PEOPLE‟S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA 

MINISTRY OF HIGHER EDUCATION AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH  

UNIVERSITY OF MOHAMED BOUDIAF – M‟SILA 

                                                                                                                  

                                                                                       

 

 

 

FACULTY OF LETTERS AND FOREIGNN LANGUAGES             DOMAIN: FOREIGN LANGUAGES 

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH                                                           STREAM: ENGLISH LANGUAGE 

N°: ………………………...                                                     OPTION: LITERATURE AND CIVILIZATION  

 

 

Identity And Memory  In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The 

Woman Warrior 

 

Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the 

Requirements for the Master Degree 

Candidates:                                                                            Supervisor 

Wassila BOUGRARI                                                Miss : NASSIMA AMIROUCHE 

Souhila TOUATI 

 

Board of examiners 

 

Mrs. Nassima AMIROUCHE  University of M'sila Supervisor 

Ms. Imane CHERAIT University of M'sila Chairperson  

Mr.Mohamed GUFFI University of M'sila Examiner 

                                                            

Academic year: 2018-2019 



 
 

 

Dedication 

I dedicate this work: 

To my lovely FATHER and MOTHER who always fit my needs 

and requirements, 

To my beloved BROTHER “Chiboub”who supports me with his  

precious advices and continual support. He is always with me in 

sorrow and happiness,wiping my tears as I cry, and smiling with me 

as I am happy, 

To all my BROTHERS and SISTERS . 

To my Nieces and Nephews. 

To all my FAMILY MEMBERS. 

To all who are DEAR TO ME. 

To all my FRIENDS. 

 

TOUATI SOUHILA. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 
 

 

Dedication 

 

To my beloved parents whose love strengthens my will 

To my lovely brother and sisters 

To my niece, Talia 

To my aunts and uncles 

To my dearest, Ameur Hassiba, and Deboucha Sawsen 

To my soul mate Touati Souhila  

To all my friends with whom I shared the university life  

with its light and shadows. 

 

Bougrari  Wassila. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 
 

 

Acknowledgement 

First and foremost, we owe a debt of gratitude to Almighty ALLAH who enlightens 

our path, and gives us the strength to reach for the stars, and chase our dreams.  

We are sincerely grateful to our supervisor: Mrs. AMIROUCHE NASSIMA for her 

efforts, advice, and comments to achieve this work.  

We would like to express our appreciation to the board of examiners for accepting 

reading, and evaluating this research paper.  

Finally, to all the teachers and colleagues in English Department in Mohammed 

Boudiaf University of “M’sila”. 

 

  



 
 

 

Abstract 

Maxine Hong Kingston‟s The Woman Warrior, is  the memoirs of a Chinese American  

girl caught between two cultures, struggling to construct her identity. Through examining 

several factors such as ethnicity, nationality, immigration, silence, and discursive community, 

this thesis shows how these aspects influenced the creation of the writer„s identity as a 

Chinese immigrant in America. The intersection of these factors creates an individual identity 

for all characters. This analysis leads to the conclusion that, within the boundaries of the 

memoir, it is easier to be a child of Chinese immigrants in the USA than an immigrant 

yourself. The narrator eventually prospers as a Chinese American woman in the American 

society, despite the difficulties that she encountered in her life. Using the psychoanalytical 

theory, in analyzing the theme of constructing identity, this thesis is divided into two main 

chapters, the former presents a general overview about Asian American literature and ethnic 

and Chinese autobiography. While, the latter is dedicated to analyze the process of shaping 

identity and factors related it.  

Key Words: Woman, Silence, Talk-stories, Immigration, Oppression, Patriarchy, Tradition, 

Gender, Ethnicity. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 
 

 

Table of contents  

  

General Introduction………………………………………………………………. 1 

Chapter One: 

The Woman Warrior and the Rise of Chinese American 

Autobiography 
1. Asian American Literature……………………………………………………. 6 

2. Ethnic Autobiography……………………………………………………….... 21 

3. Chinese American Autobiography‟s Origins…………………………….… 25 

3.1 Chinese American Autobiography Predicament………………… 27 

4. Chinese American Immigrant Women„s Autobiographies………………….... 12 

5. The Woman Warrior as a Multicultural literature…………………………….. 17 

6. Kingston‟s The Woman Warrior in Context………………………………… 12 

Chapter Two: 

The Process of Shaping Identity in Maxine Hong Kingston‘s 

The Woman Warrior 

1. Ghosts‟ Language and Reconstruction of Identity……………..……………… 16 

2. The Question of Identity and Innovation of Selfhood………………................ 21 

3. The role of Memory in Shaping Identity……...………………………………. 23 

4. The Woman Warrior and its Discursive Community………….……………... 36 

5. Silence as a Symbol of Female Victimization………………………................ 41 

General Conclusion…………………….………………………………………….… 52 

Selected Bibliography…………………………………………………..…. 46 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



1 

 

 

General Introduction 

 

 

 

 

 

 



2 

From the moment the first Chinese immigrants entered the United States, around 1840, 

the Chinese were seen as different from other wealth-seekers. They were supposed to be 

“sojourners,” only temporary visitors, Ronald Takaki explains
1
.  This description, which may 

seem innocent, indicates a deep animosity towards the Chinese. They were initially invited to 

America to fill the temporary shortage of employment, but when shortages turned into surplus 

workers, they were no longer welcome. The mistrust among men of differing appearance, 

habits and exotic traditions has become discriminatory; Chinese immigrants have been 

accused of stealing US jobs, and law upon law was constructed to prevent the Chinese from 

settling in America
2
. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 put a stop to the free flow of 

Chinese immigration, and as the Chinese community at that point primarily consisted of men, 

the Chinatowns remained “bachelor societies”
3
. Of course, migrants tried to find opportunities 

in both law and US borders, but every newly discovered gap was blocked by new legislation. 

The position of the Chinese in America did not change until the civil rights movement of 

African Americans in the 1960sthat the position of the Chinese in America changed. In 

1965,immigration law put an end to immigration control based on the country of origin, and 

the Chinese finally managed to form families and feel at home. 

The turbulent history of the Chinese in America has left its mark on Chinese American 

literature. Shirley Geok-lin Lim shows that “Asian-American writing, from its earliest 

expressions [. . .], shows a strong concern with its immigrant history”
4
.This theme is present 

in the writings of all generations Asian Americans, albeit in different forms. Lim sketches a 

development in Asian American writing, in which early works tend to define Asian 

Americans in correspondence with the “dominant stereotypes of their racial history.” More 

                                                           
1
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: a History of Asian Americans, (New York:  

 Penguin, 1989), p. 10. 
2
 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: a History of Asian Americans, pp. 11-13. 

3
 Ibid.,p. 245. 

4
 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Twelve Asian American Writers In Search of Self-Definition.” MELUS Vol. 13, No. ½, 

(1986), p. 57.  



3 

recent works freely “construct the fiction of a memory that never took place”
5
. By writing 

without the hypothesis of realism, these writers slowly reduce t the expectations of  their 

ethnicity gives rise to, thus can take to full advantage of the possibilities that provide them 

with their dual backgrounds. A well-known example of the latter is Maxine Hong Kingston‟s 

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, first published in 1976. In 

herfirst appearance, Kingston painted her hero Maxine's attempts to create a sense of 

belonging to any of the unknowns. Thus,  stripping China of its immigrant parents, or the 

concrete American world so far incomprehensible outside the family home. The Woman 

Warrior crosses borders in several ways: Kingston blends reality and fiction, memory and 

myth, and Chinese and American culture in a hybrid tale of maturation.  

Maxine Hong Kingston Autobiography, the Woman warrior deconstructs the genre of 

the autobiography and, in doing so, associated Americans ideologies; the author finds an 

identity by fictionalizing herself. 

To portray her masterpiece –the woman warrior- Kingston uses a combination between 

her imagination and talk stories her mom tells to construct her own identity, she was looking 

for a place of refuge in which she can seek an authentic self to move from a  to an 

independent adult one received identity. 

The main research question that this study aims to solve is how Maxine Hong Kingston 

depicts a young girl‟s tough search for self-identity through analyzing the role of different 

factors in shaping her identity, to what extent did Maxine Hong Kingston succeeded in 

shaping her own identity? This study will equally deal with the following sub-questions: How 

did Kingston„s Memoir explored the relationship between memory and identity? What is the 

role of stories Kingston heard as a child play in her life? 

                                                           
5
 Shirley Geok-lim Lom, “Twelve Asian American Writers In Search of  Self-Definition.”, p. 74. 



4 

The woman warrior is often praised because of its creative form, Kingston‟s work 

embraced as a classic by both instructors and students of University, ranging from 

Comparative Literature, Sociology, Rhetoric, History, political Science, to ethnic studies. 

The identification of the book as an autobiography gives “ the woman warrior” the 

appearance of being  an actual representation of Asian-American experience in the broader  

public sphere , thus the creative style of writing helps Western readers lack basic knowledge 

about Chinese culture and traditions to get clear idea about Chinese heritage brought with the 

first generation immigrants to USA. 

This research can be helpful because it allows readers to better understand 

psychoanalytical theory in one hand and motivate them to know more about Chinese culture 

and difficulties faced by Chinese women in imposing themselves within racist and sexism 

society. 

According to Gloria Chun, embraced as a classic by both instructors and students of 

university departments “ranging from Comparative Literature, Sociology, Anthropology, 

Rhetoric, History, Political Science, to Ethnic Studies.”
6
 However, as Sau-ling Cynthia Wong 

points out, “The Woman Warrior, by its very commercial success and its popularity with the 

literary establishment and the mainstream audience, seems to have become ideologically 

suspect to some Asian-American critics”
7
. Chun‟s recognition that Kingston is praised by 

many is thus not automatically positive. She is only one of the many critics who are extremely 

displeased by Kingston‟s success, in particular by the fact that the imaginative The Woman 

Warrior has been published under the label “autobiography.” What Chun really objects to is, 

of course, not that Kingston evades the restrictions of a genre, but that identifying this book as 

                                                           
6
Gloria Chun, “The High Note of the Barbarian Reed Pipe: Maxine Hong Kingston.” Journal of  Ethnic Studies 

Vol.  19, No. 3, (1991), p. 85.  
7
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “Necessity and Extravagance in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman  Warrior: Art 

and the Ethnic Experience.” MELUS  Vol, 15, No. 1 (1988), p.3.  



