Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: A Casebook. Ed. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. x, 193pp.

Maxine Hong Kingston. By Diane Simmons. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999. xii, 187pp.

Reviewed by Georgina Dodge

_Casebooks are valuable sources for examining specific texts, and
Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: A Casebook, edited by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, is no exception. I reaped the benefits of both the background information and critical analyses contained within the casebook by assigning essays from it to an undergraduate writing class for English majors. The primary reading for the course was Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and in addition to providing students with a historical basis for approaching that text, the casebook also gave them excellent examples of ways to argue and structure their own critical essays. Reading autobiographies often leads students to write autobiographical papers, but the essays in the casebook showed them how to engage with Kingston's text in an analytical manner.

After students read The Woman Warrior for the first time, I assigned the introduction to the casebook, which allowed us to discuss the genre of casebooks as well as Wong's subject position as editor and a Chinese-American woman. One student observed that she had not yet read a critical text in which the author/editor addressed her own ethnic background in relation to her critical stance. This led to a discussion about the expectation and reception of "ethnic" texts versus that of more "mainstream" works, a theme that we would return to again and again with each essay from the casebook. The specificities of Chinese and Chinese-American identities in all of the essays made students conscious of the canonical literary framework in which The Woman Warrior exists. Although severely limited, a selection of four photographs in the middle of the book provided them with some visual framework for the text, including a picture of a Stockton street and one of a rally at Berkeley. The casebook is conveniently divided into four sections that focus on particular themes, ("Setting Forth Issues and Debates"; "Gender, Genre, and `Theory'"; "A Chinese American Tradition in an Era of `Multiculturalism'"; and "An Interview"), but I found it more fruitful to assign the essays in an order that better introduced the primary text to students.

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

The first essay we read was Wong's, "Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour? Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and the Chinese American Autobiography Controversy," which discusses some of the important scholarship on The Woman Warrior, focusing on the responses of Chinese-American critics to the text. The essay moves from the specific controversy over Kingston's (mis)representation of Chinese myth and culture to a more general consideration of fact versus fiction within autobiographical writing, providing an ideal vehicle for complicating students' limited notion of autobiography as simply "truth." Wong also addresses the status of the ethnic autobiographer as representative of her ethnic group, an approach that was valuable to class discussions of what constitutes community and what an author's responsibility is to her community. In particular, the argument of some critics that the book perpetuates stereotypes of a rabidly sexist Chinese/Chinese-American patriarchal culture led to a lively debate about the normative role assigned to men's writing versus the deviant label given to women's creative acts.

Women's writing against patriarchal culture is the subject of Sidonie Smith's article, "Filiality and Woman's Autobiographical Storytelling," which is excerpted from her book, A Poetics of Women's Autobiography (1987). Smith's essay is particularly valuable in that it examines each of the chapters in The Woman Warrior as a distinct narrative while also analyzing the text in its entirety. The importance of autobiography to female self-representation is central to the essay, which considers Kingston's ability to provide subjectivity to herself and to her female relatives. But gaining a voice is not simply empowering for women; it can also provide a way to perpetuate male oppression. Through a focus on the relationship between the narrator and her mother, Brave Orchid, Smith shows how women are complicit in their own subjugation even while subverting patriarchy. The essay provides a balanced approach to the text that helped students see that the narrator is not simply a heroic figure but one who must negotiate various cultural and personal quandaries in order to construct an ideal identity as woman, daughter, and Chinese American. Smith traces connections between the narrator and her community of women to show where their motives intersect but also where they diverge. The autobiographical act allows the narrator to reconstruct relationships even as she creates an identity outside of the limited female roles occupied by the Chinese-American women in her life.

