The Divided Voice of Chinese-American Narration: Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter

Abstract

Blinde is to be commended for her close and careful textual analysis of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of Girlhood Among Ghosts, published in 1976.1 However, in her critical analysis of Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, published thirty years earlier in 1945, Blinde displays marked prejudice based on superficial and biased reading of Wong's book.2 Her analysis of Kingston's The Woman Warrior is excellent. Blinde clearly demonstrates that Kingston's confusion in growing up as Chinese-American woman is revealed in her literary choice of a collage of genres, form which Blinde rightly identifies as demanding esthetic considerations beyond those accorded the static solidity of literatures that are easily designated 'novels,' 'autobiography,' or 'poems' (PLB, pp. 52, 53). Her well-thought-out thesis is appropriately complemented by her enviable style of writing, by her well-balanced sentence structure and her almost musical flow of words.