5 

an autobiography gives “The Woman Warrior the appearance of being an actual 

representation of Asian American experience in the broader public sphere”
8
Chun, also a 

Chinese American, protests Kingston‟s creative style of writing because most Western readers 

lack basic knowledge about Chinese culture and tradition and will, because The Woman 

Warrior is presented as an Autobiography, easily accept Kingston‟s fantastic vision as a 

representation of the experience of all Chinese-Americans
9
. Because Kingston also shows 

some of the less-appealing sides of Chinese American life, Chun feels misrepresented. 

This dissertation will be broken down into two main chapters ,the first one will be 

devoted to the socio historical background of the book and the study of “ Woman Warrior” as 

a multicultural literature to give readers a background about Chinese Culture , in addition to 

an introduction to  Chinese American  autobiographies since the writer was narrating  her own 

experiences .The second chapter ,the analytical part, will be  allotted to a general literary 

analysis ,in which we shed the light on identity and memory, and how these terms have been 

explored in the Memoir ,in addition to the interpretation of silence  and voice as a helping 

factures in the way of shaping an identity. 

For the reason that the research is going to present an analytical assessment of Maxine 

Hong Kingston “woman warrior” the study will use a Psychoanalytic Approach. In the 

lightof this theory, the study aims broadly at showing how Maxine Hong Kingston uses her 

text as an effective Paradigm to her social experiences. By casting the light on psychoanalytic 

features that are very close to this study. It will try to elucidate the psychological variables 

within Maxine Hong Kingston; the leading character of the story relying on the works of 

Sigmund Freud including the Unconscious mind, Narcissism, and Defense Mechanisms. This 

work is trying to reveal the psychological motives that pushed Kingston to his way of 

                                                           
8
 Gloria Chun, “The High Note of the Barbarian Reed Pipe: Maxine Hong Kingston,” p. 86. 

9
 Ibid, p. 90. 



6 

understanding the notion of successes well as the problems that she was confronting with the 

society and traditions. 

This thesis aims to study Maxine Hong Kingston “The woman Warrior” to examine 

how she depicted Chinese culture, and analyze the writer‟s character by picking out what 

factors influenced her identity. Moreover, it investigates, the relationship between memory 

and identity, and significant role of memory in shaping identity. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



7 

 

 

Chapter One: 

The Woman Warrior and the Rise of Chinese 

American Autobiography 

 

  



8 

1. Asian American Literature 

Asian- American literature was formulated in the late 1960s. It is defined as works by 

people of Asian descent who were either born in or who have migrated to North America.
10

 It 

includes Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, and Philippine American, literature.
11

 

In the writings of Asian Americans “the immigrant experience looms large” with issues 

related to “marginality and life on the border (…) biculturalism and language, and decisions 

about identity.”
12

As a matter of fact, Immigrants from Asia to the United States came in large 

numbers from the 1850s. The gold rush attracted thousands of people from China, who 

arrived in California as cheap workers to work in the mining and agricultural industries and 

complete the intercontinental railway.
13

Thus, their writings are the product of specific 

historical contexts. Indeed, the largest Asian immigrant group was the Chinese. Hence, the 

painful Chinese experiences range from the horrors of the wars and revolutions to the control 

of the Communists.
14

 

It is common for Asian American critics to describe the historical development of Asian 

American literature in „periods‟ or, alternatively, „modes‟ and „patterns‟.9 These latter 

alternatives affect the developmental understanding of literature and cultural history, 

generally understood as the transition from simplicity and naiveté to complexity and evolution 

like ultimately compatible with both Enlightenment and the national narrative 

Bildungsroman.
15

 

                                                           
10

King-Kog Cheung, An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature (Cambridge: University Press, 

1997), p.1. 
11

Faten Houioui, “Mapping the Traumatized Subject in Chinese American Literature,”IOSR Journal Of 

Humanities And Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) Vol. 22, No. 5, (May, 2019), p. 119. 
12

 E.D Huntley, Amy Tan a Critical Companion (U S A: Greenwood Press, 1998), p.19. 
13

Seiwoong Oh, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ASIAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE (New York: Facts of File, 2007), p. 

ix.  
14

Faten Houioui, “Mapping the Traumatized Subject in Chinese American Literature,” p. 119. 
15

Bella Adams, Asian American Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2008), p. 7. 



9 

Moreover, lot of Asian American writings has been published in the form of 

autobiography, biography, or Bildungsroman. The intergenerational gaps and cultural 

differences expressed by the descendants of the immigrant generation have to some extent 

been provided with the subject of "ethnic" literature. The personal struggle of ethnic / racial 

minorities to find their identity in the United States, along with the stories of "success" 

envisaged, was also seen as a "typical minority" speech. 

Although many Asians born in the United States have been socially assimilated and 

culturally assimilated to American culture and are legally American citizens, most of the 

literary works presented by Asian American writers have been understood within our 

hierarchical binaries, including Self / Other, First World, Third World, and familiar / alien.
16

 

 Asian American critics have advanced critical procedures or written about Asian 

American literature that will ensure critical attention, beyond cultures, over the coming epoch. 

Prior to Elaine H. Kim‟s Asian-American Literature: Introduction to Literature and Social 

Context (1982), those hunting for a critical experience in Asian-American literature relied 

heavily on introductions or anthologies. 

By the early 1990s, studies began to emerge, such as, Cynthia Wong's Reading Asian 

American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (1993), that studied the role of food, 

and the subject of a doppelganger as a certain ethnic structure, beside to the themes of 

movement and mobility. Wong‟s book was interesting, as it presented a multicultural literary 

study that reshaped the image, legends and themes, even those resonated with the West, in 

ways that identified the Asian American identity.  The Introduction to this work provides a 

review of literature as far as most of the curricula and selections include -Asian American 

                                                           
16

 Youngsuk Chae, Politicizing Asian American Literature (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 13. 



10 

writing. At the present time, they are studied and evaluated wherever American literature is 

taught. 
17

 

The most famous of them is Aiieeeee !, Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), a 

joint venture of four Asian Americans Frank Chen, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusau Inad,  

and Shun Hsu Wong.
18

A group of successful and well-acclaimed authors, such as Maxine 

Hong Kingston, Frank Chen, Henry Hwang and Amy Tan, established the literary scene in the 

1970s and 1980s, Chinese-American literature as an independent sub-branch of American 

law. 

 Despite its "discovery" in the 1970s, Chinese-American literature back to the early 

years of Chinese immigration to the United States, with constructions such as“Gold 

Mountai19. 

In 1990 and beyond, Asian American literature, and Chinese-American literature in 

particular, became increasingly widespread, and new writers began appearing always, and 

new anthologies were published.
20

 

Although the number of Chinese women living in America was small until the 1950s, 

the early female writers were nonetheless more than men. According to Ling, women were 

more "original" in their writings, and were basically charged with forming Chinese-American 

literary traditions with their own distinctive voice. He said:“Without doubt, the female sex is a 

liability in any patriarchy, and the ethnic minority female is triply vulnerable: as Chinese in 

                                                           
17

 Jan Piliditch, “Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits by Shirley Geok-lin Lim; John 

Blair Gamber; Stephen Hong Sohn; Gina Valentino,” Australasian Journal of American Studies Vol. 25, No. 2, 

(December, 2007), p. 106. 
18

E.D Huntley, Maxine Hong Kingston:  A Critical Companion (Westport: Greenwood, 2000), p. 55. 
19

 Hom M.K. 1992 (1987). Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown. 

[online]. Berkeley Oxford: University of California Presssongs, composed of poems written in Cantonese  by 

Chinese Migrantworkers. 
20

S Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 1993), p. 3. 



11 

an Euro-American world, as a woman in a Chinese man‟s world, as a Chinese woman in a 

white man‟s world.”
21

 

 Edith Eaton (1865-1914) published as Sui Sin Far, Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954) as 

Onoto Watanna. After the Eaton sisters, there were a lot of women who were writing fictional 

stories about their experiences in both China and the United States. The first authors were not 

representatives of model Chinese immigrants who belong to the working class and had no 

time to educate or to write. 
22

 

 This is not to say that Chinese American men would not have not significantly 

contributed to the tradition. In addition to novels and non-fiction, Chinese American men 

authors have often specialized in drama. Important male authors are e.g, novelist Louis Chu 

(1915-1970), playwright, novelist, and critic Frank Chin (1940- ), and playwright Henry 

Hwang (1957) 

 

What explains the common characteristics in Chinese American works is their cultural 

situation. Despite their relatively distinguished position, the authors deal with the plight of all 

oppressed ethnic groups, and describe the difficulties of being a Chinese in the United States, 

as Mai-Mai Sze put it, “We‟re cause people, whether we like it or not.” 
23

Also, a “between-

world consciousness” has been a key feature in Chinese American writing from the 

beginning. 
24

Edith Eaton, for example, described her life in 1909 as a precarious between-

worlds-position between China and America. She notes: 

After all I have no nationality and am not anxious to claim any. Individuality is more 

thannationality […] I give my right hand to the Occidentals and my left hand to the 

                                                           
21

A. Ling, Between worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (New York: Pergamon Press, 1990), p. 15. 
22

Ibid., p. 13. 
23

Ibid., p.14. 
24

Ibid., pp. 108-120. 



12 

Orientals,hoping that between them they will not utterly destroy the insignificant 

„connecting link.
25

 

2. Ethnic Autobiography: 

"First, it may be useful to define what ethnic autobiographiy is: this term  refers to 

immigrant autobiography, exile, autobiography,  second-generation autobiography ,ethnics 

autobiography bicultural autobiography, and multicultural autobiography; that is, all life 

narratives written by ethnic subjects who have migrated  to another country or were born by 

immigrants and who live in a society  where they reprent minority and have to struggle to 

combine their cultural heritage with that of the host country.
26

 Autobiographies have always 

been common among immigrants who have found themselves in difficult and confusing 

situations, feeling the need to express their feelings and tell them about their life experiences. 