The connection between Kingston and her literary predecessors is the topic of Amy Ling's essay, "Chinese American Women Writers: The Tradition behind Maxine Hong Kingston." The essay was particularly important in making students aware of a Chinese-American literary

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tradition that predates Kingston. As Ling states, "With the exception of Maxine Hong Kingston, most scholars of American literature are at a loss to name Chinese American women writers" (136). Beginning with the Eaton sisters, Ling traces the literary history of Chinese-American women's writing, examining texts by the Lin sisters, Jade Snow Wong, Helena Kuo, Mai-mai Sze, Han Suyin, Diana Chang, Chuang Hua, and others. Ling's brief summation of works is skillfully accomplished; we were able to discuss main features of these earlier works, connecting them to The Woman Warrior, without having to read the entire list of primary texts that Ling cites. Considering Kingston's textual perspective in relation to those of her Chinese-American literary ancestors helped students better understand the various cultural and literary sensibilities that influence the production of autobiographical texts.

Distinctions between historical periods and the political purposes of different authors that are central to Ling's essay provide a thoughtful connection to Reed Way Dasenbrock's "Intelligibility and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English (Excerpts)." While Dasenbrock's essay is edited to highlight his discussion of The Woman Warrior, his invitation to appreciate the unintelligibility of all multicultural texts is profitable. This essay was particularly helpful in granting students permission to be puzzled about certain aspects of The Woman Warrior. Rather than simply explain away their confusion through Americentric cultural concepts, students felt encouraged to consider how a Chinese perspective towards specific words, themes, and even the United States itself might differ from their own. They became more adept at distinguishing between universal experiences that enabled them to relate their own lives to that of the narrator in The Woman Warrior and the unique circumstances of the protagonist's situation as a Chinese-American woman.

The idea of a more global perspective was useful in discussing the essay "A Chinese Woman's Response to Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior," by Ya-Jie Zhang, a visiting professor from China. The short essay helped students better understand that The Woman Warrior is not simply a Chinese text, even though it may seem "foreign" or not fully American. They empathized with Zhang's seeming confusion about exactly what to do with the text. She says in her essay that "now I want to take back this story to teach [in China]" (18), but she ends the essay by stating that "I will not teach this book to my students after my return to China" (21). My students hoped that she would indeed teach The Woman Warrior in China. They felt that the understanding Zhang gained about a specifically Chinese-American perspective could be valuable to mainland Chinese who might only experience the United

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

States through mainstream television and films, which present primarily white androcentric points of view.

We shifted our attention to a general discussion of gender through the next assigned essay, Leslie W. Rabine's "Social Gender and Symbolic Gender in the Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston." Comparisons made between The Woman Warrior and Kingston's China Men in the essay left some students who had not read the latter text a bit disconcerted, but Rabine's central distinction between the social bodies of women, which are subject to oppression, versus the symbolic status of "feminism," which can be liberated through language, resonated with the class. Rabine's examination of gender and gender roles through theories of Cixous and Irigary led us from the essay on to considerations of performative gender through Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. Students were fascinated by the concept that heterosexual practices reinforce gender identities and roles in ways that are often oppressive. I found Rabine's essay an important vehicle that enabled the class to engage with issues of sexuality that led to some highly original and thought-provoking student theories of The Woman Warrior.

King-Kok Cheung's "The Woman Warrior versus the Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism?" brought us back to specific gender issues surrounding the text. Cheung examines the ways in which Asian men and women are stereotyped in America and the reaction by Chinese-American writers and critics to those images. Specifically, Cheung shows how the cooption of the male Chinese heroic tradition by Kingston in The Woman Warrior and the feminization of Chinese-American men in China Men have led Chinese-American male critics to attack Kingston for participating in white America's emasculation of Asian men. She reads this conflict in light of divisions between white and nonwhite feminist, weaving the two points of strife together to show "where the problems of race and gender are closely intertwined" (113). The essay provided students with an intelligent and balanced analytical perspective through which to consider our next reading.

