The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is a book written by Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1976. The book blends autobiography with old Chinese folktales.
The Woman Warrior won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of TIME magazine's top nonfiction books of the 1970s.
thumb|Kingston in
Genre
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.
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.
Language and narrative voice
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. 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. 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.
Writing process
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. 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.
The original title of The Woman Warrior was Gold Mountain Stories. As Kingston stated 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."
Criticism
Since its publication in 1976, The Woman Warrior has maintained a "vexed reception history that both attests to its popularity and questions it." while the central concern is whether or not Kingston offers a faithful representation of Chinese and Chinese American culture. 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. 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." 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."