In some ways, autobiographical forms have represented to them a sort of therapy
27

. Moreover, 

by telling their story, the ethnic subject implicitly claims the right to a voice and self-

definition. In fact, historically self-representation of ethnic citizens and oppressed minorities 

has been rejected; as Michel Foucault argues, it is those in power who can impose the 

knowledge of oppressed people, that is, the way society defines and represents them. Thus, 

the autobiography becomes a counter-discourse in which persecuted people “appropriate a 

colonizer‟s (or dominant culture‟s) discursive models, thereby „transculturating‟ them into 

indigenous idioms and producing hybrid forms of collectivized life-narrative” 
28

.Therefore, 

autobiography is also a means of self-affirmation and self-representation in a society whose 

ethnic knowledge relies on stereotypes, most of which are negative. 

                                                           
25

 Sui Sin Far 1909, cited in A. Ling, Between worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (New York: 

Pergamon Press, 1990), p. 32. 
26

 Grazia Michelli, Asian American (S) wordswomen, (Universtia degli Studi di Padova, Diapartimento di Studi 

Linguistici e Letterari 2015_2016), p. 33 
27

Jerzy Durczak, Selves between cultures : Contemporary American bicultural autobiography 

(Lublin:Unywersyter Marii Curie Sklodowskiej,1994),  p.23. 
28

Sidonie Smith and Watson Julia, Reading autobiography: A guide for interpreting life narratives (Minneapolis: 

University of Minneasota Press, 2001) p, 185. 

 



13 

In the United States, ethnicity has generated debate and struggle. Fundamentally 

controversies center on meanings of the word, ethnicity, and the relationships between ethnic 

and non-ethnic implied by the definitions. Distinctions between race and ethnicity compound 

the debate. Thus, meanings associated with ethnicity carry a heavy burden, quite beyond that 

of mere linguistic debate, for they suggest past and present relationships between and among 

ethnic groups. Ultimately, issues revolve around the meaning of American identity, meanings 

that tend to fall into four brief propositions: 1) all Americans are ethnic; 2) people of color are 

ethnics; 3) ethnics are cultural groups, distinct from racial minorities; 4) ethnic groups 

(whether cultural or racial) must be seen historically and in structures of power. At any given 

time all definitions might circulate simultaneously; therefore, even the meaning of ethnicity 

emerges in a contested terrain. Because these meanings have implications for our memory of 

the past, as well as the possibilities for present and future social relations, these definitions 

resonate with the politics of cultural representation, and it becomes meaningful to elaborate 

on them.
29

 

Ethnic autobiographies are still on the sidelines of American literary criticism. What 

Cynthia Sau-ling Wong has asserted for almost two decades is still true: "Just as immigrants 

are often seen as less than fully American, immigrant autobiography has been customarily 

assigned to the peripheries of American autobiographical scholarship". Surprisingly, little 

attention has been paid to this type given the centrality of immigrant experience in American 

history.
30

 

William Boelhower‟s Autobiography of Immigrant in the United States: Four Versions 

of th eItalian-American Self (1982) is is the only book length study devoted to the 

                                                           
29

Betty Ann Bergland, “Representing Ethnicity in Autobiography: Narratives of Opposition” The Yearbook of 

English Studies, Vol. 24, Ethnicity and Representation in American Literature, 1994), pp, 67-93. 
30

Sau-Ling Cynthia,” Immigrant autobiography: Some questions of definition and approach,” in Sidonie Smith 

& Julia Watson (eds), Women autobiography, theory: A reader (Madisone: University of Wisconsin Press) pp, 

299-315. 



14 

autobiography of immigrants that provides a theory capable of describing its features. 

Boelhower
31

 defines a sort of "macrotext" or "single story" that can be found in all 

biographies of migrants; although he warns, "in no way does the macro-text exhaust the 

individual variants (the microtext) pertaining to it”
32

. According to this scheme or model, the 

migrants' experience is described in three stages: 

• "anticipation" ("the reality of the old world versus the ideal new world"); 

• "Contact" ("ideal for the new world vs. the reality of the New World"); 

• "Contrast" ("Old World vs. New World Reality"). 

Therefore, starting with the "Dreaming anticipation" phase of the New World, the 

immigrant journeys from the Old World to the New World; the immigrant faces a series of 

connections and contradictions that are at the heart of the "transformation" process or, more 

specifically, the "Americanization". The immigrant then recognizes the gap between the 

"ideal of the new world" and "the contemporary reality of the new world" and has to balance 

two cultures ("present and future culture and memory culture") into one model. The central 

stage is the “dream anticipation” phase, because this is what drives the individual to migrate 

from the ancient world to a new, mythical world. 

 

                                                           
31

 William Boelhower, Immigrant autobiography in the United States: Four versions of the Italian American Self 

(Verona: Essedue Edzioni, 1982), pp. 25-52. 
32

William Boelhower, Immigrant autobiography in the United States: Four versions of the Italian American Self, 

p. 31. 
 



15 

Figure 1: the immigrant autobiographical model.
33

 

 

Wong discovered the limits of this pattern which, she says, cannot be applied to all 

migrant autobiographies, especially those written by people from the East. First, as 

Boelhower
34

 asserts, the language used in the autobiography selected as examples supports his 

theory is very scriptural: the New World is referred to as the lost Eden, the Lost Golden Age, 

the New Jerusalem, or the city on a plateau. As Wong asserts, "These are European-origin 

fictions. For those coming from the real Orient it would be impossible to think of America as 

„a type of fabulous new Orient‟”.  In fact, Boelhower's study concentrates on a restrictive set 

of European immigrants' Jewish-American tradition. The biography of Chinese American, in 

this case, deviates significantly from Boelhower‟s model.  

The "anticipation" is very small, the "connection" to the "virtuous rules" of the 

Americans and its consequences are difficult to portray, and cultural "contrast" is either not 

drawn or painted more to enlighten Anglo readers instead of drawing a map of America for 

the hero. Most of the narrative is dedicated to the life of the protagonist before immigration in 

China. 
35

 

Furthermore, Wong sees a realistic attitude behind her grandparents' decision to 

immigrate to America, which is different from the "dream anticipation" that Boelhower 

referred to. She also believes that Boelhower has played down the importance of the public's 

role in making the autobiographies of immigrants: often the Chinese-American 

autobiographies were interested in what Anglo-readers liked to read. As Wong explained 

“these texts are subtly „sponsored‟; certainly they are not as self-authorized and inward-

                                                           
33

Ibid., p.35. 
34

Ibid., p.33. 
35

William Boelhower, Immigrant autobiography in the United States: Four versions of the Italian American Self, 

p. 304. 



16 

looking as we would be led to believe by Bellower‟s theory”.
36

 Therefore, an autobiography 

may be something different from the expression of individual negotiation about cultural 

forces. Finally, a distinction is made between autobiographies of immigrants and second-

generation autobiography or American-born autobiographies, because there are significant 

differences between the first and second generation ethnologies. This is another aspect 

Boelhower has challenged by bringing together different generations in a consistent model of 

immigrant experience. Thus, based on Wong's view, we shall also avoid using the term 

"immigrant autobiographies" to refer to the work analyzed here because it is written by an 

American-born book and not by immigrants. 

The term "immigrant autobiographies" used by Boelhower is not particularly popular 

among autobiography critics. Most tend to... (Employ the term) „Ethnic‟, however, tied even 

more questions than the term "immigrant." The chief specialist in the field of ethnic literature, 

Werner Sollors, admits that the tough the term "ethnic" is certainly a better term than, for 

example, “minority”, it is often „used confusingly‟. … Stating precisely what ethnic literature 

is might be difficult, since the term" ethnic "has never been satisfactorily defined ... Ethnic 

literature is not a uniform phenomenon.”
37

 

However, Durczak believes that there is a common feature in ethnic autobiographies 

which he calls "bicultural quality" 
38

 because their heroes are always torn between two 

cultures; for this reason, he excludes the term "immigrant" and "ethnic" and employs the term 

“bicultural”. "According to Thomas Couser, the term „bicultural biography‟ can be applied to 

those texts that" recount the lives that have arisen in distinct subcultures, but have not ended 

there. "" 
39

. In Durczak's view, interest in ethnic autobiographies increased as a result of 

                                                           
36

Ibid., p.307. 
37

Jerzy Durczak, Selves between cultures: Contemporary American bicultural autobiography, p. 19. 
38

Ibid., p. 20. 
39

Ibid., p. 21. 



17 

recognition after World War II of immigration as an essential part of American experience, 

the emphasis given to ethnicity during the 1960s and 1970s. 

Ethnic autobiographies offer a people's history of the United States people telling their 

story, we imagine, with greater justice and accuracy than have been shown in stories told by 

those in power. They represent collective narratives and histories of struggle and opposition - 

to slavery, conquest, occupation, discrimination, ongoing racism, and injustice. Because 

ethnic autobiographies point to the multicultural complexity of the United States, they 

illuminate the richness and complexity of that culture - the tragedies and injustices as well as 

the resist.
40

 

3. Chinese American Autobiography’s Origins: 

Norton's American biography discusses only one Chinese American work: The Woman 

Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston. What is 

the meaning of tracking the "assets" that led to this work? Kingston acknowledges Jade Snow 

Wong‟s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950)
41

, but literary historians were interested in recovering 

a longer tradition cite "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian" (1909) by Sui Sin 

Far née Edith Maude Eaton. According to their view, Sui Sin Far is "the foremother to the 

women writers of Chinese ancestry.”
42

We can, of course, look for more distant origins in 

history, considering the first book published by a Chinese-American in English, When I Was a 

Boy in China (1887) by Yan Phou Lee, or even "perhaps the oldest book by a Chinese person 

in the United States”, a friendship album prepared by Wu Lan in 1824
43

. We may wonder 

                                                           
40

 Betty Ann Bergland, Representing Ethnicity in Autobiography: Narratives of Opposition, pp. 67-93. 
41

 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “ The Tradition of Chinese American Women‟s Life Stories: Thematics of Race and 

Gender in Jade Snow Wong‟s  Fifth Chinese Daughte rand Maxine Hong Kingston‟s  The Woman Warrior,” in  

American Women‟s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory , ed. Margo Culley ( Madison :  University of 

Wisconsin Press ,  1992 ),  p. 256. 
42 Annette White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 1995), 

p. 6. 
43 Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Copying and Conversion: An 1824 Friendship Album from „a Chinese Youth,‟”   American 

Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 4, (2007), pp. 301–39. 