Frank Chin's "The Most Popular Book in China" would certainly prove confusing to anyone not familiar with the now-classic Kingston/Chin controversy. By gaining some critical exposure to the roots of Chin's antagonism towards The Woman Warrior through previous essays, students were better able to understand his critique of Kingston's autobiography and David Henry Hwang's Tony Award-winning play, M. Butterfly (1988), which also features a cross-gendered Asian. But most fascinating was the students' response to Chin's rendition of the Joan of Arc myth. Some aspects of his parody of Kingston and Hwang, titled "Unmanly Warrior by Smith Mei-jing," were read as "true" by

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several students who had no previous exposure to the story of Joan of Arc. Chin's essay provided us with an excellent example of how stereotypes can be introduced or reinforced by literature, and it made students reconsider their earlier assertions that any author should be able to write "whatever she wants" without explaining or clarifying her aims and perspective.

The responsibilities of the ethnic writer towards her community links all of the essays in the book and provides a focal point for considering the diverse approaches that are used. My only complaint about the casebook is that most of the essays engage with the Kingston/Chin debate to some extent, and I felt it was inappropriate to have students enter into that specific conflict without first reading works by Chin as well as later texts by Kingston, particularly Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989). By concentrating on the theme of ethnic representation more generally, I sought to expose students to important aspects of the text other than its position as the site of Chinese-American gender wars.

The final essay in the casebook, "Susan Brownmiller Talks with Maxine Hong Kingston, Author of The Woman Warrior," was a refreshing departure from the interethnic conflict informing the essays. The interview was conducted shortly after publication of the autobiography and was held in Hawaii, where Kingston then resided. For students, the interview helped to make Kingston seem less "exotic" and also punctured some of their stereotypes about Asian cultures. They were disappointed to discover that the term "talk story" was not from Kingston's Chinese heritage but a Hawaiian phrase, which forced them to question their own assumptions and expectations of the ethnic Other. As a mediated form of self-writing, the interview enabled them to consider the craft and agency responsible for the creation of The Woman Warrior.

Interviews are an important source of biographical information in another book useful for approaching The Woman Warrior as well as Kingston's other works: the Twayne's United States Authors Series title Maxine Hong Kingston by Diane Simmons. Although I did not assign the book to the class, I found it a useful reference tool for providing background information about Kingston and her books. In particular, a two-page version of the "The Ballad of Mulan," which I read aloud to the class, contributed to an enthusiastic discussion about artistic license and cultural appropriation. Maxine Hong Kingston begins with a chronology and a biographical essay that gives an overview of Kingston's publishing history and is enlivened by personal anecdotes. Copious footnotes to this chapter provide an extensive bibliography of Kingston criticism and interviews. The next three chapters focus on The Woman Warrior, and Simmons's interpretations of that text are

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both thorough and interesting. Her close reading of The Woman Warrior is occasionally supplemented by the opinions of other critics, but Simmons mostly engages with the primary text. This same approach is used in chapters six and seven, which focus on China Men and Tripmaster Monkey, respectively.

Much like Wong's casebook, Maxine Hong Kingston ends with a short interview that was conducted by Simmons in 1997. In that interview, Kingston discusses her novel manuscript, The Book of Peace, which was lost when her Oakland home burned in a 1991 wildfire. In rewriting the book, she says that more personal perspectives are replacing the fictional characters of the original version. The new Fifth Book of Peace seeks to resolve conflict and to celebrate heroism without war. When asked, "Do you feel that you owe a debt to the community? Do you have to save the world, as you get in position to do so?," Kingston answers succinctly, "Yeah" (164). The link between the author and her community, however that community is defined, is a crucial element of Kingston's writing that reviewers and critics appear to recognize.

Both Wong's casebook and Simmons's author study contain short annotated bibliographies that list major studies of Kingston's works. The index at the end of Simmons's text is very detailed and useful; an index would have made the casebook a friendlier tool. While each text presents the Kingston scholar with specific approaches and analyses of her texts and life, together they provide a comprehensive examination of one of America's great authors.

Ohio State University