchid, while training as a midwife in China, had had an opportunity to live out this daydream of women—a room of one’s own, “even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself.” Kingston’s portrait of Brave Orchid is memorable as a real-life counterpart of the woman warrior. We see only sketches of her father, as in the photographs he sent from America: with friends at Coney Island (“He’s the one in the middle with his arms about the necks of his buddies.”) In another snapshot, he is glimpsed smiling in front of a pile of clean laundry. “In the spring he wears a new straw hat, cocked at a Fred Astaire angle.”

Assimilation into an alien culture seemed unimportant to Brave Orchid, secure in her own identity. As a mature woman, she had studied exorcism, midwifery, and modern medicine. A brilliant scholar and a dragoness, she once fought off a Sitting Ghost, a great furry creature that saps the energy of its victims. All night, Brave Orchid insulted the ghost and then chanted her lessons for the following day’s classes. The next morning, she and the other women, chanting and singing, smoked out the creature and killed it.

Brave Orchid told her daughters that children with birth defects were often left to die—as were girl babies sometimes. Maxine, trying to make her life “American-normal,” pushes the deformed into her dreams, “which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories.”

In an eerie blend of the real and the surreal, Kingston recreates the steamy laundry where the family worked from 6:30 in the morning till midnight, while the children slept on shelves among the clean clothes. To fool the gods, Brave Orchid calls Maxine “Little Dog”; both mother and daughter are dragons. When the temperature reaches 111 degrees, Maxine’s parents tell ghost stories to “get some good chills up our backs.”

A child of World War II, Maxine also heard her mother “talk-story” about bomber planes. Shiny silver machines haunt her dreams, and she comes of age in an America of machines and ghosts—Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts, the fearsome Garbage Ghost. The family laundry ultimately falls prey to Urban Renewal Ghosts.

The clash of ancient ways with Americanized Chinese is vividly depicted in the story of Moon Orchid, sister of Brave Orchid. After staying behind in China for thirty years, Moon Orchid timidly comes to America to claim her husband, a successful brain surgeon who had sent her money and supported their daughter, “even though she’s only a girl.” But he had taken a new wife. Brave Orchid goads her to find her errant husband and “demand your rights as First Wife.” In an awkward confrontation on the street, he confesses, “It’s as if I had turned into a different person. The new life around me was so complete; it pulled me away. You became people in a book I had read a long time ago.” Moon Orchid retreats into a paranoid fantasy. After trying to chant away her sister’s fears, Brave Orchid finally recognizes Moon Orchid’s incurable madness and commits her to a mental asylum, where she dies happy. Resolving fiercely that they would never allow men to be unfaithful to them, Brave Orchid’s daughters vow “to major in science or mathematics.”

Learning was to become Maxine’s escape route to independence, but her early school experiences humiliated the little girl, who failed kindergarten and got “a zero IQ” in first grade. Suffering from an intense shyness, she at first refused to speak in school. From men teachers in the Chinese school, held each afternoon until 7:30 p.m., Maxine learned to chant. Later she developed an American-feminine speaking personality. But her traumatic early years marked her childhood. In an agonizingly vivid scene, Maxine torments another girl who remains silent even in Chinese school. Maxine corners her after school in the girls’ lavatory and brutally ridicules the girl, pulls some of her hair out, and defies her to say a word. Finally, Maxine cries too.“Now look what you’ve done.” I scolded. “You’re going to pay for this. . . . You don’t see I’m trying to help you out, do you? Do you want to be like this, dumb (do you know what dumb means?), your whole life? Don’t you ever want to be a cheerleader? Or a pompon girl? What are you going to do for a living? Yeah, you’re going to have to work because you can’t be a housewife. Somebody has to marry you before you can be a housewife. . . . You think somebody is going to take care of you all your stupid life?”

