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A Palimpsestuous Writing: Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Xiaoqing Liu

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is one of the most successful Asian American literary works. Rather than reading the book as an autobiography of an Asian American girl growing up in Chinatown in America, I view it as a multifarious telling and writing of the stories of Asian American women in their interrelated relationships living in both the past and present in their hyphenated lives between China and America. With her palimpsestuous writing strategy, Kingston reexamines what it means to be an Asian American woman. She not only uncovers what is forbidden, hidden, unspoken, wronged, or covered in the …