This is interesting in the first place because I feel that the tendency in any class (at least for me) is to assume that the things you're dealing with (even if they are rather current, e.g. post-modernism) are sort of dead and gone, no longer occurring, pieces of only the past, etc. I found it really intriguing that even in his most recent posts, dated at various times in 2011, Chin was still repeating what we've discussed was his view back in the 70s when Kingston's novel first came out.
In his second most recent posting he refers to the process of "white racist stereotyping of the Chinese fresh off the boat" and it lead me to a few thoughts about him, and about him with respect to Kingston. Mostly, I would like to see if I can't mount something of a defense of him, primarily in terms of the way that I think he might see his job as a writer of fiction.
As I understand it, his primary complaint against Kingston arose from the fact that he saw her as a basically American writer, one who hadn't even been to China when she first published The Woman Warrior. So, even though he saw her asking questions like "What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?" he seems to have felt (and still feels) that she wasn't equipped to ask questions of that sort (6). From the point of view of students of literature, I think we might all agree, that his assertion that she doesn't have the authority to talk about things like that because she isn't authentic enough doesn't really hold water. This is especially true in light of the sort of post-modern discourse we've been working with all semester in which authenticity is (rightfully, I would argue) pretty soundly reduced in value.
However, and toward the end of possibly defending Frank Chin, he might perceive this type of discussion in a different way. It would appear that Chin sees himself and other writers (whether he would call it this or not) as, in a way, folklorists. His issue seems to be folkloric in nature, and, to a certain degree I can see where he's coming from (though ultimately I think he ends up seeming a little more than stuck in his ways).
I see the situation with Frank Chin's problems with Kingston's novel as roughly analogous to the kerfuffle that occurred in ethnomusicological circles around Herbie Hancock's album Headhunters when it was first released. (Here's a really interesting current essay about that album and some of the controversy around it). Put simply, Hancock re-appropriated a lot of African musical sounds and styles in a way that many people found exploitative and crass. Others thought his approach to the sounds didn't do them justice; they felt that they overly simplified or altered them too much.
The position against Hancock's approach argued against the commodification of alien culture, the basic problem in considering any culture "alien" in the first place, and the ways in which careless re-appropriation can completely destroy an extant genre for the foreseeable future. This destruction, they argued, came about from re-appropriation because, even though you can't literally "take" a genre of music or a folk tale from someone, you can, in certain ways, alter irrevocably the way that culture sees and interacts with that genre or tale. In the mind of certain folklorists and ethnomusicologists, to "alter irrevocably" is the same thing as "to take."
So, this all ties back to Frank Chin's ire toward The Woman Warrior because there probably were people who, when the novel came out marketed as nonfiction, did not exert their full powers of literary analysis on the book and who missed the fact that the whole thing is sort of an exercise in subjectivity. I think the biggest "misrepresentation" he could point to was the fact that Kingston completely changed the Fa Mu Lan myth, mixing it with other myths that were always quite separate from it in the Chinese tradition. The entire section where Fa Mu Lan's father cuts words in "red and black files, like an army" down Fa Mu Lan's back, is actually lifted from a myth about a man named Yue Fei (from a literary perspective, of course, this fact is ridiculously interesting) (35). The fact of the matter is that when I was reading the novel for the first time, fully aware of the fact the book wasn't intended to be anthropological in any way, I still just assumed that the myth as she presented it in the novel was the way that it appeared in Chinese tradition.
What this all boils down to, I think, is that Frank Chin has a vastly different (and maybe somewhat skewed) perspective on what fiction should do. Fiction is not folklore, I don't think (and I would argue that Kingston would likely agree) so the arguments that could be applied to Herbie Hancock's album, for example, can't be effectively translated onto Kingston's novel. Even so, I think I can see to a certain degree, where Chin might be coming from when he so vociferously decries writing by people like Kingston.
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