As Kingston traces her own maturing from “bad girl” (telling people she wants to be a lumberjack) to independent woman, she portrays the painful period of rebellion which forced her to leave her beloved family in order to find herself. Maxine feared being sent to China, where girls could be sold. (No one had told her parents that the Communists had outlawed girl slavery and girl infanticide.) To make herself unsellable, Maxine decides to be the crazy woman in her house. But such behavior had its perils. The old Chinese, her father warned, smeared honey on bad daughters-in-law and tied them naked on top of anthills. When a retarded boy courts Maxine, her parents appear to encourage the match. She rebels: “They say I’m smart now . . . I’m going to get scholarships, and I’m going away. And at college I’ll have the people I like for friends. I don’t care if they were our enemies in China four thousand years ago. So get that ape out of here. . . . And I don’t want to listen to any more of your stories; they have no logic. They scramble me up.” But later she reflects, “Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing.”

The pain and triumph of this girl, the captive of two cultures, is echoed in the tale of Ts’ai Yen, an ancient poetess, who was kidnaped and raped by barbarians. Hearing the flute music of her captors, she began singing to her babies, songs about China and her family there. The words seemed Chinese, with barbarian phrases, but the savages understood their sadness and anger. Later Ts’ai Yen was ransomed and married well. But she carried back with her the savage songs, which translated well.

This delicate and moving memoir is proof that Maxine Hong Kingston has translated with sensitivity and wit the syllables of pain and growth and beauty.

The Woman Warrior is a blend of autobiographical material about the second-generation Chinese-American author and the myths and dreams that constitute her psychic reality. By fusing fact and imagination, Maxine Hong Kingston works toward answers to the central problem articulated at the beginning of the book. This problem isto figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fit in solid America. . . . Chinese-Americans, . . . how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese?

The narrative consists of five interlocking sections, each of which explores the central problem from a different perspective.

The first section, “No Name Woman,” tells the story of an aunt who, after bearing an illegitimate child, was forced by neighbors and family to commit suicide. Kingston explains that when she reached puberty, her mother told her the story of No Name Woman as a warning. The story of this aunt is vague and shrouded in the mystery of the unspeakable.

The next two sections picture strong women who refuse to be victims. No Name Woman is the victim of a community which devalues and severely restricts women; in contrast, the mythical Woman Warrior of the second section, “White Tigers,” actively avenges crimes against her community. A Chinese Joan of Arc, she leads an army in defiance of laws which would put her to death for impersonating a man if she were discovered; she also marries for love, gives birth in the saddle, and returns to her family in honor, evading the fate of the Western woman hero. Kingston explains that the Woman Warrior, also based on her mother’s stories, represents her dreams of power and creativity.

The third section, “Shaman,” recounts the life of Kingston’s mother, Brave Orchid. While still living in China, Brave Orchid battled stiff odds to be graduated with honors from a women’s medical college and then practiced her craft against equally stiff odds. Like the Woman Warrior, the Shaman seems to possess superhuman strengths and takes enormous risks. Unlike most Chinese women whose husbands left them to go to America, Brave Orchid eventually follows her husband to “the Gold Mountain” to work at his side.

The fourth section, “At the Western Palace,” recounts the life of Brave Orchid’s sister Moon Orchid. Like No Name Woman a generation earlier, Moon Orchid is victimized by a community which devalues women. After thirty years in Hong Kong, Moon Orchid follows her sister’s advice, coming to San Francisco to find the husband who left her for the Gold Mountain. Now a successful physician, the husband rejects her, and Moon Orchid retreats so far into madness that she is finally hospitalized. With the other psychiatric patients, Moon Orchid is content once more.

The fifth and last section, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” concludes the themes introduced in the first four parts of the work. The first episode in this section concerns the author’s childhood reticence, so intense that before allowing her teachers to see her school drawings she covers them with layers of chalk and black paint. This silence parallels the silence surrounding No Name Woman, who never tells the name of the man who raped or seduced her and consequently loses her own name. Kingston’s silence, however, eventually turns into self-expression. In the second episode, Kingston recalls her mother’s superstitious demand that a white druggist, who has mistakenly delivered medicine, recompense the family with gifts. Kingston learns to lie creatively in order to negotiate between the whites, who do not understand her culture, and her mother, who does not understand the white culture. The third episode builds on the first and second; here, the author acts out her mother’s role as a shaman, attempting to “cure” a silent classmate by bullying and torturing her. Instead of curing her classmate, however, Kingston herself succumbs to a mysterious illness which confines her to bed for a year. In the next episode, the author considers female victimization once more, concluding that the silences surrounding women and girls make them crazy: “I thought every house had to have its crazy woman or crazy girl, every village its idiot. Who would it be at our house? Probably me. . . . there were adventurous people inside my head to whom I talked.” The last episode of “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” explores Kingston’s dream life and the increasing urgency of her need to communicate. In her childhood, Kingston took this urgency as further evidence of her own craziness, but paradoxically, the dreams and the talk are also the means by which she transcends psychic stress.

