in Wong 249), and Jeffery Chan accuses Kingston of “distributing an obvious fiction for fact” (qtd. For instance, Benjamin Tong describes The Woman Warrior as “fiction passing for autobiography” (qtd. In her article “Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour? Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and the Chinese-American Autobiographical Controversy,” Sau-ling Cynthia Wong collects and discusses criticism from numerous scholars who dismiss The Woman Warrior as a work of fiction clumsily disguised as autobiography. But while the work capitalizes on the conventions of various genres, it also evades the limitations of any one genre” (qtd. Critic Patricia Blinde refers to The Woman Warrior as “a collage of genres” and describes the book thus: “It is at once a novel, an autobiography, a series of essays and poems.

In fact, epitomizing the genre debate, the book itself is labeled “Fiction/Literature” on the back cover, while the front cover proclaims the novel’s acquisition of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. The actual genre of The Woman Warrior, however, has been widely disputed among critics. In 1975, Maxine Hong Kingston published her critically acclaimed autobiography, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, which describes her experiences and struggles while growing up as a Chinese-American girl in California.

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