SOURCE: "Confirming the Place of 'The Other': Gender and Ethnic Identity in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior," in New Perspectives on Women and Comedy, edited by Regina Barreca, Gordon and Breach, 1992, pp. 143-56.

Begum is an educator who has taught literature and feminist criticism at Bowling Green State University. In the following essay, she surveys the manner in which Kingston establishes her own identity as a woman and as a Chinese American in The Woman Warrior.

The personal quest motif appears frequently in the literature of occidental societies, but rarely surfaces in that of oriental cultures, where integration with the community and family takes precedence over individuation of self. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: A Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, analyzed by most critics as a quest for identity, is perceived also as "oriental," exotic, and mysterious because it expresses the Chinese American experience. Even...