The last episode of the last section tells the story of the woman poet Ts’ai Yen. Captured and taken into exile by barbarians, she learns their language and music, transforms barbarian idioms into her language, and eventually brings back to her own people poems of great beauty.

In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston presents a series of mythic and autobiographic stories that illuminate the way in which the author must deal with the sexism and racism in her world. As a young Chinese American girl, who is called such racist names as “gook” and who is repeatedly told such misogynist Chinese sayings as “girls are maggots in the rice” by her own parents, Kingston feels alienated both from the dominant American culture and from the male-dominated Chinese culture. In her memoirs, Kingston tells of her search for women role models, interweaving imaginative stories concerning such characters as Fa Mu Lan, a Chinese woman warrior, with memories of her own relationship with her strong-willed mother, Brave Orchid. Through these various stories, the narrator searches to affirm her Chinese American female identity in the context of her bicultural world.

The narrator begins her autobiography with her mother telling her a cautionary tale about her Chinese aunt, whom Kingston calls the No Name Woman. Her married aunt, who became pregnant from an illicit affair, incurs the wrath of the Chinese villagers, who attack her family’s house. Her aunt gives birth to her child and drowns both herself and the child in the family well. Kingston calls her aunt “No Name Woman” because her family, blaming the aunt for the shame that she brought to them, deliberately attempts to erase her from the family’s memory. Although Brave Orchid warns Maxine not to repeat her aunt’s story, Maxine uses the story as a catalyst for her creative imagination. Maxine attempts to imagine her aunt’s reason for adultery: Was she in love? Was she raped? Most important, she tries to transform her aunt from a mere object lesson—of misguided passion punished by communal wrath—into a human being who should not be forgotten by the family.

Yet Brave Orchid tells Maxine stories not only of women who have been ostracized by a punitive feudal community but also of powerful women such as Fa Mu Lan, a Chinese woman warrior who saves her community. Fa Mu Lan serves as a central inspiration for Maxine who, in her imagination, becomes the woman warrior fighting battles to right the wrongs perpetrated against her people. Although she fantasizes that she is like the woman warrior who fights tyrants, Maxine acknowledges her own limitations in her everyday life; when she attempts to challenge her boss’s racist comments, he simply ignores her “bad, small-person’s voice.”

In the latter part of her autobiography, Kingston turns her attention to the life of Brave Orchid, who acts as both an adversary and a role model for her. She depicts two ostensibly conflicting pictures of her mother. On the one hand, her mother, who married her husband right before he left for the United States, lives an independent life in China, going to medical school and becoming a doctor. On the other hand, when she goes to the United States years later to be with her husband, she reverts back to the traditional role of wife. Nevertheless, Kingston’s strong-willed mother stands in stark contrast to Brave Orchid’s sister, Moon Orchid, who comes to the United States after being separated from her husband for three decades. Brave Orchid commands Moon Orchid to insist that her husband, who has taken another wife, recognize her role as “first wife.” Instead, Moon Orchid’s husband, now a successful American doctor, rejects her with a hostile stare. Unable to endure her husband’s rejection or to adapt to her new country, Moon Orchid becomes paranoid and eventually insane.

Although Brave Orchid is a powerful matriarchal figure, she ostensibly attempts to pass on patriarchal values to Maxine. Thus, in a key scene, Maxine verbally “battles” with her mother, in order to assert her own identity and autonomy. In the end, however, Maxine realizes that she and her mother—both born in the year of the dragon—have much in common; both are fighters and storytellers.

Although other Asian American women writers preceded her, Kingston was one of the first to garner national recognition, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 for The Woman Warrior. Thus, she has been seen as a pioneer for other Asian American women writers who have succeeded her. Politically, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior has excited interest not only because the work provides a feminist vision from a Chinese American woman’s perspective but also because of the negative reaction that it has produced in such Chinese American men as Frank Chin.