18 

what the benefit would be. Certainly, a mere definition of early history reinforces many 

important ideas - that Chinese-American literature did not suddenly explode into the scene in 

the late 20
th

 century, when Chinese immigrants had come to the United States since at least 

the early nineteenth century and that their descendants had contributed Culture and society 

since then. In addition, the legacy of the literary heritage can enhance the pride of the long-

excluded population as a "yellow peril" and has only recently been observed, albeit 

problematic, as a typical minority
44

. 

Without the distinction of telling one story over another, whereas also admitting that we 

can never completely suspend the biases of our present age, it would be useful to think of 

echoes of contemporary Chinese-American autobiographical works and those written during 

the nineteenth and early twentieth century.  In addition to the relatively famous early works of 

Yan Phou Lee, Yung Wing and Sui Sin Far, we can determine a less-known "lifelet" from Lee 

Chew, "reminiscenes" by Huie Kin, and - if we expand our concepts of what is 

autobiography"- a number of provisional texts collected in Chinese-American Voices: From 

the Gold Rush to the Present (2006), edited by Judy Young, Gordon H. Chang, and Mark Lai. 

Taken together, these works are not inherent in the sense that they provide models that 

directly inflate existing writers. Instead, they are origins in the sense of being early writings 

whose purposes, desires and cultures are different from subsequent writings. Like many 

authors today, the early writers often found that the only way to get into mainstream discourse 

was by positioning themselves as cultural representatives; however some take the opportunity 

to assert themselves as artists and political agents, while also negotiating new ways to 

understand China as a nation or Chinese Americans as a group. Others continue to benefit 

                                                           
44 K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan, eds., Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the 

Exclusion Era (Philadelphia:  T emple University Press, 1 998), pp.77_82. 

Yuko Kawai, “Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril ,”  HowardJournal 

of Communications Vol.16, No.  2,  (2005), pp. 109–30. 

 



19 

from public acceptance of the autobiographical genre to achieve different aesthetic and 

ideological goals.  

3.1 The Chinese-American Autobiography Predicament 

Although more than a hundred years have passed and so much has changed, some of the 

conditions for literary production and reception of Chinese-American writers are still 

tenaciously consistent. The most important of which is the market's tendency to interpret their 

work as autobiography, whether it is meant to be or not. While some writers have certainly 

succeeded in other types, many are known primarily for writings that are believed to be the 

most personal. Marilyn Chen is known for How I Got That Name (1994), and Amy Tan still 

has to distinguish herself from the hero of her famous novel The Joy Luck Club (1989)
45

. 

Even Kingston, which continued to publish novels and other poems, is still known as The 

Woman Warrior, a work of the type marketed by the publisher as autobiography, considered 

to be "mildly deceptive."
46

 

Complications arise, of course, from the fact that autobiography is a slippery genre. 

While some agree with the traditional concept of autobiography as non-fiction, usually a 

"retrospective narrative of a real person in relation to its existence," others understand 

autobiography as a kind of signal, because the formation of "memory" or "experience" into 

the language necessarily introduces elements of choice and invention.
47

 Certainly, the Chinese 

American autobiography includes more and more traditional works“. 

                                                           
45

 Amy Tan, “Required Reading and Other Dangerous Subjects,” Threepenny Review Vol. 67 (1996), pp. 5 – 9. 
46

 Kingston quoted in Youngsuk Chae, Politicizing Asian American Literature: towards a Critical 

Multiculturalism (New York:  Routledg, 2008), p.46. 
47

Phillippe Lejeune, “ The Autobiographical Pact, ” in  On Autobiography , ed. Paul John  Eakin and trans. 

Katherine Leary ( Minneapolis :  University of Minnesota Press , 1989 ), 4. Frank Kermode, “Memory and 

Autobiography”Raritan Vol. 15, No.  1 (1995 ), p. 36 



20 

Is it any surprise that autobiography was and still is the dominant discourse through 

which the Asian enters the national consciousness,” David Shih asks rhetorically
48

. The 

reason why it is not a surprise has to do with three kinds of desire: the desire for a wider 

audience seeking to know China through the original, perceived informants; a narrower, often 

academic, desire to restore what it means to be a Chinese American through these sources The 

author's desire to participate in cultural dialogues about their identities as well as broad-based 

themes. Because of the desire for "authentic" knowledge of others, individual narratives are 

often understood as culturally representative. Maxine Hong Kong believes "someday when a 

great body of Chinese American writing becomes published and known . . . readers will no 

longer have to put such a burden on each book that comes out."
49

But for a long time now, this 

expectation that ethnic writers represented their group was an honor and a burden. On the one 

hand, such an expectation gives the individual a potentially strong opportunity to intervene on 

behalf of his / her culture or community. On the other hand, it can limit the freedom of 

expression of the individual writer. Indeed, his/her association of expectations and desires 

creates a great dilemma for Chinese-American autobiographers, as well as other ethnically-

defined authors.  

  At one time, it seems that the book has given them the opportunity to intervene, but they 

face the inevitability of imperative. For each Stuart Hall encourages authors to "constitute... 

new kinds of subjects," there is Frank Chin waiting to judge their efforts as "real" or "fake."
50

 

Based on a number of factors, this opportunity / imperative can be experienced as an honor 

                                                           
48

David Shih, “The Seduction of Origins: Sui Sin Far and the Race for Tradition,” in Form and Transformation 

in Asian American Literature, ed. Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 

2005), p. 68. 
49

Maxine Hong Kingston, “Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers,” inAsian and American Writers in 

Dialogue: New Cultural Identities,” ed. Guy Amirthanayagam (L ondon: M acmillan, 982), 1 6 3. For an 

excellent discussion of this dilemma, see Deborah W oo, “M axine Hong Kingston: The Ethnic Writer and the 

Burden of Authenticity,”Amerasia 16. 1 (1990), pp. 173 – 200. 
50

Stuart Hall, “ Cultural Identity and Diaspora, ” in  Identity: Community, Culture, Difference , ed. Jonathan 

Rutherford ( London :  Lawrence , 1990 ),  236–7; 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, ed. Jeffrey Paul Chan et al. (New York:  Meridian, 1991), pp 1 – 92. 



21 

and a burden, often the same time. Rey Chow raises the intriguing issue that Asian-American 

writers, who do not see themselves influenced by the dominant American culture around 

them, should build and stare at images for themselves, and then participate in a healthy 

narcissism. 

 In the book "Secrets of Ethnic Abjection," Chow describes the problem as "lost or 

wounded narcissism". While individuals from the dominant group, according to their reading 

of Freud, go through a narcissistic phase and usually move after it, Asian Americans do not 

face narcissism in the first place, as a result of “the lack of proper societal representation, the 

absence of societal approval.”In light of this theory, Asian American autobiographical writing 

is perhaps not simply a straightforward account about oneself but more a symptomatic attempt 

to (re)gain access to a trans-individual narcissism – to grope for a „self-regard‟ that has not yet 

existed.”
51

 

At the same time, the attempt to construct such images is always caught in the trap of 

coercive mimeticism, another concept of Rey Chow‟s theory, which Paul Lai described as 

“the incessant and necessary performing of an ethnic self for a mainstream audience as well as 

one‟s ethnic group.”
52

" At the same time, they are free to communicate with the languages, 

letters and species they have at their disposal, while they are also bound by the limits of those 

languages, speeches and species as well as the expectations that their audiences place on 

them. Regardless, authors continue to write, knowing that silence, too, can be read and poorly 

read. These tensions together define the favorable and pp. disturbing conditions faced by 

American authors of ethnic origin. 

This impasse is affecting virtually all Chinese-American writers who are trying to 

address a wide audience of English learners, perhaps starting with Yan Phou Lee, and author 

of "When I was a Boy in China." This book appeared as part of the “Children of Other Lands 

                                                           
51

Rey Chow, “The S: Race, Panic, and Memory of Migration, ed. Meaghan Morris and Brett de Bary (Hong 

Kong:  Hong Kong University Press, 2011), pp. 64–6. 
52

Chow,Rey. ”Secrets of Ethnic Abjection,” in  Traces 2 Vol. 2,(2001). 



22 

Series” published by D. Lothrop This book, for the first time in a century, appealed for their 

belief in the power of self-writing or "self- culture-writing."
53

 It takes both honor and burden 

to represent his hometown. The public's expectations of his day enabled him to serve as an 

"ambassador of goodwill," as Elaine Kim explained; but like any ambassador, he should be 

careful not to stop his audience.
54

With this in mind, Lee subtly exploits the genre of auto 

ethnography to “intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding,” which was crucial in the 

mid-1880s.
55

  

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which restricts the immigration of most Chinese, 

already in the United States to apply for naturalized citizenship, initially with a ten-year 

expiration date. Consequently, Congress was discussing its renewal during the time that Lee's 

work appeared. With little access to the courts and political remedies, some Chinese 

Americans have turned to printed culture to make the case "the Chinese must stay”, Lee 

said.
56

To this end, Lee‟s autobiographies simultaneously try to satisfy readers' desire for 

alienation and to explain that, despite cultural differences, the Chinese deserve homogenous 

citizenship like any other immigrants. 

Publishing “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” by Sui Sin Far, on an 

insight into the nature of the autobiography of a multi-ethnic author. Rey Chow says it is for a 

different, if not impossible, community for Chinese Americans to find "appropriate cultural" 

parts of themselves in the dominant American culture. What is the amount of Devi worship 

that must be for Sui Sin Far, the daughter of a Chinese mother and an English father? Sui Sin 

                                                           
53

Paul Lai, “ Autoethnography Otherwise, ” in Asian Canadian Writing beyond Autoethnography , ed. Eleanor 

Ty and Christi Verduy ( Waterloo, ON :  Wilfrid Laurier University Press , 2008 ),p  60. 
54

Hertha Wong, Sending My Heart Back across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American 

Autobiography (New York:  Oxford University Press ,  1992 ),  6. On turn-ofthe-century regard for 

autoethnography, see DominikaFerens, “Winnifred Eaton/ OnotoWatanna: Establishing Ethnographic 

Authority,” in Zhou and Najmi,  Form and Transformation ,p. 43 
55

Elaine Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context 

(Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 1982), p. 24. 
56

Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession Vol. 91 (1991), p. 35. 



