Autobiography as a sociolinguistic resource: Mazine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.

This article prepares to demonstrate that a bilingual-bicultural biographer can provide insights into challenging and important ethnic issues, including some not easily investigated through traditional methodologies, by presenting them in context of the larger processes of maturation experienced by a bilingual-bicultural individual. In particular, this paper focuses on Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior in which she recounts her early years as the first U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants. Her memoir is consistent with such established facts about the Chinese in the U.S. as residential and cultural segregation from the host culture, strong ties with family in China, strict paternal; control, commitment to the ancestral culture, and a relatively high level of mother-tongue retention among U.S.-born. In sum, the memoir can be read as a social document, a unique and valuable contribution to understanding the family and individual aspects of language maintenance and language shift. Kingston reveals that at least some immigrant parents bring to bear on their children the powerful mythologies of their home culture first to control them, to keep them close to home, and second to hold off external pressures to acculturate.