On the one hand, Kingston provides a critique of a patriarchal and misogynist feudal China that can trap women in demeaning, slavelike roles, subject to such cultural practices as foot-binding. On the other hand, Kingston points out that the Chinese culture itself provides her with such powerful women role models as Fa Mu Lan and Ts’ai Yen. Out of this complex tradition, Kingston forges a bicultural self that will allow her to enact her own “woman warrior” identity in an American society with its own racist and patriarchal legacy.

Nevertheless, Chinese American playwright Frank Chin has criticized Kingston’s work on the grounds that it propagates racist views of Chinese Americans. Interested in championing a Chinese heroic tradition to combat the often-emasculating vision that the dominant American culture has of Asian American men, Chin believes that Kingston’s feminist views distort an authentic picture of China and Chinese Americans. Certainly, however, one can argue that Kingston’s work is an autobiographic, not an ethnographic, study; Kingston is conveying her understanding of her mother’s talk-stories, which reflect a living immigrant oral culture, not a series of static, “authentic” tales. Moreover, Kingston has reformulated male heroic traditions, highlighting the contributions of women to that tradition. Thus, Kingston’s work broadens the concept of a Chinese mythos precisely because she embeds her hybrid American and feminist views within that tradition, claiming her own “woman warrior’s” voice.

In The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston weaves myth, history, and personal recollection into the genre of autobiography. As a mirror of the author’s conscious life, the book reflects Kingston’s struggle to construct a coherent narrative from the stories, dreams, and fragmented memories of her formative years. The text is divided into five sections, made up largely of stories reconstructed from those told to Kingston by her mother, stories to “grow up on.” As central characters in these cautionary tales, female relatives and ancestors embody cultural ideals that are transmitted from mother to daughter.

The first story, “No Name Woman,” is related as a secret. The offense of its central figure, Kingston’s father’s sister, is to have borne a child outside of marriage. Shunned by her community, she drowns herself and her baby in the family well. In contrast to this hushed story of shame, the second tale celebrates a revered legend in lyrical expanses of writing, like epic poetry. A model character, Fa Mu Lan, schooled in the harsh discipline of a warrior, liberates her people from tyrants and then lives out her life as a dutiful wife and mother.

As do the first and second parts of the book, the third and fourth present contrasting views of women: victim and overcomer, healer and destroyer. The third section, “Shaman,” traces the career of Kingston’s mother, Brave Orchid, in China as a brilliant medical student and then as a physician. The fourth section features Brave Orchid’s sister, Moon Orchid. In both sections, name reveals Character: If Brave Orchid survives on bold cunning, Moon Orchid fades as a pale satellite, tragically dependent on others.

The final section focuses directly on Kingston. By the book’s end, she has clearly become its protagonist. The section climaxes with a diatribe in which Kingston refuses to listen to any more of her mother’s stories. She rejects their lack of logic or clear distinction between fiction and reality. Nevertheless, her experience with Western logic and scientism leaves her no more satisfied. A coda that completes the book tells the story of a poet who is kidnapped by barbarians; when she returns to her people, she brings with her songs that translate well on their instruments. The Woman Warrior ends, then, on a note of hope for personal integration.

Women in Chinese Society

In The Woman Warrior, Kingston addresses centuries of female oppression in Chinese society while also reconciling her family’s role within American culture. Through her "talk stories" about herself and her female relatives, Kingston illustrates Chinese traditions that depict women as subjugated by men and treated as mere property. From the era of Confucius to the early 1900s, Chinese society prioritized family above all and men over women. Marriage formed new family bonds, where new wives were particularly subservient to their husbands' parents. Women of higher social classes led highly secluded lives and endured practices like foot-binding. Young girls, especially those deemed beautiful, were chosen for foot-binding to keep their feet small. This process involved bending the large toe backward, permanently deforming the foot. Men preferred women with bound feet, viewing it as a mark of beauty and gentility, and a sign that these women were supported without needing to perform physical labor.

