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. 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. ==Plot summary==

The book is divided into five interconnected chapters, which read like short stories. "No-Name Woman" In the first part of this chapter, the narrator is recounting how her mother once told her the story of the No-Name Woman. The chapter essentially opens as a vignette told from the mother's point of view. She tells the story of the No-Name Woman, her husband's deceased sister. The middle portion of this chapter is Kingston's retelling of the No-Name Woman Story. Kingston uses her own experiences with Chinese tradition and culture to substantiate alternate "versions" of the tale. At the end of "No-Name Woman", Kingston reflects on the importance of her mother's story. She concludes that the real lesson is not how No-Name Woman died, but rather, why she was forgotten. "White Tigers" In the first part of "White Tigers", Kingston recounts her mother's talk-story of Fa Mu Lan, a woman warrior who took her father's place in battle. Kingston reverts to talking about her life in America and compares it to the story of Fa Mu Lan. She cannot gather the courage to speak up against her racist boss, let alone save her people in China. In the end, Kingston decides that she and Fa Mu Lan are similar. "Shaman" Using her mother's old diplomas and photos from her years in China, Kingston recounts the story of her mother's life as a lady scholar. Brave Orchid, Kingston's mother, returns home after two years of study. Kingston was born during World War II and grew up with her mother's talk-stories. Her mother taught her that all white people around her were "ghosts". "At the Western Palace" "At the Western Palace" opens with Brave Orchid, her two children, and her niece at San Francisco International Airport. Brave Orchid is waiting for her sister, Moon Orchid, to arrive from Hong Kong. Moon Orchid is emigrating to the United States after being separated from her sister for 30 years. The sisters arrive back at Brave Orchid's house in the Valley. They are greeted by Brave Orchid's husband, who has aged significantly in Moon Orchid's eyes. Moon Orchid spends the summer in Brave Orchid's house. Brave Orchid, her oldest son, Moon Orchid, and Moon Orchid's daughter drive South to Los Angeles. They are on a mission to find Moon Orchid's husband. At the end of the chapter, Moon Orchid declines in mental health and is forced to return to live with Brave Orchid. "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" In this story, Kingston reveals that her mother cut the membrane under her tongue. Kingston despises a Chinese girl who is a year older than she is because she refuses to talk. One day, she finds herself alone with the girl in the lavatory. Kingston writes about other eccentric stories. After Kingston screams to her mother and father that she does not want to be set up with the developmentally disabled boy, she launches into a laundry list of things she is and is not going to do, regardless of her mother's opinion. In the final part, Kingston tells the story of Ts'ai Yen, a poet born in A.D. 175. ==Themes==

Necessity and extravagance In an essay about The Woman Warrior, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong writes about "the protagonist's struggle toward a balance between self-actualization and social responsibility... identified as 'Necessity' and 'Extravagance.'" ==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." ==See also==