Abstract:

        "Sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s what little girls are made of." At least this is what little American girls grow up learning. Little Chinese girls, on the other hand, grow up learning quite a different lesson: "There is no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls" (Kingston 46). Maxine Kingston’s autobiography, The Woman Warrior, bursts at the seams with examples of the cruel treatment of females in and among the Chinese culture. From as early as birth, with even the youngest of girls being sold as slaves in the street markets, on into the later stages of life, serving as slaves to their husbands, Chinese females are treated as inferiors. The Chinese word for the female "I" means slave, so even the women, in addition to the rest of society, break themselves with their own tongues (Kingston 47). Although Kingston does not literally and physically experience the chains of slavery that come with being a Chinese woman because she was born in America, her Chinese heritage still enslaves her. Instead of being aught in the customs of just the Chinese culture, Kingston is trapped between two cultures that have very different views on how to treat women within their own socitey: Chinese culture and American culture. The result of the enslavement caused by these two cultures is a need for self-exploration. Kingston’s The Woman Warrior serves as a journey of discovering the self, "beginning with a defintion of home," and what it means to be "born in the Untied States to Chinese immigrant parents" (Sato 194).
        It is thus my intention and the purpose of my paper to explore Kingston’s autobiography as a means of self-identification. Kingston uses No Name Woman, Fa Mulan, Brave Orchid, Moon Orchid, and Ts’ai Yen as tools in the construction of her own identity. As Gayle K Fujita states in her article, Ghosts as Chinese American Constructs in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, "the narratives of No Name Woman, Fa Mulan, Brave Orchid, and Ts’ai Yen not only present five versions of female development but also express a concentric movement from imagined...toward actual" (199) as the settings change from the home of the No Name Woman, an unnamed Chinese village, to that of Kingston in Stockton, California (199). Kingston also searhes for a definition of self in and through various scenes of her novel. Three, in particular (the telling of the No Name Woman, the fight with the little schoolgirl, and the defending of herself to her mother), exists as pivotal points of Kingston’s definition and declaration of her sefl as of neither merely the Chinese nor merely the American cutlure, but instead, as of a synthesis of the two: the Chinese-American culture.
 
 

Begum, Khani. "Confirming the Place of ‘The Other’: Gender and Ethnic Identity in
        Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior." New Perspectives onWomen and
       Comedy. Ed. Regina Barreca. Philadelphia, PA: Gordon and Breach, 1992. 143-154.

        Begum Khani states that while personal quest motifs appear frequently in literature of occidental societies, it rarely ever surfaces in works of oriental cultures. While Kingston’s The Woman Warrior does resist categorization as an autobiography with the interweaving of myth and fiction, the narrative is most often analyzed as a quest for identity "precisely because it is concerned with questions of self-definition and identity" (143). Begum explains that Maxine Hong Kingston’s quest for identity occurs on three levels: gender, ethnicity, and nationality. Begum’s article then goes on to illustrate how Kingston, through her work, confronts her Otherness: first, as a woman in patriarchal socitey(in both the Chinese and American society); secondly, as a member of an ethnic minority in America; and lastly, as an English speaking American within a genuine Chinese family. Begum esplains that because she is "caught between two cultures and the product of both, in order for her to find her authentic self, [Kingston} must negotiate the contradictions between her two worlds before discovering and valorizing her individual cultural uniqueness" (144). Begum’s article establishes a lot of strong emphasis on subject-positions, the positions from which a subject is viewed, and language.
        Begum’s article correlates with my thesis, which argues that Kingston uses her text as an assessment of self actualizatio, because it demonstrates how Kingston’s text "explores the quest of a unique and particular self, onw whose experience of growing up is both Chinese and American" (144). However, Begum begins to explore several different tangents to the main argument, and also begins to apply several different critical lenses, irrelevant to my argument, to the article’s main theme, which makes the article hard to follow, serving to take away from the article’s strength as a source for my paper. Begum’s article also focuses mainly and specifically on the evolution of Kingston’s gender identity, her identity in relation to menm instead of her cultural identification.