While Kingston shares stories of such subservient women, she also presents mythical Chinese women who defied these constraints to become warriors, heroines, and swordswomen. These visions were imparted to her by her own mother. Critic Diane Johnson in the New York Review of Books notes that Kingston "has been given hints of female power, and also explicit messages of female powerlessness from her mother, who in China had been a doctor and now toiled in the family laundry." Henry Allen in the Washington Post describes these stories as "a wild mix of myth, memory, history and lucidity which verges on the eerie." Mary Gordon in the New York Times Book Review praises Kingston’s technique, saying, "the blend … [is as] … relentless as a truth-seeking child's."

Chinese Political History

The Woman Warrior begins with Kingston’s mother recounting the tale of her husband's sister, who brought shame to the family by having a child out of wedlock and then committing suicide. This occurred in 1924, a time when numerous men left China for America amidst political turmoil. After over 3,000 years of imperial rule, Chinese revolutionaries compelled the last Qing emperor to abdicate. Sun Yat-sen became the provisional president of the new Chinese Republic, even gaining support from the most conservative factions. Yuan Shikai succeeded Sun Yat-sen but passed away in 1916. Between then and 1928, warlords dominated China. Despite the governmental instability, the Chinese populace began to adopt more liberal views, embracing many Western ideas, rejecting imperialism, and challenging the Confucian social order. This era of nationalism is referred to as the May Fourth movement. Concurrently, many Chinese gravitated towards Marxism, with Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) leading the nascent Chinese Communist Party.

Despite China now having a Communist party, Russian Communists did not support it. Instead, they backed the Nationalist Party because it had a larger membership and greater political influence. Their goal was to eliminate the warlord presence in China and pave the way for socialism. Sun Yat-sen led this Nationalist Party, also known as the Kuomintang (Guo-mindang), from 1912 until his death in 1925.

In 1923, the Russian Communists and the Kuomintang urged Chinese citizens to join their cause, and the Kuomintang began to align more closely with Russian Communism. However, this alliance was short-lived. Kuomintang forces launched a brutal attack on the Chinese Communist Party and the Shanghai labor movement, resulting in a bloody massacre. Chiang Kai-shek, who had served as Sun Yat-sen's military advisor, led the massacre and took control of the Kuomintang after Sun's death in 1925.

During the Northern Expedition, Chiang and his troops dismantled the power of the Chinese warlords. Kingston references both the warlords and Communist rule in the chapter titled "White Tigers." By intertwining ancient Chinese mythology with modern Chinese history, she imagines herself as a female warrior avenging the injustices inflicted upon her family and country by the revolutionaries and Communists.

Style

Kingston's writing style garners both praise and criticism from literary experts. She blends fact with fiction—drawing from her own memories, her mother's "talk stories," and her vivid imagination—to depict the experience of growing up as a Chinese-American female. Critics who admire this approach particularly appreciate how she modernizes traditional myths and legends. However, this technique annoys some critics, especially those within the Asian American community. They argue that Kingston's reinterpretation of Chinese myths and legends diminishes their original intent. Additionally, these critics contend that her heavy reliance on imagination makes it challenging to categorize her work as either autobiography or fiction.

Structure

Besides her distinctive writing style, Kingston employs an unconventional structure in The Woman Warrior. The central theme revolves around a young Chinese girl growing up in America, torn between Chinese and American traditions. Kingston unfolds the drama of the girl's life through five separate stories, each depicting pivotal events in her maturation. These stories collectively illustrate how the girl shapes her identity through her interactions with various women in her life.

Point of View

Kingston's use of five distinct stories allows her to shift perspectives and narrate from different points of view. She tells four of the five stories from a first-person perspective. Through her own narrative voice, Kingston can express her views and recount events as she perceives them, addressing social and racial injustices. The one story told from a third-person perspective gives voice to her silent aunt, Moon Orchid. Unable to adapt to American life, Moon Orchid suffers from mental illness. Narrating Moon Orchid's story allows Kingston to honor her "displaced spirit."

Setting

The narrator grows up in Stockton, California, where she was born in 1940. The real-life events take place in California, while her imagined warrior life and her mother's "talk stories" are set in China. For instance, the tale of No-Name Aunt, the ghost aunt, occurs in China between 1924 and 1934. In the chapter "White Tigers," Kingston envisions herself as a woman warrior in ancient China. "Shaman" recounts Brave Orchid's life in China as a medical student and doctor before she immigrated to America in 1939.

