ABSTRACT
Even though both books have been critically acclaimed and commercially successful, both authors have been criticized by members of the Asian American community. Kingston's use of traditional Chinese myths and her revision of them to suit her own purposes caused an outcry among Asian American male writers when Kingston published her fictionalized "autobiography" in 1976. At that time, the Asian American literary community was composed of men who were offended by what they saw as the perversion of their traditions in order to please the white culture. Tan has been accused of writing about only middle-class and s~iccessful Chinese Americans in her 1989 book, Tlze Joy Luck Club, and of not representing an economic cross-section of the community. In an interview with Marilyn Chin, Kingston remarked that the men "say we pander to the white taste for feminist writing" (66). But I propose that the two authors, like Yeats and his fellow Irish Renaissance writers, both needed an audience larger than their own Chinese American community and also had something to say to both Chinese Americans and Caucasians. The commercial success of both books indicates that they have reached a large audience; Tan's book has even been made into a motion picture.
