SOURCE: "Literary Tricksterism: Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts," in Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, edited by Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 279-94.

TuSmith has been an professor of English at Bowling Green State University and is the author of All My Relatives: Community in Contemporary Ethnic Literatures. In the following essay, she considers Kingston's narrative strategy in The Woman Warrior.

When an ethnic female writer publishes an "autobiography," she is immediately confronted with inappropriate expectations. As readers we must realize, for example, that neither the Ben Franklin paradigm nor the exotic world of Suzie Wong are valid points of reference for interpreting Woman Warrior. Ultimately, we must read the work on its own terms. In reading Kingston's "autobiography," we must recognize that the writer is a creative...