Ku,+Hannah

Chiu 1994 (Daina C, Doctor of Law (JD), Law@berkeley, The Cultural Defense: Beyond Exclusion, Assimilation, and Guilty Liberalism, 82 Cal. L. Rev. 1053, [], LB)

One of her harshest critics, Benjamin R. Tong, took aim at Kingston after she published __The Woman Warrior__. According to Tong, Kingston was trying to cash in on a feminist fad.42 9 In so doing, she **__was "selling out... her own people"__** __by addressing her work to a **white audience**__**. ** 43 Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong pointedly excluded Kingston's novel from the reissue of their Asian American literary anthology.4 3 They argue that The Woman Warrior is a Chinese American collaborationist work __that **incarnates "the racist mind**" of white supremacist America__ .4 32 In Chin's view, __The Woman Warrior is a "stroke of white racist genius [that] attacks Chinese civilization, Confucianism itself, **and where its life begins: the fairy tale**__ ."4'33 Kingston's rewriting of Fa Mulan, a Chinese fairy tale figure, into a champion of Chinese feminism is a call to "dump the Chinese race and make for white universality."4 34 As for Amy Tan's use of a fairy tale, Chin flatly states that "[ __t]he fairy tale is not Chinese but white racist. It is not informed by Chinese intelligence__ . 4 35 Chin alludes to Hong Kingston's and Amy Tan's work as __ventriloquizing____the same old white Christian fantasy of little Chinese victims__ of the original sin of __being born to a brutish, sadomasochistic **culture of cruelty** and **victimization** **fleeing to America** in search of freedom from everything Chinese and **seeking white acceptance,** and of being **victimized by absurd**__ stupid **__white racists__** __and then **being reborn in acculturation and honorary whiteness**__ .4 36 Whereas Professor Crenshaw points to the attempt by African American men to minimize the projection of negative stereotypes into white society as part of the rationale behind their silencing African American women,4 37 I believe __that the rationale that underlies **criticism of Asian American women** by **Asian American men** is **different**.__ Consider the tenor and content of the criticism leveled at Asian American women writersFrank Chin asserts that Chinese American men have been silenced: " **__Our white-dream identity being feminine, the carriers of our strength, the power of the race belongs to our women__** ."438 Tong argues that __, in order to cater to the expectations of white audiences,____Kingston portrays Chinese American women as victims of "perpetual torment at the hands of awful yellow men.'__ 439 For Chin, __the Chinese woman__ in The Woman Warrior __is a "pathological white supremacist vicitimized and trapped in a hideous Chinese civilization__ " 0 __which does not deserve to survive because it is so misogynistic__ ."' The claim is that Asian American women's challenge to patriarchy repudiates the validity, integrity, and worth of Asian culture and traditions. Throughout __this criticism run the common strands of **betrayal** and **identity**__. __When Asian American women **rebel**, **break the rules**, and **criticize things Asian**, we are pandering to racist exoticism or white feminists, but most of all, we are **race traitors**__ ." 2 Our __rebellion threatens the communityand culture, and unsettles__ cripples __Asian American male identity__ . __Our charge__, then, in the name of racial solidarity, **__is to obey without question__** our cultural traditions, preserve them, and transmit them unchanged and intact. **__In this paradigm, Asian American identity becomes predicated on adhering to cultural traditions that were created by men and that privilege men__** . In such an equation, an __attack on culture becomes an attack on male identity__ . This rush to preserve culture prevents us from engaging in the important task of examining how power and subordination work in particularly gendered ways in our communities. __In the intersection between culture and gender-notably, in the cultural defense **debate-culture** **prevails** and gender disappears__. Such bracketing of gender to preserve culture essentializes the Asian American woman's identity as a cultural caretaker and leaves Asian American women with fragmented selves. We can only exist as the essential Asian American women that Asian American men want us to be. **__Our identities will be forever unfinished and unconstructed.__** More disturbing is that __this____paradigm can pit Asian American men and women against each other: his identity derives from her preservation and transmission of a culture that often privileges him by subordinating and devaluing her;____her identity is shaped by challenge to, as well as exploration and acceptance of, that same culture__. Asian American women's challengeto patriarchy is forbidden trespass on the cultural terrain of Asian male prerogative. __Asian American women's construction and reconstruction of Asian and Asian American culture through this process of questioning and challenge are **savagely attacked** and their efforts derided as **fake**,4 3 **illegitimate**, **unauthorized**, and **unauthentic**__. But __challenge is **not** repudiation__. __Reconstruction is **not** betrayal__. __Reworking subordinating myths to **inspire** and **empower** is a vital and necessary enterprise__. **__We can debate the merits__**__of__ Maxine Hong Kingston's __exploration of Chinese American culture____and **there is ample room for disagreement**__, __but to **excoriate** and **condemn** her__ (and other Asian American women) __for **exploring new cultural terrain** and **identity**, and for **expanding the limits of Asian American women's lives**, serves no other purpose than the **continued privileging of men** through the **subordinating and silencing of women**__**. ** For Asian American women, **__identity is not and cannot be an essence distilled from unquestioned acceptance of tradition__**. **__As Asian American women, we must be free to construct our own multiple and varied selves, selves which leave room for all the multilayered, complex threads of our cultures and traditions.__****__Asian American women need and deserve the opportunity to confront inequities and imbalances of power, and the hidden assumptions of race, gender, culture, and tradition.__** __In__ the cultural defense **__debate and in larger society, the focus must allow for uncertainties and unknowns, and identities must be constructed, not essentialized__**. Identities of shifting, multiple selves, in which no aspect dominates. Identities in which contradictions and contradictory selves remain.