Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

The Woman Warrior, the fictional non-fiction novel by Maxine Hong Kingston, despite its positive commercial and critical reception, has been the subject of controversies over the years, especially among Asian-American readers and critics. While it is easy to read the Orientalist elements in her book as betraying Kingston’s attempt to distance herself from her mother and the Chinese culture, or as an indication that she unconsciously normalizes Western cultural traditions and favors them over Eastern ones, it is, perhaps, a fairer and more beneficial interpretation to consider it as a meta-narrative that points out the Occidental misunderstanding of the Asian-American experience as problematic. The narrator’s exploration of various facets of

To Westerners, whose Eurocentric world view is the norm, Asian America has with it the threatening “exoticism, foreignness, passivity, and obsolescence” (Chong, 182) that are shockingly different.. This ethnocentric Western culture separated itself from the East with all of its “Suzie Wongs, Charlie Chans, and Fu Manchus” (Chong, 182) and blindly merged “disparate peoples from Asia and Africa into an undifferentiated mass of colonial subjects, slaves, servants, and unwanted immigrants” (Chong, 182), creating “Orientalism”, the “Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient” (Chong, 182), with all of its incessant prejudices against the Asian peoples and their cultures derived from Western fantasy of what the Oriental is. Hence, those who embrace an Orientalist view see a world that is divided into the West and the East, an impassable gulf between ideologies. As they do not understand this difference, they fear it and so turn to its neutralization through disempowerment. Asian Americans who live in such a society that suspects and looks down on them must often endure being cast as “foreigners’ indelibly marked with their racial origins elsewhere” (Chong, 183), not as equal consumers of the mainstream American culture with their own cultural

Readers are led to see that even Kingston, an Asian-American scholar in her own right, conststly expresses a sense of confusion, loss, and incomprehension. In essence, the narrator serves as the avatar for the book’s non-Asian readers, the majority of whom has ever only known the Asian American culture peripherally and not explored any further, who has not made the effort to explore and understand, because such efforts require from them a more than superficial comprehension of race and the Asian culture. The narrator’s status as a stand-in for readers extend to Asian American readers as well, specifically those whose understanding of Asian American culture is solely dependent on what is told to them or what they have heard and are content with it, not through academic study or in-depth exploration; through talk-stories like the narrator. The identities of these Asian American readers are formed by the very stories they hear, so to explore further and risk discovery of these stories being in accurate could undermine the integrity of these basic building blocks of their identities and threaten their ideas of self. This is what makes the narrator so effective, because she is a contemporary character whose ill-informed knowledge of and reactions to the events of the past and realties of race and culture allow