Juhasz, Suzanne. "Maxine Hong Kingston: Narrative Technique & Female Identity."
       Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies. Ed. Catherine
        Rainwater and William J. Scheick. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky,
        1985. 173-183.

       Juhasz ‘s article discusses the embodiment of Kingston’s search fo identity in the narrative act in her two-volume autobiography, The Woman Warrior and China Men. Juhasz explores the similaritites and differences of the way in which Kingaton comes to identify herself through the texts of these two works. Juhasz explains that in the first text "the evolution of female identity...is formed in realtion to the mother through the achievement of individuation in the context of connection" (173), and in the latter it is formed "in relation to the father through the understanding of separation" (173). Juhasz’s article suggests that although Kingston finds her identity through a different means in each text, in both works alike she seeks to define herself as a Chinese-American, and both texts alike move towards her own definition of home.
        Although Juhasz’s article supports my view of Kingston’s work as a means of self-identification with the argument that Kinston finds her definition of home in The Woman Warrior, it also explores the same argumetn within another of Kingston’s works, China Men. The exploration of two texts serves as a weakness to the article as a source for my paper in that the main focus is taken off support for The Woman Warrior specifically, as a declaration of the self and applied to another text. However, despite this exploration of not one, but two, texts, Juhasz’s article does manage to sufficiently present and support its main argument solely within The Woman Warrior, thereby providing support for my argument.

Sato, Gayle K. Fujita. "Ghosts as Chinese-American Constructs in Maxine Hong
        Kinston’s The Woman Warrior." Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist
       Perspectives on Ghosts Stories by American Women. Ed. Lynette Carpenter and
        Wendy K. Kolmar. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991. 193-213.

       Sato describes her essay as "read[ing] The Woman Warrior as a distinctly Asian-American text by showing how ‘ghost’ designates a particular as well as a shared Chinese-American existence" (193). In her article, Sato explores how, although in the interpretation of her experience Kingston speaks of what it Chinese and what it American separate from each other, she represents her life as a undichotomized totality of Chinese-American culture, combining both cultures into one single culture. Sato explains that Kingston first separates the the invisible Chinese world from the solid America, but then uses the synthesis of these two in the figure of ghosts (which combines the invisible and the solid) to represent the experiences of the Chinese-American culture. She also examines how Kingston, because she is a Chinese woman born in America and thus separated from both cultures, uses ghosts as constructs in naming and locating her home, not in China or America, but "someplace in between" (Sato 195).
        Sato’s article covers several main points relative to and in support of my argument that Kingston’s The Woman Warrior exists as an autobiography serving to describe the process through which she identifies her self as a Chinese-American. However, despite the elaborate explaination of its main ideas, the article is somewhat confusing in that it contains almost too much information. The extreme length of the article hinders the reader’s ability to somprehend the whole argumetn presented in its entirety.

Zhang, Ya-jie. "A Chinese Woman’s Response to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The
       Woman Warrior." Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: A Casebook.
        Ed. Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 17-21.

       In her article, Zhang, a Chinese woman, expresses the offense she initially take from Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Later, however, as she begins to read the work as an American-Chinese story, Zhang comes to the realization that Kingston’s purpose is not to present the Chinese culture, but to use her stories "to show how a Chinese-American finds her own identity" (18), the struglle she goes through to do so with the old culture in addition to the new, and how she uses her words to deny the old culture and contribute to the new. Zhang realizes that through her stories Kingston finds her voice and fights like a real warrior. The remainder of Zhang’s article is devoted to relating Kingston’s stories to her own personal experiences withing the Chinese culture.
        Zhang’s article is relative to my main thesis that Kingston uses her stories to incover her own identity in that Shang comes to share, and thus also support, this same point of view. Zhang’s statement that she will return home to China and "search for [her] own reed pipe and sing for [her] own kind" (21), as Kingston does through writing The Woman Warrior, serves to summarize my main argument.