The Woman Warrior, written by Chinese-American author Maxine Hong Kingston, is a collection of five interconnected short stories that depict her personal and family experiences in the United States. The novel incorporates Chinese elements to make it culturally authentic, and Kingston particularly highlights moments of sexism and controversial Chinese politics. However, the book's misinterpretation and misuse of Chinese folktales undermine its cultural authenticity. Moreover, I suspect that the book reinforces traditional stereotypes of Chinese people and is largely distorted due to the ideological conflict between capitalism and communism.

Instead of introducing actual Chinese folktales and historical stories, Kingston intentionally modifies their styles and spiritual connotations to satisfy Westerners' flawed assumptions about Chinese folk literature. For example, her story "White Tigers" describes the legend of a female warrior who rallies uprising peasants to subvert the old regime, and together they ultimately execute the evil landed aristocrats. This piece incorporates traditional Chinese legendary figures, including Yue Fei and Hua Mu Lan. Unsurprisingly, the use of these well-known Chinese elements manipulates foreigners and manages to persuade them that this fabricated piece is an authentic Chinese story. However, when comparing the message delivered in this synthesized story with the actual connotations of this and other Chinese folktales, it is obvious that Kingston irresponsibly modified the Chinese characters to suit her tale. The two core themes of "White Tigers" are feminism and revenge. Kingston utilizes the woman warrior's leadership to illustrate the strong capabilities of female characters, and she uses her protagonist's execution of the baron as a symbol of revenge against social inequalities. In contrast to authentic Chinese cultural history, neither the legend of Hua Mu Lan nor the history of Yue Fei illustrates either of these connotations. Instead, the authentic tales reflect bravery, courage, and patriotism. In China, a legend is not regarded as a legend simply because its underlying significance overweighs the description of the fantasy. Kingston's misinterpretation and misuse of Chinese fables to please foreign readers deviate from the essence of Chinese folktales. Thus, such works detract from China's cultural identity and cannot represent authentic Chinese culture.

To reinforce the book's motifs of feminism and sexism, the author describes the rampant human trafficking in Old China. Although such descriptions help Kingston develop her character as a Western feminist, she does not provide any historical background and tampers with the reality of Chinese history. For example, in the story "Shaman," she depicts her mother buying an enslaved woman at the market. Some of her accounts reveal her morbid, evil, and unsympathetic nature:

"I watch them with envy. My mother's enthusiasm for me is duller than for the slave girl; nor did I replace the older brother and sister who died while they were still cuddly. Throughout my childhood, my younger sister said, 'When I grow up, I want to be a slave,' and my parents laughed, encouraging her."

It is unbelievable that such words come from a published autobiography of a feminist. Kingston does not sympathize with the young, enslaved women traded like commodities in markets in this extract. Instead, she is selfishly jealous of the favor accorded the enslaved person by her mother; even more irresponsibly,  she does not reflect on such erroneous and apathetic thoughts throughout the rest of the book. Furthermore, she does not tell the readers that the ordinary peasants of Old China were so impoverished and bankrupt that they had to sell their children to afford temporary survival. Kingston fails to realize the brutal reality that when people cannot sustain themselves, there is no room left for kindness and morality. Unlike the characters in Kingston's accounts, the hapless parents of Old China who had to sell their children never encouraged their offspring to become enslaved. The decision to sell one's children is an act borne of misery, frustration, and pain. I question whether such a selfish, unsympathetic, ignorant person can be a feminist.

In addition to falsely portraying the author as a true feminist, The Woman Warrior reinforces Western stereotypes about Chinese people. Kingston intentionally characterizes the Chinese as benighted, ignorant, and xenophobic. In her story "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," the family regards a medicine delivery boy as an inauspicious omen and clamors to "avenge this wrong on our future, our health, and on our lives." Chinese culture bears a long-lasting tradition of families hoping for health, peace, and well-being. Many have established a firm connection between drugs and diseases and often resent discussing medical issues. In the story, Kingston converts the genuine will of the Chinese to live healthy lives into hostility against the drug delivery boy, thus suggesting that this ethnic group is unenlightened and unsophisticated.

Moreover, Kingston overtly claims that Chinese people refer to foreigners as "ghosts," further reiterating the stereotype that they are xenophobic. She claims, "But America has been full of machines and ghosts—Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts." Again, Kingston utilizes the general Western public's ignorance of China's suffering and humiliation between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. During that period, China suffered constant foreign invasion: the two Opium Wars, the Eight-Power Allied Force's aggression, and the Sino-Japanese Wars. The foreign invading forces torched, massacred, raped, and looted the populace and its land. The most brutal atrocities occurred in Nanjing in December 1937, where Japanese troops massacred 300,000 Chinese people. Therefore, the beleaguered Chinese cursed them as "ghosts" to show resentment against these violent invaders. However, without providing this essential historical context, Kingston depicts Chinese society as xenophobic and hostile.    

As traditional Western media outlets are also known to do, Kingston mischievously utilizes propaganda tactics, including sophistry, overbearing logic, generalization, and even shameless feigning to criticize communism in an unwarranted manner. For example, in the story "White Tigers," the author claims that several uncles, as landlords, were put to trial and subsequently "executed like the barons in stories, when they were not barons." Kingston uses the technique of changing concepts to confound Western readers. She intentionally changes the term "landlord" to "baron" and uses her concocted story as alleged evidence to prove that the uncles were innocent villagers. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a baron is "a low-ranking male member of the nobility," while a landlord is "a person or organization that owns a building or an area of land and is paid by other people for the use of it." A baron is an aristocrat – a noble – but a landlord is not a highborn individual. Kingston manipulates the slight difference between the terms baron and landlord, attempting to justify that her uncles should not have received adverse treatment. Maintaining a disturbing pattern, she again fails to provide a historical context by omitting the fact that Chinese peasants were once treated atrociously by landlords, thus deceiving Western readers and attacking communism. Moreover, she asserts that the "Immigrants nowadays were bandits, beating up store owners and stealing from them rather than working. It must've been the communists who taught them those habits." Such ridiculous lies are so unfounded that they cannot survive any logical deduction. Most immigrants who left China for the United States were opponents of communism. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that they would be emulating the traits of the communist society that they purposefully fled.

As a twenty-first-century reader who understands Chinese culture and history, I am deeply shocked and disheartened by Kingston's overt distortion of Chinese culture to satisfy the taste of Westerners; her selfish, shameless, and deceitful nature is hidden under the guise of a Western feminist, and her arrogant pronouncements are devoid of conscience. The content I digested in The Woman Warrior was never a true representation of Chinese cultural identity. Instead, I discovered a distorted account of Chinese culture, reinforcements of the Western world's false stereotypes of the Chinese people, and the hidden conflict between two rival ideologies.