Preface
Nothing says more about the almost irreconcilable tension between feminist desires and ethnic nationalist belonging than the fact that Maxine Hong Kingston was not able to write one story for both Chinese American women and Chinese American men and that she had to break it up into two: The Woman Warrior for women and China Men for men. Nothing tells us more about the rapid developments of feminist and nationalist discourses since the publication of The Woman Warrior than the fact that The Woman Warrior and China Men, once published separately, are now presented within one volume,1 just as Kingston intended so that the two could be read side by side for a balanced Asian American story.
The split between the female and male voices was a product of its time when the issues of gender and ethnicity / nationality were constructed as mutually exclusive, just as the joint presentation today witnesses the breakdown of the assumed borders between them. This does not mean the magic disappearance of the political tension between Chinese American feminism and cultural nationalism, but it provides a different context for the readers to experience the texts. It is a result of the long-term controversy around Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, while it also changes the outlook of the controversy.