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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Between Solid America and Fragile Chinatown in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

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description

The article traces mixed affiliations of the narrator of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), permanently split between the world of Chinatown and broader American society outside Chinatown, both places crucial for the narrator in the on-going process of subjectivity construction. While both of these worlds constantly interpellate her, each of them entails a fair measure of hindrance and empowerment. The article undermines the criticism leveled at Kingston’s The Woman Warrior by a section of the Chinese American community represented primarily by Frank Chin. Chin accused Kingston of pandering to white tastes and white readers’ expectations of Chinese American authors. That, according to Chin, was achieved through the estrangement of Chinatown and its inhabitants as well as the criticism of the Chinese American community. I illustrate in the article that the narrator’s pronouncements on Chinatown or broader America outside Chinatown are neither equivocal nor arrived at without tension, internal struggle or misgiving at choosing one world and at least partly leaving the other one behind.