Crisis of Genre and Diasporic Identity in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

Abstract

Maxine Hong Kingston makes a conscious choice of presenting a multi-generic narrative in her autobiography, The Woman Warrior (1975) as a method of structural navigation which describes her experiences and struggles while growing up as a Chinese-American girl in California. As a diasporic text this choice of stretching the sacred conventions of autobiographical genre subjects it to scrutiny which primarily focuses on the text’s impact rather than search for meaning for the protagonist. The dispute among critics essentially considers the novel as fiction clumsily disguised as autobiography. This paper argues that the incorporation of talk stories, memory, fact, fiction along with elements of Chinese and American culture enables Kingston to truthfully comprehend a disoriented past where stories of the ‘other’ coexist and help in reconstructing a unique personal self. The deconstruction of generic boundaries in the text become tools for questioning the public-private binary associated with history and autobiography respectively. However, this blurring of distinctions between fiction and non-fiction in the novel is brought about not by ignoring norms of genre but by actively evaluating and engaging with it. An objective retelling of Kingston’s story then relies on multiple subjective experiences and fictious accounts which enable her to situate herself within her family and community and to understand the complexities of Asian-American identity.