In the following article, Ling contrasts the role of woman as victim and victor in Kingston's The Woman Warrior.

In Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts [1982], Albert Stone identifies several situations which he calls "occasions" for the writing of autobiography. The first is "the situation of an old man looking back over a long career and significant stretch of history to recapture the personal past against the background of sweeping cultural change." As examples of this type, Stone discusses The Education of Henry Adams and the Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, though the most famous example, of course, would be Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography.... Stone's second autobiographical occasion is the account of one's spiritual growth or journey, as Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), Black Elk Speaks (1931), and more recently Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). A third occasion is physical or psychic violence, as recorded in the lives...