David Li
Scholar Sheryl Mylan stated that Kingston constructs an Orientalist framework to separate herself from her mother and her culture, but in the process she replicates the ideologies of the American culture. Professor Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong stated that Kingston's "Orientalist effect" is the result of Kingston's failure to commensurately critique the patriarchal values or institutional racism of Western society, resulting in a lopsided and biased commentary regarding Chinese culture. 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."