Symbolism

Symbolism plays a crucial role in two of the five stories in The Woman Warrior. At the beginning of "Shaman," Brave Orchid is attending medical school after spending over a decade fulfilling her duties as a traditional Chinese wife and mother. When her classmates dare her to spend a night in a supposedly haunted dormitory room, she accepts the challenge. The following day, she recounts a fierce battle with the "Sitting Ghost." She warns her friends that the ghost still poses a threat and persuades them to help her banish it. Together, they perform a ritual that successfully expels the spirit. This act symbolizes Brave Orchid's struggle against the restrictive roles imposed on Chinese women.

In "At the Western Palace," Moon Orchid arrives from China to live with her sister in California. Moon Orchid embodies the traditional Chinese woman. She passively allows her sister to orchestrate a forced reunion with her Americanized husband and does not assert herself at all. The frail, gray-haired woman remains silent and eventually deteriorates in a mental asylum. Her name, Moon Orchid, symbolizes her lack of identity.

Figurative Language

Brave Orchid uses the term "ghost" in a figurative sense. The ghosts she most often refers to are not supernatural beings but Americans. She cautions her children about various "White Ghosts," such as Teacher Ghosts, Coach Ghosts, Taxi Ghosts, Police Ghosts, and the Newsboy Ghost. There are also Black Ghosts, but they are less feared by the children because they are more recognizable and cannot move as stealthily as White Ghosts. Additionally, Brave Orchid occasionally mentions Chinese ghosts, representing those who have brought shame upon themselves or their families, with No Name Aunt being an example.

While Brave Orchid warns her children about American ghosts, her intention is not to demean Americans. Instead, she struggles to accept her place in America and clings to her self-image as a respected Chinese woman.

Several reviewers have observed that A Woman Warrior blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction. To convey the essence of the present, Kingston frequently references the past through both historical events and myths, providing context and significance to contemporary experiences and emotions. The narrative often shifts unexpectedly from specific childhood memories to family stories of life in China or to legendary tales. Readers must piece together these various elements to understand how they interrelate and add meaning to each other.

Kingston's accomplishment lies not in merely retelling traditional myths, but in demonstrating how these old stories are adapted and reinvented to meet the emotional needs of immigrant generations facing the harsh realities of American life. The family stories and Chinese folk tales are devoid of nostalgia and often harsh, serving as metaphors that help the storytellers make sense of a new, unfamiliar world.

Kingston heavily draws on the "talkstory" tradition of her mother and Chinese elders, as well as her own experiences. She has mentioned elsewhere the challenge of translating her native dialect into American English: "For proper names, I created my own orthography. When I write dialogue for people speaking Chinese, I say the words to myself in Chinese and then write them in English, hoping to capture some of the sounds, rhythms, and power of Say Yup."

By relying extensively on the oral traditions of her American "village," Kingston achieves a Faulknerian sense of the past's immense power over daily life. She accomplishes this in part by discarding chronology as a unifying framework. For example, she goes off to college in chapter two, is born in chapter three, and starts kindergarten in chapter five. The sudden, vivid, and dramatic shifts between different realities—whether derived from fantasy and mythology or from everyday routine—give the narrative its intricate unity. It is as selective and meticulously organized as a traditional autobiography, such as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, yet possesses the lyrical power and imaginative detail of quasi-autobiographical novels like F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) or Willa Cather's My Antonia (1918).

As an autobiography, the book focuses on depicting the experiences of a single individual grappling with the challenges of growing up as a female Chinese-American in California during the 1950s and 1960s. The narrative vividly portrays the confusion, alienation, and pain of being a first-generation American, caught between American realities and the traditions, morals, myths, and legends of Chinese elders. The entire book seeks to answer a question posed early on: "when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese?" Kingston does not focus on typical biographical details such as her relationships with siblings, or her interests in books, friends, or fashion. Instead, through recounting stories about her mother and her mother's life in China, Kingston poignantly presents the powerful social forces that shaped her self-perception and worldview, a world where girls are called "maggots" and "slaves" and are compelled to endure their own humiliation.

