Blog 7
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The Woman Warrior's Visible Diasporic Environment
"Chinese-Americans, how do you distinguish between what is Chinese and what is distinctive to your childhood (...), your mother who imprinted your growing up with stories? What movies are there, and what is Chinese tradition? (1976, Kingston, p. 6). Kingston, a second-generation Chinese American, looks back on her upbringing while bridging the cultural divide between her Chinese parents and the community she grew up in. She does this by fusing the autobiographical novel form with Chinese folktales. The protagonist of the book is a young girl who tries to shed her Chinese heritage. portraying it as a conflict she encountered as a child between her Chinese heritage and the American Dream.
Scholars have criticised The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) for its judgmental treatment of Chinese culture because the book neither celebrates Chinese American hybridity nor criticises racial segregation that is deeply ingrained in American culture. The primary source of the criticism that Kingston faces is an attitude that supports multiculturalism and diversity. Multicultural identity and bilingualism are rooted in existential deterioration, but the multiculturalist perception that denigrated her in the 1980s avoided this. Young Kingston might have thought that becoming more American would ease her existential dread.
Written By: Name Style