23 

Far‟s thesis is "grappling with remarkable skill and admiration for self-esteem" that did not 

exist in the late nineteenth century.
57

  

 For example, while traveling as a European American in a Midwest city, Sui Sin Far 

reveals herself on her way through a racist conversation “the Chinese people may have no 

souls, no expression on their faces, be altogether beyond the pale of civilization, but whatever 

they are, I want you to understand that I am – I am a Chinese.”
58

So, the Chinese and Chinese 

Americans defend the identity of the group, although Sui Sin Far is sometimes known as a 

"Chinese" to combat racism, which is only necessary in the context of narrow and dual 

thinkers who find it difficult to grasp part of the brilliance of the work. Thus,  to expand the 

readers' limited minds David Shih draws our attention to her personal image associated with 

the original 1909 version of the article that “[a]l though the name that ostensibly refers to this 

woman is recognizably Chinese, the woman is not.”
59

 

Not all writers write for the same reasons, but especially during the 19
th

and early 

20
th

centuries, readers expected that authors of ethnic identity not only represent themselves, 

but also represent their original countries. This expectation results in opportunities and 

necessities, positive and negative effects. As noted by Sau Ling Cynthia Wong, the metaphor 

of the term “a phrase applied to early African-American writers, Chinese-American writers 

„entered into the house of literature through the door of autobiography,‟ ” even today, 

“autobiographies predominate Chinese-American writing in English.”
60

 Many Chinese writers 

came through the entrance of autobiography, but only because it was one of the few corridors 

                                                           
57

Rey Chow, “The Secrets of Ethnic Abjection,” p. 64, 66. 
58

Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far), “ Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian, ” in Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far),  

Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings , ed. Amy Ling and Annette  White-Parks ( Chicago :  University of 

Illinois Press ,  1995 ), p.  225. 
59

 David Shih, “The Seduction of Origins”, p.59. 
60

Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour, Maxine Hong Kingston‟s  The Woman 

Warrior and the Chinese-American Autobiographical  Controversy,”  in  Maxine Hong Kingston‟s The Woman 

Warrior: A Casebook , ed. Sau-ling  Cynthia Wong ( Oxford :  Oxford University Press ,  1999 ),p. 39. 



24 

open to them, and then, after entering, but their work had to meet impossible and 

contradictory sets of standards. 

4. The Chinese American Immigrant Women’s Autobiographies 

The autobiographies of immigrant women deserve closer study, because their encounter 

with America was more multifaceted than those faced by men. The men and women who 

moved into the new world faced poverty, hunger, loneliness and discrimination, and often the 

intense struggle was to overcome the language barrier. But even more than men, the 

Immigration Act changed the relationships of immigrant women with their ancient cultures, 

particularly the dominant gender concepts that influenced family relations.  

In fact, they faced a double educational barrier: they were not born abroad but females. 

The daughters of immigrant parents had to go through a series of conflicts with their parents, 

regardless of whether they were born or not born in the United States. Some parents simply 

feared that higher education "in an unfamiliar way" a woman, ultimately destroy her future 

chances of marriage and motherhood. The marginalization experienced by the children of 

immigrant parents was intensified by their conflicts between the definitions of the old world 

of the roles and duties of women and the possibilities of the new world to become more 

independent. 

Many immigrant girls felt the need to re-summarize the immigrant experiences of their 

parents, and CV was a way of doing it. By re-listing their process of gradual independence by 

blending reality and imagination, they tried to resolve the contradictions between their 

common ethnic heritage and their personal commitment to "feminism" by designing 

themselves after powerful women in their migrant past. Many of these autobiographies reflect 



25 

the need to restore their ethnic background and integrate them into their contemporary 

American lifestyles. 

Among the autobiographies that women deserve a special examination is the one issued 

by migrant women. The autobiographies of migrant women display, and hence show, a deeper 

awareness of female identity than the history of American women. But their migratory lives in 

the United States cannot wipe out their country's past. 

Consequently, these women often present themselves as divided points in their self-

written careers and in their second language. The "American" woman, which she has now 

created in the New World, has literally transformed herself into a resolute woman, a woman 

who claims to have gained the power to raise her voice. American sound is the voice that tells 

the growth process as an immigrant female. 

The traditional roles imposed by the cultures of these former women conflict with 

perceptions of what their new lives will be. They live in a culture  along with a culture  that 

reinforces the patterns of thinking of the ancient state that define women as inferior creatures 

than being married to an unknown husband whose will is a piece of property. But they also 

face a culture outside their traditional home circle, which is an extension of their old culture, 

which they have developed and their previous challenges, to question the ways in which they 

function as women. This double perspective of female identity makes them feel that they are 

homeless as they stand on the border crossing between two different cultures and have no real 

sense of belonging to either. 

The autobiography of migrant women in the New World, in this regard, reveals a 

special thematic structure, a record of a distinctive mental code from which women sought to 

become full-fledged bi-cultural identities. This dual cultural heritage establishes an American 

dilemma in the identity and advocacy of women. In selectivity and quality, a limited number 



26 

of CVs were selected to represent a certain group of immigrants: middle-class educated 

women who came in the New World enjoyed an unexpected reputation derived largely from 

their writing autobiography. 

It will also be seen that female migrants share a common motivation not only to 

separate themselves from male images of women, but also to expose themselves as 

professional women. These writers identify themselves with American men as a strategy to 

redefine the ancient world that defines and affirms themselves as liberal intellectual women. 

While searching for written literature on the subject, no books were found but only a 

few articles on autobiographies of immigrant women. Articles on Chinese-American 

autobiographies focus on specific works. Catherine Leo Sui Yin and Christopher F. Paulson 

examines the voice of the divided Chinese novel, "The Fifth Chinese Daughter," by Jade 

Snow Wong, "the fifth daughter of China," by Gay Snow Wong, "as an extraordinary literary 

form effectively making it the divided consciousness of dual heritage."
61

 

As Lim notes the tradition of Chinese-American women's stories is new and not broad 

but "it is nonetheless certain and existent."Lim believes that the presence of these texts is 

remarkable since Chinese women arrived in America later than Chinese men and that they did 

not know English very often. The first Chinese immigrants were men who worked in gold 

mines or built-in railroads. In addition, the Chinese Exclusion Act banned many Chinese 

women from immigrating to America. Even when the Exclusion Act was repealed, other laws 

prohibit mating between Asians and whites and deprive Asian immigrants of their nationality. 

"This legislation kept Chinese American women as well as men socially in the underclass, a 

                                                           
61

 Kathleen LohSwe Yin and Kristoffer F. Paulson,” The Divided Voice of Chinese American Narration: Jade 

Snow Wong‟s Fifth Chinese Daughter,” Melus: The Journal of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic 

Literature of The United State, 9 (Spring, 1982), p. 59. 
 



27 

position in which writing and publishing were not generally available cultural productions, 

"Lim explains.
62

 

According to Wong, early English life stories were written primarily by first-generation 

Chinese-American women who received an appropriate education that enabled them to master 

the language. Unlike African-American slave narratives beginning with the acquisition of 

literary, Chinese American women‟s life stories…tend to contain accounts of how the author, 

contrary to the prevailing gender norms, came to be highly educated and learn English. These 

women‟s works were published by mainstream publishing houses as they were considered of 

interest for the white American audience.  

All these autobiographies of migrant women put a multicultural dilemma of female identity. 

One unusual variable of this style is provided by Pearl Buck. Unlike all other immigrant 

women who immigrated to the United States, she spent many years in a foreign country first, 

before eventually returning to her country. The Nobel Prize winner in 1938 was born of 

American evangelical parents, who spent her life in China and came to the United States 

several years later. She talks about the same problem in the "My Several Worlds: A Personal 

Record" that has been seen in these other life records. She feels like a Chinese among 

Americans. She re-produces herself as a bilingual and artistic interpreter from two cultures, 

expressing hope over and over again that there is a better understanding between East and 

West.” I grew up in China, in one world and not of it, and belonging to another world and yet 

not of it”
63

. 

                                                           
62

Shirley Geok-lin Lim, The tradition of Chinese American women‟s life stories: Thematics of race and gender 

in Jade Snow Wong‟s Fifth Chinese daughter and Maxine Hong Kingston‟sThe woman warrior. In Margo 

Culley (ed.), American women‟s autobiography: Fea(s)ts of memory(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 

1992). pp. 252-267. 
63

 Pearl S.Buck, My Several Worlds: A Personal Record (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934), p.51. 



28 

The fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong, and the Woman Warrior: Memories of 

Girlhood among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston, reflect the "silence" that the traditional 

roles played women, while integrating themselves into mainstream American culture. 

Although, Wong surrenders to Chinese tradition without showing anger or resentment about 

her gender role during her childhood. She later identifies herself as an artist and began her 

own pottery business. Her solid autobiography offers a strong vision of a Chinese American 

woman who can transcend stereotypes of herself as a body: "She could stop searching for that 

niche that would be hers alone. She had found herself and struck her speed.”
64

 Kingston, on 

the other hand, vents its anger at China's attitude toward women as undoubtedly inferior. 

When a liberated woman leaves her family home, she presents herself as an American woman 

whose Chinese heritage should only exist in Chinese cultural legends and legends so that she 

will not have to face them anywhere else in the American present. 

 

To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything 

untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in 

Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they 

stuff our heads like the suit-cases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.
65

 

 

The stories of migrant women are necessary "documents" because they present their 

direct stories of migrants in the New World, their root roots and their planting. They give their 

side to intercultural dialogue as they refocus one's perspective on the American past from the 

perspective of migrant women. 

 

 

 

                                                           
64

Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter (New York: Harper and Row, 1950), p. 246. 
65

 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior : Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghost s( New York: Vintage 

Books,1977), p .102. 



29 

5. The Woman Warrior as a Multicultural Literature 

 

The American multicultural society was already long before the term “multiculturalism" 

appeared in the 1970s. This term means the welcoming of the differences founded in ethnic 

values and cultural diversities like language, food, customs, attitudes or cultural heritage. 

Dissimilar to “Melting Pot” a model of the blending of cultures, that requires ethnic / ethnic 

minorities or immigrants to agree to the basic and fundamental values of society. 

