The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
 | Vintage, 1989, Paperback Customer Rating: 170 reviews Recommend |
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A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity.
The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts" — the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost — with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain.
Title: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Sales Rank: 15098 in Books
Author: Maxine Hong Kingston
Publisher: Vintage, 1989-04-23, Paperback, 224 pages, ISBN: 0679721886
Package Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches, 0.2 pounds
- Eliptical Elusiveness Still Elucidates Immigration
The women ancestors of a geeky Chinese-American girl pile up impressive resumes, no worries ! They are kungfu heroines, joining peasant armies that overthrow the very Imperial throne. They are doctors who brave ghosts and come to America. They are mothers and grandmothers who remain staunchly Chinese in the face of the full press of American culture. They… More reviews
- Woman Warrior, a hauntingly lyrical memoir.
- Woman Warrior is among the most gripping lyrical-memoirs I've read. It is author Maxine Kingston's Chinese ancestry that teaches her that girls are half-ghosts that walk a tight wire: one wrong step and they transcend into full-pledged ghosts, with all memory of their existence erased from time. Girls in the history of her Chinese culture are regarded… More reviews
- the power of memory
- Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is a powerful
gem about the relationship between the author and her
mother and other women in her family. It is a memoir
but reads like fiction. I loved this book and especially
how she utilizes symbols, particularly ghosts to represent
people from different backgrounds, whom the… More reviews
- Brilliant!
- An excellent book, funny, insightful, poignant. Ms. Kingston brilliantly conveys how cultures can clash within the minds of those who straddle them. After reading this book I bought half a dozen copies to give to close friends. More reviews
- Prepare for the unexpected.
- This is a tremendous novel. The author threads the stories her mother told her when she was a child, through the retelling of her own life, using them to draw you into her own imagination. As she grows up, living half immersed in traditional myth and half in gritty reality, where mothers and daughters are only human, the… More reviews
