Since its publication in 1976, The Woman Warrior has maintained a "vexed reception history that both attests to its popularity and questions it."[8] Much of the debate concerns "autobiographical accuracy, cultural authenticity, and ethnic representativeness,"[11] while the central concern is whether or not Kingston offers a faithful representation of Chinese and Chinese American culture.[8]
Asian American scholars have expressed strong criticisms of The Woman Warrior. Writer Jeffery Paul Chan criticized Kingston for posing the book as non-fiction despite the many fictional elements of its stories. He stated that Kingston gave a distorted view of Chinese culture: one that is partially based on her own experience, but mostly fictional. Chan also noted Kingston's mistranslation of the Cantonese term, "ghost", and Benjamin R. Tong, another Asian American writer, stated that this mistranslation was done deliberately to "suit white tastes so that her book would sell better."[3]
Benjamin R.Tong.Jeffery Paul Chan.Tong further stated, based on The Woman Warrior's fictionalized elements and inaccuracies about Chinese culture and history, that Kingston manipulates her white audience by giving them what they think is Chinese culture, which in reality is only a caricature based on Western stereotypes of Chinese people.[3]
Scholar Sheryl Mylan stated that Kingston constructs an Orientalist framework to separate herself from her mother and her culture, but in the process she replicates the ideologies of the American culture. Professor Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong stated that Kingston's "Orientalist effect" is the result of Kingston's failure to commensurately critique the patriarchal values or institutional racism of Western society, resulting in a lopsided and biased commentary regarding Chinese culture.[11] Scholar David Li suggested that The Woman Warrior functions as "a means of contesting power between the dominant culture and the ethnic community; whose value lies in foregrounding the representational issues that have accompanied growth of Asian American creative and critical production."[11]
Among the most caustic criticisms was author and playwright Frank Chin's, who accused Kingston of being "unChinese" and "a fake".[12] Chin criticized Kingston for giving her readers a fictional and exaggerated representation of Chinese people based on American stereotypes, and also criticized her readers for accepting these stereotypes.[12] Chin also accused Kingston of "practising an inauthentic Orientalism inherited from the apologetic autobiographies written in the Chinese American 'high' tradition."[12]
Frank Chin.In Kingston's defense, reviewer Deborah L. Madsen claimed that this accusation showed Chin's tendency to privilege the low, working-class tradition of Chinese American writing as "authentic", which is not Kingston's tradition. Madsen claimed that autobiographical Chinese American writing is full of competing discourses that differ both culturally and racially, and as Chinese American writers seek both Chinese ethnicity and American citizenship, the result may be "a subversion of racial authenticity", which she believed to be the case with Kingston.[12] Other reviewers, such as Jeehyun Lim, believed that the criticism accusing Kingston of representing the Chinese American community as barbaric "misreads her play with ideas of foreignness and nativeness."[8]
In 1982, Kingston herself wrote a rebuttal essay entitled, "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers", in which she disparaged her critics who she believed were insisting she represent the Chinese to some standard of excellence. "Why must I 'represent' anyone besides myself?" Kingston asked.[13] Others, however, noted that Kingston's stories are fictional and therefore do not represent herself, either. The San Francisco Association of Chinese Teachers warned: "Especially for students unfamiliar with the Chinese background, [The Woman Warrior] could give an overly negative impression of the Chinese American experience."[14] Even a Chinese American female scholar sympathetic to Kingston wrote that "for a minority author to exercise such artistic freedom is perilous business because white critics and reviewers persist in seeing [fictional] expressions by [Kingston] as no more than cultural history."[14]