The theme of oppression, particularly the oppression of females, runs like a thread throughout the book. The first chapter does not start with the author's birth and childhood but with her mother's story of a "no name aunt" who, back in China, committed suicide after disgracing the family by having an illegitimate child, leading to a village raid on the family compound. This was one of many stories meant to teach an adolescent girl about the dangers of straying from traditional paths. Embracing traditional ways meant accepting the widespread belief that girls are subhuman, that "when you raise girls you're raising children for strangers," or that "feeding girls is feeding cowbirds."

The sole escape from being a wife or a slave was to become a Woman Warrior, a female avenger like the legendary Fa Mu Lan who would rage across China to avenge her family and village. Nearly all of the first fifty pages are dedicated to recounting the exploits of this Chinese heroine who, with ideographs of injustice and revenge carved on her back, sets out to right the wrongs of an oppressive feudal system. The book itself stands as a testament to the power of a modern-day woman warrior who brings the ghosts of her childhood into the light and seeks to lay them to rest. After fifty years, the no name aunt finally has an avenger.

6th Century BC - 1911 AD: Chinese women face widespread confinement and oppression.

1912-1928: The last Chinese monarchy collapses. Sun Yat-sen and his successor Yuan Shikai attempt to reestablish the monarchy but face opposition from warlords.

1917-1921: The May Fourth Movement sparks a revolution in Chinese thought and culture. During this period, Marxism is introduced to China, and the Chinese Communist Party is founded with Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) as a key figure.

1921-1927: The Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang) and Russian Communists form an alliance.

1925: Chiang Kai-shek assumes military leadership of the Kuomintang.

1937: Japan invades China.

1937-1945: The Chinese Communist Party experiences rapid growth, with Mao emerging as a national leader. Under a new immigration law, 105 Chinese individuals per year are allowed to immigrate to the United States.

1949: The People's Republic of China is established, with Mao Zedong serving as chairman.

1965: The Chinese immigration quota is eliminated.

1966-1969: Mao leads the Chinese Cultural Revolution, aiming to eradicate liberal elements in Chinese society.

Today: The 1990 Immigration Act increases the quota for Chinese immigrants and reorganizes the preference system for entry.

Kingston has expressed that her aim to write about her community, defined more by a shared language than a geographic location, has posed unique challenges: "It affects the shape of what I am writing to have to make up words to describe things that have never been written in English before." She studied the works of Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein, who "had the goal of hearing the way people talk and creating the illusion of speech in writing." Additionally, she delved into Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928), "trying to understand how she works so well with time, the big expanses of time and the little moments."

Chinese literary classics, many of which her parents brought from China, also played a significant role in her development. For instance, the idea of revenge words carved on a warrior's back was drawn from a six-volume series about the adventures of Ngok Fei.

Several unforgettable scenes in The Woman Warrior were inspired not by literature but by the vibrant imagery of Chinese opera films Kingston watched as a child at the local Confucian Church. "They would mix cartoons with realistic scenes and real-life characters," she reminisces. Interestingly, critics like Edmund White of the Washington Post Book World describe Kingston's writing similarly, as "a picture of fabulous dragons sinuously coiling around real people."

Kingston narrates The Woman Warrior on an audio cassette titled Maxine Hong Kingston Reading The Woman Warrior [and] China Men (Excerpts Audio Cassette). The American Audio Prose Library released the tape in June 1987.

Sources

Henry Allen, review in Washington Post, June 26, 1980.

Mary Gordon, review in New York Times Book Review, April 23, 1989.

Paul Gray, review in Time, December 6, 1976.

Diane Johnson, review in the New York Review of Books, February 3, 1977.

Maxine Hong Kingston, "At the Western Palace," The Woman Warrior, Vintage International, 1989, p. 160.

William McPherson, review in Washington Post Book World, October 10, 1976.

Timothy Pfaff, review in New York Times Book Review, November 7, 1976.

Pin-chia Feng, "Maxine Hong Kingston," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 173: American Novelists Since World War II, Fifth Series, Gale Research, 1996, pp. 84-97.

