The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is a book written by Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1976.

With this mixture, Kingston tries to provide her audience with the cultural, familial, and personal context needed to understand her unique position as a first-generation Chinese-American woman.

[2] Susan Stanford Friedman's assessment of autobiography with regard to women and minority groups explains Kingston's intricate blend of perspective and genre: women and cultural minorities often don't have the privilege of viewing themselves as individuals isolated from their gender or racial group.

In the first part of "White Tigers", Kingston recounts her mother's talk-story of Fa Mu Lan, a woman warrior who took her father's place in battle.

"At the Western Palace" opens with Brave Orchid, her two children, and her niece at San Francisco International Airport.

In an essay about The Woman Warrior, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong writes about "the protagonist's struggle toward a balance between self-actualization and social responsibility... identified as 'Necessity' and 'Extravagance.

'"[3][clarification needed] The language of The Woman Warrior invokes a complex juxtaposition of cultural and linguistic voices.

[7] It was this habit that allowed Kingston to complete The Woman Warrior in just three years while teaching at a boarding school that demanded she be on call twenty-four hours a day.

"[9] In terms of Kingston's decision-making process in what to include and exclude from her story, she admits to using only what she deemed was "necessary" cultural imagery.

This, of course, was a very subjective endeavor on her part, and, in a more recent reflection she had on The Woman Warrior, Kingston was quoted as calling the cultural references "really Chinese.

Writer Jeffery Paul Chan criticized Kingston for posing the book as non-fiction despite the many fictional elements of its stories.

He stated that Kingston gave a distorted view of Chinese culture: one that is partially based on her own experience, but mostly fictional.

[11] Scholar David Li suggested that The Woman Warrior functions as "a means of contesting power between the dominant culture and the ethnic community; whose value lies in foregrounding the representational issues that have accompanied growth of Asian American creative and critical production.

[12] Chin also accused Kingston of "practising an inauthentic Orientalism inherited from the apologetic autobiographies written in the Chinese American 'high' tradition.

[12] Other reviewers, such as Jeehyun Lim, believed that the criticism accusing Kingston of representing the Chinese American community as barbaric "misreads her play with ideas of foreignness and nativeness.

"[8] In 1982, Kingston herself wrote a rebuttal essay entitled, "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers", in which she disparaged her critics who she believed were insisting she represent the Chinese to some standard of excellence.