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  • The Woman WarriorHer Planetary Asian American Imagination
  • Shirley Geok-lin Lim (bio)

When Maxine Hong Kingston's first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, came out in 1976, a number of academic friends, inferring that my immigrant Asian background would tilt me toward the book, suggested strongly I check it out. I was so offended by their blatant stereotyping that I did not read the book until three years later, when I began serious research into Asian American literature, then merely a nascent subarea in an emerging subfield—ethnic American studies—in the field of American studies. For a recent immigrant who had come to the US to study American literature, American studies in the second half of the twentieth century was strangely and unaccountably an interdisciplinary matrix of scholarly interests in universities structured on the power interests of dominant disciplinary departments; it was, I discovered, apparently absolutely marginalized in comparison, for example, to the center of modern language studies, English literature from Beowulf to T.S. Eliot.

Most American undergraduates, deep into googling, texting, tweeting, blogging, vlogging, Blackberrying, and more, do not know and in fact do not care that they do not know of the canon wars that wrecked The Norton Anthology of American Literature as we knew it in 1979 (first edition), pre-Heath, where almost all the authors established for national recognition were white and men. In 1969, however, N. Scott Momaday had won the Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn (1968); and Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) convincingly engaged the modernist tradition and made visible an earlier canon of Native American writing that the Norton had blithely ignored. Katherine Newman, as blithely ignoring the power of the canon, brought together academics bored witless with the oppressive centrality of New England Transcendentals, of the Lowells, from James Russell to Amy to Robert, the crushing maleness of the expatriate duo, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and began an interest group, MELUS (Multi-ethnic Literature of the United States), to study some different texts. Slowly and then faster, the Modern Language Association opened its New York headquarter doors to similarly inclined scholars. By the time Amy Ling and I proposed that the MLA establish an Asian American Discussion Group, the MLA Executive Committee was pleased to agree, resulting in the current status of an entire Division devoted to Asian American literary studies and to the visibility of this particular canon in the US and globally.

Our proposal was grounded on Amy's pioneering work on Chinese American women writers and my own attempt to recuperate a tradition of Asian American writing out of seemingly disparate texts. But, speaking for myself, much of the conviction that drove my research and writing was powered by the astonishingly multi-layered, richly stylized, provocatively historicized, mythologized, feminist, aesthetic achievement of Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Arguably, if it weren't for the incontrovertible genius of Kingston's English language (recognized almost unanimously, as seen in John Leonard's note that China Men [1980] is "sheer magic"), narrative tactics, and imaginative pyrotechnics displayed in all of her books (including China Men, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book [1989], To Be the Poet [2002], and The Fifth Book of Peace [2003]), we would not now be seeing the present academic respect and publishing support for Asian American writing.

So, if there is one Asian American book I would teach at my university, it is The Woman Warrior (and alternatively, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, or The Fifth Book of Peace).

The phenomenon of attention-grabbing first books has been around for as long as mass print publishing. Think of Jane Austen's first publication, Sense and Sensibility (1811) that so intrigued both the emerging genteel mercantile class and the aristocratic elite of England. That her triumphant first book was followed by Pride and Prejudice (1813), still beloved all over the English-reading universe, and then by a string of similar masterpieces is what makes Austen the time-defying figure she remains today, even in a youth-besotted, novelty-seeking Hollywood. So too with Kingston. I held my breath after the astonishing appearance of The Woman Warrior...

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