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.

In the following essay, Mylan examines what she terms as elements of Orientalism in Kingston's portrayal of her mother in The Woman Warrior.

In the following essay, Nishime traces Kingston's treatment of gender and ethnicity in The Woman Warrior and China Men, and discusses how genre illuminates the author's concept of identity.

Ho is an American educator. In the following essay, she studies the interplay between mother and daughter in The Woman Warrior, and discusses how this interaction illuminates racial and gender-based concerns.

In the following essay, Li surveys how Kingston establishes a uniquely Chinese-American female identity in The Woman Warrior.

In the following essay, Schueller provides an analysis of The Woman Warrior as a work that offers insight into issues of racial, national, and gender identity.

In the following essay, Melchior explores the issues of identity, the traditional Western concept of self, and the American tradition of autobiography raised by Kingston's rendering of her memoir in The Woman Warrior.

TuSmith has been an professor of English at Bowling Green State University and is the author of All My Relatives: Community in Contemporary Ethnic Literatures. In the following essay, she considers Kingston's narrative strategy in The Woman Warrior.

Begum is an educator who has taught literature and feminist criticism at Bowling Green State University. In the following essay, she surveys the manner in which Kingston establishes her own identity as a woman and as a Chinese American in The Woman Warrior.

Goldman has taught women's studies at the University of Victoria and Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. In the following essay, she assesses The Woman Warrior as a postmodern work that offers a distinctive sense of female identity.

Frye is an American educator and the author of Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience. In the following essay, she argues that in The Woman Warrior, Kingston portrays an image of female selfhood that is both imaginative and realistic.

In the following essay, Mitchell delineates Kingston's integration of oral storytelling into her written narrative in The Woman Warrior.

In the following essay, Hunt examines Kingston's treatment of the conflict and confusion created by her various roles as a woman and as a member of separate and distinct cultures and classes.

In the following review of The Woman Warrior, Homsher lauds the volume and analyzes Kingston's fictionalized approach to autobiography.

In the following essay, Johnston explores Kingston's use of myth in The Woman Warrior.

In autobiography, the told story often is accompanied by the untold one. In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, the idea of autobiography is accompanied by the vision of the stuttering girl, the woman of whom nothing is known, the girl who refuses to speak, the girl with the cut tongue, the one whose throat hurts, the one who quacks like a duck, and the one who talks so much that she is considered mad. Even as Kingston gives a voice to her own life, she is also offering us their suppressed coll...

"China Men," using the same techniques as "The Woman Warrior"—the blend of myth, legend and history, the fevered voice, relentless as a truth-seeking child's—is impelled by Mrs. Kingston's need to understand the men with whom she is connected: her father, grandfather, brother, mythic figures…. Mrs. Kingston begins her quest for understanding with her own father. But whereas her mother, Brave Orchid, was full of "talk-story," her fa...

China Men is not a sequel to The Woman Warrior but a companion piece, an amplification. It revolves, again, around the author's family, who operated a laundry in Stockton, California. Both parents were born in China, and their first two children died there. Six others, born later in the US, are Americanized on the surface—casual, impatient, disconcertingly direct—but beneath the surface, haunted by a sense of being different. (p. 32) It becomes apparent fairly early in China Men that th...

"China Men" contemplates exile; it seeks to explain exile by recovering history from deceit. It is quite as wonderful as "The Woman Warrior," but angrier…. The anger in "China Men" causes some seams, some scars, in its narrative that were not apparent in "The Woman Warrior." She stops to tell us, year by year, of discriminatory legislation against the Chinese in this country; her indignation is a hook in her throat; she is properly outraged at t...

In this exquisitely written book [The Woman Warrior], Maxine Hong Kingston has given us a picture of the American life of a Chinese-American woman, mediated through the stories and myths that her mother has told her about China. The interweaving of experience, legend, and history, played against the background of two totally different cultures, gives an extraordinary sense of both worlds. Yet the most important contribution of the book is the entrance into the mind and emotions of this complex and fascinati...

Exiles and refugees tell sad stories of the life they left behind. Even sadder, sometimes, is the muteness of their children. They are likely to find the old ways and old language excess baggage, especially if their adopted homeland is the U.S., where the race is to the swift and the adaptable. Thus a heritage of centuries can die in a generation of embarrassed silence. The Woman Warrior gives that silence a voice. Subtitled Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, this astonishingly accomplished first book ...

["The Woman Warrior"] is a brilliant memoir. It shocks us out of our facile rhetoric, past the clichés of our obtuseness, back to the mystery of a stubbornly, utterly foreign sensibility, and I cannot think of another book since Andre Malraux's melancholy artifice, "La Tentation de l'Occident," that even starts to do this. "The Woman Warrior" is about being Chinese, in the way the "Portrait of the Artist" is about being Irish. It i...

The Woman Warrior is a strange, sometimes savagely terrifying and, in the literal sense, wonderful story of growing up caught between two highly sophisticated and utterly alien cultures, both vivid, often menacing and equally mysterious. Reality in its bewildering complexity is at the heart of it: what appears to our senses, the mind transforms, into a whole set of myths and phantoms (language, number, emotion, relation, abstraction) to become what we perceive as real. Ghosts from the Chinese past may thus ...