In One Voice: Autobiographical Acts in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Hisaye Yamamoto’s “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara”

Abstract

Abstract In 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts received the National Book Critics Circle Award in the category of nonfiction. Two years later, the autobiography also won for the author the Ainsfield-Wolf Race Relations Award. And during the subsequent decades, the work has garnered astounding praise, becoming according to most estimates the most widely taught text on American college and university campuses, a fact attested to by the Modern Language Association’s publication Approaches to Teaching Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior”; its chapter headings include: “The Woman Warrior in the Women’s Studies Classroom,” “Woman Warriors and Military Students,” and “The Woman Warrior in the History Classroom,” titles that illustrate the popularity of the narrative (Lim, 1991).