Further Reading

Frank Chin, "Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake," in The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, edited by Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, Meridian, 1991, pp. 1-92.
Chin criticizes Kingston for distorting Chinese culture by modifying traditional Chinese myths and for writing an autobiography, which he claims is not an "authentically Chinese" genre.

Elisabeth Croll, Changing Identities of Chinese Women: Rhetoric, Experience, and Self-Perception in Twentieth-Century China, Zed Books, 1995.
This book explores the upbringing of Chinese daughters across generations before, during, and after the Revolution. Combining case studies with historical research, the author discusses growing up across gender and cultural boundaries.

Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
The author chronicles Chinese traditions from prehistory to modern times, emphasizing the arts, culture, economy, foreign relations, emigration, and politics. Noteworthy is the discussion on the societal treatment of women in China.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Women in Society," in Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia [CD-ROM], Grolier Interactive, Inc., 1998.
The author examines the low societal status of Chinese women up to the early twentieth century, highlighting their relationships with their husbands and in-laws, and detailing the impacts of their low status.

Yan Gao, The Art of Parody: Maxine Hong Kingston's Use of Chinese Sources (Many Voices: Ethnic Literatures of the Americas, Vol. 2), Peter Lang Publishing, 1996.
The author analyzes Kingston's utilization of Chinese sources in her novels, focusing on how her bicultural background enhances her unique perspectives on Chinese and American traditions.

Donn V. Hart, "Foot Binding," in Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia [CD-ROM], Grolier Interactive, Inc., 1998.
Hart provides a detailed description of the Chinese practice of foot binding, explaining both its purposes and the process involved.

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, "'Growing with Stories': Chinese American Identities, Textual Identities," in Teaching American Ethnic Literatures: Nineteen Essays, edited by John R. Maitino and David R. Peck, University of New Mexico Press, 1996, pp. 273-91.
Lim offers an insightful analysis of the themes and structure of Kingston's autobiography and discusses strategies for teaching the book.

Paul Mandelbaum, "Rising from the Ashes: A Profile of Maxine Hong Kingston," in Poets and Writers, Vol. 26, no. 3, May/June 1998, pp. 46-53.
This article explores Kingston's life and career, highlighting the 156-page manuscript she lost in a fire that destroyed her Oakland home. Mandelbaum commends Kingston for her ability to navigate "deep into the borderland that encompasses both fact and fantasy."

Paul Outka, "Publish or Perish: Food, Hunger, and Self-Construction in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 38, no. 3, Fall 1997, pp. 447-82.
Outka examines Kingston's quest for identity and its relationship to the theme of hunger in her book.

Tracy Robinson, "The Intersections of Gender, Class, Race, and Culture: On Seeing Clients Whole," in Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, Vol. 21, no. 1, January 1993, pp. 50-58.
This piece connects identity formation to the influences of race, culture, and class on individuals.

Malini Schueller, "Questioning Race and Gender Definitions: Dialogic Subversions in The Woman Warrior," in Criticism, Vol. 31, 1989, pp. 421-37.
Schueller applauds Kingston for her innovative approach to autobiography and for challenging simplistic definitions of gender and ethnic identity.

Sidonie Smith, "Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior: Filiality and Woman's Autobiographical Storytelling," in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, Rutgers University Press, 1997, pp. 1117-37.
Smith praises Kingston for illustrating the interplay between gender and genre in autobiography, calling The Woman Warrior "an autobiography about women's autobiographical storytelling."

Howard J. Wechsler, "History of China," in Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia [CD-ROM], Grolier Interactive, Inc., 1998.
Wechsler provides a comprehensive overview of Chinese history from ancient times to the present. Key discussions include the Nationalist Movement, the Chinese Communists, and the Kuomintang, which are particularly relevant to this novel.

Gayle Wurst, "Cultural Stereotypes and the Language of Identity: Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple," in Cross-Cultural Studies: American, Canadian, and European Literatures: 1945-1985, edited by Mirko Jurak, Filozofska Fakulteta (Yugoslavia), 1988, pp. 53-64.
Wurst compares Kingston's The Woman Warrior with Atwood's Lady Oracle and Walker's The Color Purple, noting that in all three books, the narrators aim to dismantle cultural stereotypes.