Confirming the Place of “The Other”

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, 1 is perceived also as “oriental,” exotic, and mysterious because it expresses the Chinese American 2 experience. Even when critics evaluate its literariness within the tradition of American literature, they cannot resist marginalizing it. Kingston’s narrative, on the one hand, lends itself to analysis as a quest narrative precisely because it is concerned with questions of self-definition and identity. On the other hand, it resists categorization as individual autobiography because it concurrently interweaves myth, fiction, and reality to create its own unique tapestry of form. It refutes facile distinctions of form that place it as representative of 144either occidental or oriental literature. While Kingston’s memoir is not strictly autobiographical (its subtitle, “Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts,” indicates ambiguity of both form and content), it still deals with a journey or quest. More specifically, it explores the quest of a unique and particular self, one that is female and one whose experience of growing up is both Chinese and American. Caught between two cultures and the product of both, Kingston’s protagonist Maxine, in order to find her authentic self, must negotiate the contradictions between her two worlds before discovering and valorizing her individual cultural uniqueness and otherness from each.