SOURCE: "Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour? Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and the Chinese-American Autobiographical Controversy," in Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives, edited by James Robert Payne, University of Tennessee Press, 1992, pp. 248-79.

Born in Hong Kong, Wong has been a professor in the Asian American studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of From Necessity to Extravagance: Contexts and Intertexts in Asian American Literature. In the following essay, she surveys the controversial critical reaction to The Woman Warrior.

Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiography, The Woman Warrior, may be the best-known contemporary work of Asian-American literature. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best book of nonfiction published in 1976, The Woman Warrior remains healthily in print and on the reading lists of numerous college courses; excerpts from it are routinely featured in anthologies with a multicultural slant. It is safe to...