Shirley Geok-lin Lim points out in her preface to
Approaches to Teaching Kingston's The Woman Warrior that by revealing the repressed and unspoken stories of her family and of Chinese American history, Kingston is tracing the development of a Chinese American woman finally able to recognize the power of her ethnicity.
The book draws heavily from the myth and legend of Chinese talk stories Kingston heard from her mother while growing up in California. These mysterious tales scramble Kingston's ability to distinguish fact from fiction herself and create a childhood lost in amaze of unusual language, unfamiliar ancestral tradition, and incomprehensible behavior toward girls. These myths are so finely integrated into the women's and girl's stories that comprise The Woman Warrior, it is difficult to determine the spaces between imagination, myth, and real life.
Kingston wrote The Woman Warrior concurrently with her second novel, China Men, believing they would comprise one large book, but the stories split themselves into two volumes by gender, replicating geography and history in which the women maintained their worlds in China while the men sailed to California. Kingston considers it "an 'I' book," created by the voices she hears inside herself.
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