Moreover, multiculturalism has given the greatest respect for the reciprocation to the 

cultural impacts of ethnic minorities or immigrant groups bring with them to the United 

States. Though the idea of multiculturalism was widely disseminated in the 1980s through 

slogans on multiculturalism, the question, how the term was used or first developed stays 

vague also,  questions concerning the political and ideological meanings and the term „s 

implications has been raised consistently. 
66

 Thus, the discussion of multiculturalism in the 

broader literature deals with social justice items like humanity, feminism, and liberalism.
67

  

“The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston, is the best example of multicultural 

literature which is often classified and studied as such. 
68

  

Dasenbrock defines multicultural literature as “works that are explicitly about 

multicultural societies” and “are implicitly multicultural in the sense of inscribing readers 

from other cultures inside their own textual dynamics.” He declares that “explicitly 

multicultural texts are also implicitly multicultural.”
69

  . Focusing on the implicit cultural 

                                                           
66

 Youngsuk Chae, Politicizing Asian American Literature (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 32. 
67

 Dolce. C. J, “Multicultural education-some issues,” Journal of Teacher Education, 24, 283. (1973). 
68

 He, S, Chinese American Literature. In A. Knippling (ed.), New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A 

Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage, (Westport: Greenwood, 1996) pp. 43-65.  
69

 Dasenbrock, R.W. 1987. Intelligibility and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English. PMLA 

[online], 102 (1), p 10 



30 

diversity of The Woman Warrior, Dasenbrock's discussion focused on the concept of "ghost" 

in the text. He declares that, in The Woman Warrior, the Chinese use the word ghost in terms 

of:  "foreigner", "a non-Chinese person" and, as "spirit", "a dead person". The specter of 

"foreign" is a Chinese or Chinese-American concept, a Chinese way of referring to non 

Chinese people. while,  The second meaning of the ghost  corresponds more or less to the 

American (or Finnish) meaning, in reference to “the soul of the deceased person, who speaks 

of it as appearing in a visual form, or expressing its existence.”
70

 

Hence, the word "ghost" is used in The Woman Warrior in a slightly larger and different 

sense than English. When the reader understands the cultural difference between the meanings 

of the word "ghost", a window opens to a "global vision" that differs from the mainstream in 

America. Dasenbrock says “to understand the ghost in The Woman Warrior. Non-Chinese 

readers need to understand the Chinese use of the word, which means that we must, 

momentarily at least, learn to see ourselves as ghosts.” 
71

 

The dual meaning of "ghost" thus realizes the external and internal positions rely just on 

the individual's perspective, and challenge the readers of non-Chinese Americans Further 

work in expanding its cultural horizons.
72

 That also makes the fact that the Woman Warrior is 

written to two audiences: Chinese Americans who will not face any problem in understanding 

the meanings, and non-Chinese Americans who will be obliged to make an effort to get the 

meaning.
73

  

 Moreover, Dasenbrook's definition of implicit multiculturalism in The Woman Warrior 

may have to be redefined a b it. Instead of recording readers from "other" cultures within their 

text dynamics, The Woman Warrior records readers from many cultures, none of which are 

                                                           
70

 In dictionaries, the adjective „multicultural‟ is defined as “pertaining to a society consisting of varied 

cultural groups” (OED) or “of, being, or designed for a combination of several distinct cultures” (Longman 

Dictionary of the English Language). Thus, „multicultural‟ (as opposed to „bicultural‟) implies that there 

are more than two cultures involved 
71

 Dasenbrock, R.W. 1987. Intelligibility and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English. PMLA 

[online], 102 (1), p. 14. 
72

 Ibid., p. 16. 
73

 Ibid., p. 14 



31 

"internal" or "external" because the text contains elements familiar to each. Maxine Hong 

Kingston commented that the target audience of The Woman Warrior is at the same time 

embracing and "very specific": It is written on the one hand to "everyone", and on the other 

hand, to Chinese Americans. Kingston reveals that the text contains "puns for Chinese 

speakers only" and "visual pictorials most appreciated by those who write Chinese."
74

  

6. Kingston’s the Woman Warrior in Context 

Maxine Ting Hung was born in Stockton, California in 1940; she is the eldest of the six 

surviving children of Tom Hong (researcher, washing man, and housekeeper) and Chew Ling 

Yan (midwife, nurse and field -hand).
75

 

Although she was very calm in her childhood, she failed in kindergarten because she 

refused to speak loudly in class .Maxine Hong soon showed a talent for writing, and by the 

age of nine she composed poems in English, her second language after Cantonese.
76

 

Furthermore, she earned her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of 

California at Berkeley in 1962 and a teaching degree in 1965. She lived and worked in both 

California and Oahu, Hawaii and got married to Earl Kingston, a representative. She has one 

son, Joseph Lawrence Chung Mei. 
77

 

 During her writing career, Kingston has held many teaching positions at various 

colleges and universities, thus, since 1990 has been a Distinguished Professor of Counseling 

at the University of California at Berkeley.
78

 

By combining autobiography and fantasy stories with stories, oral history and folk tales, 

Kingston's writings strongly challenge the idea that Asian Americans have a separate  identity 

                                                           
74

 Ibid., p. 65. 
75

 Amy Lng, The Heath Anthology of American Literature 2 (D.C. Heath, 1990), p. 2094-95. 

76
Seiwoong Oh, Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature (New York: Facts of File, 2007), p. 152. 

77
 Amy Ling, The Heath Anthology of American Literature 2, p. 2094-95. 

78
Seiwoong Oh, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ASIAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE, p. 153. 



32 

- "ethnic" and "American" - attesting to the harmful effects that such an idea might have on 

both individual and community level. She has also widely written about "silencing" Chinese 

and Chinese American women in both countries.
79

 

Therefore, Ms. Kingston gave Chinese America its most real, most sensitive, and 

absolutely the most irresistible voice. Ms. Kingston is not particularly a political writer, but 

perhaps it would be appropriate to care about many things more important than the fact of 

being Chinese. Ms. Kingston first gave voice to women, especially Chinese American 

women, but all women would see their own ideas and struggles against subtle or stark sex 

discrimination. Subsequently, she gave her voice to the Chinese and all what is one of the 

richest popular cultures in the world.
80

 

By the early 1970s, Kingston was writing short articles that would form “The Woman 

Warrior,” that was widely published in several magazines and newspapers, including the New 

York Times .Consequently, Woman Warrior won numerous awards, including the 1976 

National Book Critics Award; Time Magazine named one of the top 10 works of fiction in the 

decade. In addition to her 1980 book, “China Men,” that received a similar honor and won the 

National Book of Public Stories Award in 1981, a short collection of articles, entitled "Hawaii 

One Summer", appeared six years later, followed by “Tripmaster Monkey” (1989), in which, 

Kingston turned from a combination of autobiography and myth that characterized her early 

work to direct fantasy. 

Beside to her turning into direct fictions, Kingston‟s renewed interest in poetry was 

clearly detailed in a series of lectures and poems entitled “To Be the Poet” (2002), that 

                                                           
79

Ibid., p. 152. 
80

 Susan Evangelista, “Chinese-America's Woman Warrior: Maxine Hong Kingston THE WOMAN WARRIOR 

by Maxine Hong Kingston; CHINA MEN by Maxine Hong Kingston”  Philippine Studies Vol. 31, No. 2, 

(Second Quarter, 1983), p. 244. 
 



33 

contains a selection of new works. She continues writing the latest and the longest of her 

publications being “The Fifth Book of Peace” (2003).
81

  

Kingston‟s first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, 

won for her the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction in 1976. She mixes 

biography, history, and myth, and describes her struggle to shape her identity out of the 

contrast American and Chinese cultures. 
82

 She said:  

Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do 

you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, in-sanities, one family, your 

mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese 

tradition and what is the movies?”(6) 

 

The book, without a plot in the traditional sense, brings up images of Chinese women, 

real and mythical, because they interact with their culture, the real responds generally in 

silence, or is silenced, and find the legendary voice that not only speaks for themselves, but 

also about the dumb others.
83

However, the book is a collection of imagination, reality and 

memory, a hybrid type of Kingston innovation, through Chinese folk stories and family tales 

which marked her childhood, and the weird tradition of the old world imposed by her mother 

but did not explain to them, through Kingston's experiments and imaginary trips and poetic 

journeys, The Woman Warrior details complications and difficulties in Kingston‟s 

development as a woman and as a Chinese American.  

Moreover, she protests against prejudice of traditional Chinese culture, which is 

embodied in hateful statements of women, such as “it is better to feed the goose than girls” 

(45) and in acts such as tying girls' feet and selling slave girls. Indeed, Kingston is so sensitive 

to American racism and objects to her employer's claim to paint a “yellow Negro.” The book 

manifests the power of stories in the formation of characters and behavior, also shows a 

                                                           
81

Seiwoong Oh, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, pp. 152-153. 
82

 Barbara Wiedemann, Cyclopedia of World Authors II, Vol. 3 ed. Frank N. Magill (Salem, 1989), pp. 846-48. 
83

 Barbara Wiedemann, Cyclopedia of World Authors II, pp. 846-48.   



34 

victory to become a former of stories by finding one„s voice and embracing his past and self-

assertion. 
84

 

Chapters are presented in blocks against opposing chapters, some gaps are engulfed by 

the cries of doubt or victory, while others are left to decode by the reader. Kingston breaks 

time because it distinguishes the usual distinctions between reality and fiction, thus separating 

her book from traditional biography and chronology.
85

 

The first chapter “No Name Woman” relates to a story her mother, Brave Orchid, 

narrates. It is about Kingston‟s aunt, who destroyed her family's reputation by having an 

illegitimate child. On the night of the baby‟s birth, after the villagers ruined the family 

compound, she committed suicide by throwing herself and the baby into a well. Kingston 

imagines her aunt‟s life: her amenability in marrying a man chosen by her family, her reaction 

when her husband left for the United States a few days after their marriage, her approval when 

a villager forced her to have sex, and her acceptance of the villagers' disdain, her denial to 

mention her child„s father, and her last wish to end her life that humiliated her family, that did 

not mention her name again. 

Not only does Kingston tell the story that the aunt could not but retaliate. In Chinese, 

the ideograph of  ”revenge” means” reporting a crime.”86
 

The Woman Warrior, second chapter “White Tigers” tells a completely different story 

about Fa Mu Lan, the legendary warrior Women. When she was a child, Kingston felt that 

girls could not achieve greatness in the male world. "White Tigers" is the story from the 

                                                           
84

 Amy Ling, The Heath Anthology of American Literature 2 (D.C. Heath: 1990), pp. 2094-95. 
85

 Deborah Homsher, “The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston: A Bridging of Autobiography and 

Fiction,” The Iowa Review Vol. 10, Issue. 4, (1979), p. 93. 
86

 Barbara Wiedemann, Cyclopedia of World Authors II, pp. 846-48.   



