In The Woman Warrior, Kingston addresses many of the same themes and concerns found in modern and traditional Chinese literature. Comparing Kingston's work to other Chinese literary texts can enhance our understanding of her memoir. In addition to Ts'ai Yen, a figure from traditional Chinese literature and culture who plays a prominent — though brief — role in The Woman Warrior, issues surrounding women's roles are common themes in the literature of many major twentieth-century Chinese writers, including Shen Congwen and Ding Ling, both of whom were influenced by reading Western literature. These two Chinese authors write about the conflicts arising from modern women's determination to find fulfillment and prominent voices in a traditionally patriarchal culture. Although unlikely that Kingston, who is more comfortable with the English language than Chinese, consulted the stories written by Shen and Ding, their texts, which deal with situations and contain incidents similar to those in The Woman Warrior, lend cultural and historical credence and authenticity to many of the episodes in Kingston's memoir.
Many of the events depicted in The Woman Warrior appear in other Chinese works of literature. For example, the talk-story about No Name Woman is highly reminiscent of Shen Congwen's short story "Xiaoxiao." One of modern China's best-known male writers, Shen, who often writes about issues stemming from the clash between modern and traditional Chinese culture, wrote "Xiaoxiao" in 1929. In the short story, Xiaoxiao, although betrothed to a young boy by her family, who live in rural China, becomes pregnant by her lover, a young errant laborer. After her lover abandons her, Xiaoxiao runs away from her family to join the female students in town. For her, girls who attend school represent freedom, an entirely new and modern concept for Chinese women. However, her family catches her running away and discovers that she is pregnant. Staunch traditionalists who blindly accept patriarchal society's status quo, Xiaoxiao's family must decide between two traditional options available to disgraced families such as theirs, whose daughters break sexual taboos: either kill Xiaoxiao by drowning her, or sell her. Her uncle chooses to sell her, but no one will buy Xiaoxiao. Only after she gives birth to a boy — and not to a girl — is she somehow redeemed. "The whole family loved the baby," Shen writes. "As he was a boy, Xiaoxiao was not sold after all."