35 

imagination of her childhood to overcome emotions of inferiority as a female. Such as Fa Mo 

Lan, imagine herself leaving home at the age seven and lift Martial arts teachers.
87

 

This "talk story," echoed over and over again by the praises of Orchid and her girl, told 

of a girl taken by a magical bird to the mountains. For the purpose of returning to avenge the 

enemies of her family and her country, she trained herself so as to become strong in self-

discipline and magic. These introductory Myths set alongside a woman who is a criminal 

becoming a victim against another faithful and heroic woman.
88

 

After these stories, Kingston jumps to her mother‟s history in China, In the third chapter 

“Shamann,” she tells the story of Brave Orchid„s unusual, medical career as a midwife in 

China. After the birth of two children in China, Brave Orchid takes the extraordinary step of 

going to medical school, and then works as a doctor in her home village to become a 

successful healer later. But, in the end, she abandoned her career to join her husband in the 

USA. Whereas, she was unable to practice medicine in America, she opened a laundry 

company in California with her husband. 

As the Woman Warrior a progress, Kingston relies less on her mother's novels and more 

about her own memories and family events and experiences. 

 Then, in the fourth chapter of her book “At the Western Palace” a story of another aunt, 

Moon Orchid, a sensitive and a funny old woman, who failed to incorporate in American 

civilization. Her husband arrived alone to America and became a successful doctor. 

Nevertheless, after several years of practicing medicine in Los Angeles, he remarried and 

divorced Moon Orchid, who stayed in Hong Kong wait for him to send her.  Brave Orchid 

determined to help her sister facing this careless man, and plan for her migration to America, 

but, when Moon Orchid finally faced her husband; he refused her again and rebuke her for 

                                                           
87

 Gary Carey and James L. Roberts, (Eds), CliffsNotes™ The Woman Warrior (New York: Hungry Minds, 

1998), p. 9. 
88

Deborah Homsher, “The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston: A Bridging of Autobiography and 

Fiction,” p. 93. 



36 

damaging his life and profession. Later on Moon Orchid suffered from a mental illness and 

finished her days in a mental hospital. 

In the last chapter, “A Song for a Barbarian Red Pipe,” Kingston describes her 

emotional experiences and struggles she felt originated in Chinese family in America during 

her childhood, she narrates the torture of creating a personal identity, and a voice to show 

herself to  both her parents and society that cannot understand her. Kingston finishes the 

Woman Warrior   with the legend of Ts‟ ai Yen, an ancient Chinese poetess arrested by a non-

Chinese tribe in which she lived between those for twelve years, but could never fully grasp 

their culture. 

Thus, Kingston said indirectly  that her mother is like Ts‟ai Yen in that, Brave Orchid 

pining to return to her Chinese village, she also hints that she  sees herself as a foreigner in 

America, caught among her parents „Chinese traditions and American culture that focuses on 

individuality. Her memoir is similar to the healing song of Ts‟ai Yen, which the barbarians do 

not understand.
89

 

 

  

                                                           
89

Gary Carey and James L. Roberts, (Eds), CliffsNotes™ The Woman Warrior, p. 10-11. 



37 

 

 

 

Chapter Two: 
 

The Process of Shaping Identity in Maxine Hong 

Kingston’s The Woman Warrior 

 

  



38 

1. Ghost’s Language and the Recreation of Identity 

Kingston‟s the Woman Warriorstarts with the story "No Name Woman", the narrator's 

aunt who has become pregnant during starvation time, gave birth to a daughter ...It was a 

waste enough (6). Moreover, the narrator notices that adultery, perhaps only mistake in good 

times, becomes a crime when villagers need food (13). In order to No Name Aunt is punished 

for -action as if she can have a private life, secretly and apart from them and to create a break 

in the "depth" of the community, the villagers attack house of the family. After leaving, the 

family cursed the aunt:"Aiaa, the death is coming. Look what you have done. You„ve killed us. 

Ghost!  Dead ghost! A ghost! You have never beenborn."(13-14). Here the term "ghost"is 

used to denote shame and exclusion. 

In the end of the narrative, the Aunt commits suicide by throwing herself and the child 

in well and becomes a real ghost, wandering alone to infinity with any family member  ready 

to remember or worship her. Put a stain on family history, Kingston‟s aunt is consciously 

forgotten and silenced. Jennifer Griffiths claims that the aunt's story is like a "pedagogy of 

shame,"
90

 that "instructs young girls to learn about the inherent danger and corruption of 

their bodies."
91

(Griffith 356). As such, the ghost of the no name aunt represents the repression 

of femininity in a patriarchal society in general and more specifically, the persecution of 

Chinese American women in the United States.
92

 

                                                           
90

 Sandra Lee Bartkly, The Pedagogy of Shame.Feminisms and Pedagogies of Everyday Life. Ed, (Carmen Luke. 

London: Routledge, 1996), p. 225. 
91

 Griffiths Jennifer Griffiths,“ Uncanny Spaces: Trauma, Cultural Memory, and the Female Body in Gayl 

Jones's Corregidoraand Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior Studies in the NovelVol. 38, No.3 

(2006): p. 356. 
92

 Chia-Sui Lee, “GHOST‟S LANGUAGE AND THE RECREATION OF IDENTITY IN TONIMORRISON‟S 

BELOVED, MAXINE HONG KINGSTON‟S THE WOMAN WARRIOR AND JOY KOGAWA‟S OBASAN 

,”New Academia: An International Journal of English Language, Literature and Literary Theory  Vol. IV, No. I 

(Jan, 2015): pp. 138-139. 



39 

Moreover, Cheung argues that words can be liberated, but they can be distorted, wound, 

and while the silence may erase, it can also serve and calms and communicates.
93

 Her 

statement complicates the idea of contradiction between silence and speech. It means that 

silence is not just an absence of speech; it is a productive means of communication. Isabel 

Hoving, explores both negative and positive meanings of silence and argues that silence can 

be considered "as the inability to make an authoritative use of dominant or even non-

dominant discourses," or as"an inarticulated blabbering and madness,"as well as "an 

instrument to find a new voice. "
94

. 

In the Woman Warrior, by creating loopholes in the closed-door family novels, the 

Ghost hero of the novel conveys his repeated and strange effects on the hero on the 

protagonist. It is a paradoxical position. Since no woman's name bears untold and shameful 

history, family made efforts to block her story. Brave Orchid didn‟t not only prohibited 

Maxine's to mention the aunt‟s name, but also blocked most of the story. However, as much 

as the family tries to contain the story of the aunt through deprivation, her charms ghost 

appears in the composition of the transferred novels. Her silence creates ambiguity and holes 

in the discourse of hegemony, and encourages the protagonist to question the fixed accounts 

and create new versions of the story." This haunting silence is precisely what gives wings to 

the niece„s imagination, allowing Maxine to test her own power to talk story and to play with 

different identities" 
95

. Haunted by the absence of truth, Maxine feels the urgency of perform a 

morning ritual by rewriting the story of her aunt, and assign" pages of paper to her."(16). 

Through  creating new memories of her aunt, she break the family secret surrounding the 

disgraceful past and giving voices to women who have been excluded from the prevailing 

                                                           
93

Cheung King-kok Cheung, Articulate Silence: Hisaya Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa(New 

York: Cornell UP, 1993), p. 128. 
94

Isabel Hoving, In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Woman Writers (Stanford, CA: 

Stanford UP, 2001), p. 23. 
95

Cheung King-kok Cheung, Articulate Silence: Hisaya Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, p. 85. 



40 

novels. Being a woman is no longer shameful. Her new version of the story challenges 

patriarchal and sexual discourses, and calls it a burden Woman's body. 

In fact, Maxine recreates her identity by creating a relationship with the ghost of her aunt. In 

her revised account of the no name aunt story, she imagines the aunt as a revenge ghost and 

reinstates the activity of "aunt as a forerunner" 
96

. She says, "She (aunt) was a spite suicide, 

drowning herself in drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned 

one, whose weeping ghost… waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute."(16). By 

taking the nature of the rebellious ghosts as an inheritance, she has the ability to challenge the 

limitations of mainstream novels and create a new identity "a new Chinese American 

tradition," that negotiates two contrasting cultures."
97

 

By re-interpretation of the Chinese myth of Ts‟ ai Yen in the closing story of the "A 

song for a Barbarian Red Pipe", the author, represents a new language that is open to ethnic 

harmony. She made it clear that during exile, Ts‟ ai Yen invents a song that connects her 

native language and Barbarian music to her children: 

 

Then, out of Ts„ai Yen tent … the barbarians heard a woman„s voice singing, as if to 

her babies, a song so high and clear, it matched the flutes…Her words seemed 

to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood their sadness and anger… She 

brought her songs back from the savage lands, and one of the three that has 

been passed down to us is "Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," a 

song that Chinese sing to their own instruments. It translated well." (209) 

 

 

                                                           
96

 Kathleen Borgan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (Charlottesville: U 

of Virginia P, 1998), p. 138. 
97

Cheung King-kok Cheung, Articulate Silence: Hisaya Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, p. 85. 



41 

 The song of Ts‟ai Yen is a kind of translation between two cultures, an embodiment of 

the past and the present, ancestral roots and foreign culture. The song refers to the possibility 

of overriding ghosts silence and reconstruction of societal and cross-cultural identity. As the 

narrator says, "Here it is a story my mother told me, not when I was young, but recently, when 

I told her I  also talk a story. The beginning is hers, the ending is mine."(206) The novel 

begins with Brave Orchid's story about a"no name woman" silenced by the family, ending 

with the story Ts‟ ai Yen, that, instead of being nameless, "achieves her mortal fame by 

singing about her exile." 
98

 

 

Using her story as a revised story to coincide with her mother, Maxine reaches a 

symbolic return to her community and re-invents her bi-cultural identity. She says:"The 

swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people understand the resemblance soon 

so that I can return to them. What we have in common are the words at our backs."(53). Take 

her words and stories that connect her bicultural resources as a weapon, she simulates the 

legendary swordsman and rebuilds the "composite self."
99

. In short, the silence of the strange 

ghost does not only serve as her source of imagination, but also leads to a new strategy of 

narrative that pushes her for a new re-creation of  collective identity of Asian American 

Women. 
100

 

 

 

 

 

                                                           
98

 Cheung King-kok Cheung, Articulate Silence: Hisaya Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, p. 95. 
99

Ibid., p.100. 
100

Chia-Sui Lee, “GHOST‟S LANGUAGE AND THE RECREATION OF IDENTITY IN TONIMORRISON‟S 

BELOVED, MAXINE HONG KINGSTON‟S THE WOMAN WARRIOR AND JOY KOGAWA‟S OBASAN, pp. 

144-145. 



42 

2. The Question of Identity and Innovation of Selfhood 

Kingston‟s first book, the Woman Warrior , represents a necessary step in the process of 

identifying a marginalized and silenced Chinese American identity, and in the seek to 

legitimize a very popular Asian-American writing‟s tradition.
101

Furthermore, Kingston's 

"wobbly" memoirs also introduces her immature childhood; that is, by encroachment. The 

text opens with a violation: "You should not tell anyone," my mother said, "what I want to tell 

you. (3). In the five sections that make up the Woman Warrior, Kingston makes a voice for 

many "ghosts" and tells - that is, reinventing - the stories she heard or experienced during her 

childhood. At the heart of every novel, there is a different "ghost" of a woman.
102

 

 

 First, The No Name Woman,  whom the family punished by forgetting, pursued 

Maxine; then the legendary warrior Fa Mo Lan, who took the place of her father in the war to 

save her village. Following the ghost of a woman who suffered and died in silence, this ghost 

of a strong woman has not subsided in the hope that her revenge will be in the virtual future. 

This opposing pair finds itself repeated many times in the text to reflect on a gradually smaller 

scale, the inner struggles of Maxine, her "separate "identity and voice: another aunt,  Moon 

Orchid, the weak, appears in sharp contrast to Maxine's mother  Brave Orchid. A quiet 

Chinese classmate, a crying baby with a "China doll hair cut" (201-2), and a silent 

reincarnation into the "No Name Woman" turns into Maxine's alternative style. 

In fact, Kingston‟s breaking of silence is a temporary, but ongoing exploration about a 

question she doesn‟t have a simple answer to, she will be allowed to present herself as an 

adult and make her Childhood into something "fixed": 

                                                           
101

 Cristina Bacchilega, “Feminine voices inscribing Sarraute's Childhood and Kingston's The Woman 

Warrior,”Textual Practice Vol. 6, No. 1, (1992), p. 101. 
102

 Cristina Bacchilega, “Feminine voices inscribing Sarraute's Childhood and Kingston's The Woman Warrior,” 

p. 103. 



43 

“Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand how 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? What is Chinese tradition and 

what is the movies?”(6) 

This exploration only leads to more questions: “I continue to sort out what's just my 

childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living.”(239), 

Kingston point out at the end of her memoirs: “My mother has given me pictures to dream 

nightmare- babies that recur.” (101), in those nightmares, though Kingston's care, the “dream 

baby” dies. In order to make it live, she have to break violently open the “impossible stories” 

with that our parents “stuff our heads like suitcases which they jam-pack with home-made 

underwear.” (102). those stories, pushed back into dreams, speak the rule of silence; tell 'not 

to tell'. Out of the hole that Kingston makes in silence, that continues to kill "No Name 

Woman" and her child is a group of gray, swollen ghosts - women and children - who 

continue to feminize her femininity and childhood and whom Kingston  refuses to continue  

killing, to keep “deliberately forgetting”(18). 

Moreover, Kingston's autobiographical fiction is rediscovering and reevaluating, both in 

thematic and digressive levels, the priority of the mother/daughter relationship in the writers' 

identity shaping. Thus, Maxine goes through a similar and disturbing process during her 

childhood in China and America in California. She finds certain words “troublesome”
103

: 

I could not understand T. The Chinese T has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the 

American T, assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the 

middle so straight? Was it out of politeness? That this writer left off strokes the way a 

Chinese has to write her own name small and crooked? No, it was not politeness; 'I' is a 

                                                           
103

Ibid., p. 104. 



44 

capital and 'you' is lower-case. I stared at the middle line and waited so long for its 

black center to resolve into tight strokes and dots that I forgot to pronounce it.(193). 

It seems that the struggle in which the young girl finds her silencing "T" is more  strict 

culturally , but we discover that in both ethnic contexts it is erased twice, "buried" in silence 

because of sex  “There is a Chinese word for the female I — which is “slave”. Break the 

women with their own tongues”' (56), Kingston's cognitive commentary, that does not 

contradict the Chinese customs of female murder and slavery she heard about, finds further 

confirmation of the insults her third uncle cries on the table, referring to the young girls  "Eat, 

maggots", he said, "Look at the maggots chew." (223). Her identity is equally shaky in the 

American context, Maxine finds herself forced to 'invent' an 'American-feminine speaking 

personality, “And all the time I was having to turn myself American-feminine, or no dates,” 

(56), only to be more silenced: “Normal Chinese women's voices are strong and bossy. We 

American-Chinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American-feminine. Apparently we 

whispered even more softly than the Americans.”(200). In both worlds, the feminine I speak 

“in an inaudible voice” (13). 
104

 

Through this recognition, Kingston is rebuilding a woman, fighting customs, silenced 

by her culture and, as a result, creating her own voice and identity “My aunt haunts me-her 

ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect...I alone devote pages of paper to 

her” (19). This haunting of Kingston by a no name aunt can be seen from this ancestral 

multiplier. So, she reveal gender-based criteria for filling a position in the cultural memory 

between soldiers and women  like her aunt: Mao encouraged gifts "the spirits of outstanding 

soldiers and workers, no matter whose ancestors they may be" (19), but her "aunt remains 

forever hungry" if not for Kingston's reclamation of her life and memory (19)
105

 

                                                           
104

Ibid., p.106. 
105

  Ruth Y. Jenkins, “Authorizing Female Voice and Experience: Ghosts and Spirits in Kingston's The 

WomanWarrior and Allende's The House of the Spirits,”MELUSVol. 19, No. 3,(Autumn, 1994), p. 65. 



45 

3. The Role of Memory in Shaping Identity 

Kingston‟s memoirs illustrates how the historical situation involves the building of a 

new identity in the nation to which she migrated, and a multiplex relationship with the 

political and cultural history of the nation she left. In this work, she has revealed how gender, 

memory and identity are related to dialogue, and how gender and race identities can be 

affected by personal memory, family memory and ethnic collective memory. 

In her autobiography, Kingston rewrites the collective memories of Chinese expatriates 

and the official memories of the nation-state to restore the post-colonial voice and feminist 

space.  Her writing unveils that women often work as references to generations' memories or  

collective culture through storytelling. She also contends that women's memories, such as the 

collective memories of the national state and the ethnic society, are not homogenous, and thus 

may become sites of power struggle over the fact that women themselves claim, in this case, 

between mother issuing and  daughter inventing stories. Memory always enters into dialogue 

with the past by suppressing the past to a reflective consciousness and revealing the difference 

of the past from the present. Memory also exists in relation to language, symbols, events, and 

social and cultural contexts. 

In the Woman Warrior, Kingston publishes stories of memory as a mirror to show her 

identity as a Chinese woman from the second-generation diaspora, as well as rewriting and 

diversifying US national memories. Kingston holds the concepts of identity building as 

narrator struggles to find meaning in the minimal spaces between gender and transnational 

identity.
106

 

                                                           
106

Milon Franz, “Encountering the Gendered Transnational Identity: A Study of The Woman Warrior:Memoirs 

of a Girlhood among Ghosts,”International Journal of English and Language, Literature and Humanities Vol. 

III, No. VII,(September, 2015),  p. 72. 



46 

The work focuses on developing an identity in which race and sex play pivotal roles. As 

the daughter of migrant immigrant parents, her cultural community has been pushed to the 

margins of society because of their differences in language, customs and appearances. 

Expatriates build racial, gender and opposition identities, and awareness in the diaspora has a 

sense of loss and hope as a specific tension. Besides, the identity of Chinese women is 

particularly indicative of the transnational feminism that criticizes the persecution of gender 

in China and the Chinese diaspora. The identity of the second generation Chinese American 

women in the diaspora becomes more complicated, difficult to be constructed and imagined, 

and slides between identification and mis-identification.  

More importantly, Kingston participates in the introduction of the genre “talk-story” 

into ethnic literature in America; this genre is linked to the local oral traditions of Hawaii 

where she lived in mid 60s and 70s. Wendy Ho explains that “talk-story” is a pidgin 

expression designating a “social or communal oral exchange in which people gather to ‛chew 

the fat‛ or ‛shoot the breeze‛ with friends and family” (28)
107

. In this memoir Kingston “retells 

traditional oral stories and/or invents subversive stories to account for the varying social, 

economic, cultural, and historical circumstances of Chinese women, families and 

communities in the United States” (28). But, this fictional autobiography becomes a mental re-

presentation of an incomprehensible memory, an emotional misinterpretation of patriarchal 

type of legends,an emotional misunderstanding of a patriarchal type of woman-a feminist re-

appropriation of these legends and legends, a cultural review and a technical distortion of 

Chinese sources. By recounting these stories, through a process of turbulence and rebirth, the 

author makes her past usable and understandable to the contemporary American presence, 

thus creating its American-Chinese identity. But, also shapes a Chinese American literary 

tradition of detecting the risk of loss and erasure in the process of social infringement. 

                                                           
107

 Ho, Wendy, In Her Mother‟s House: The Politics of Asian-American Mother-Daughter Writing, (California: 

AltaMira Press, 1999). 



47 

The Woman Warrior is composed of five short prose novels that tell the story of the 

emergence of a second-generation Chinese girl whose name was not mentioned but who 

represents the author. Kingston explores how the self intersects with ethnic and gender 

identity within specific geographic and family areas.
108

“You must not tell anyone what I am 

about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the 

family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been 

born” (3) the book starts with Maxine s mother warning her daughter of patriarchal 

punishment for any kind of gender and sexual transgression. The mother warned Maxine: 

“Don‟t let your father know that I told you. He denies her. Now that you have started to 

menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don‟t humiliate us. You wouldn‟t like 

to be forgotten as if you had never been born. The villagers are watchful” (5) 

Maxine inherits the post-traumatic memory of her unnamed nation through the stories of 

her mother. This story is testimony to the power of patriarchal erasure in history - denial of 

women's sexuality and existence. If a woman goes beyond