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Original Title: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
ISBN: 0679721886 (ISBN13: 9780679721888)
Edition Language: English
Literary Awards: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (1978), National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction (1976)
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The Woman Warrior Paperback | Pages: 204 pages
Rating: 3.73 | 23920 Users | 1489 Reviews

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Title:The Woman Warrior
Author:Maxine Hong Kingston
Book Format:Paperback
Book Edition:Deluxe Edition
Pages:Pages: 204 pages
Published:April 23rd 1989 by Vintage Books USA (first published August 12th 1976)
Categories:Autobiography. Memoir. Nonfiction. Feminism. Cultural. China

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This was an intense book full of both women's power and violence against women set against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution and the emigration of many Chinese people fleeing Mao to California. It is a mixture of autobiography and folklore and is beautifully written. Maxine Hong Kingston received the National Book Award for this book in 1977 and remains a feminist activist. The book itself talks of the China of her parents (she was born in the US after her father emigrated in 1940) using the voice of her mother and herself as well as a mystical woman warrior. It is highly poetic at times such as when Maxine's grandmother (still in China) sends her sweet tastes telepathically, "How large the world must be to make my grandmother only a taste by the time she reaches me." p.99 The concept of identity pervades this work as Maxine's family is essentially country-less - the family in China is nearly wiped out by the revolution and their remaining property ceded to distant uncles that are still there and they fell isolated in the US surrounded by "ghosts" as they describe the white people around them. "I could not understand 'I'. The Chinese 'I' has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American 'I', assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight?" p. 166 My favorite part was the second chapter "White Tigers" where she describes a great woman warrior is trained in combat from the age of 7 to 22 by two old peasants and goes on to lead a peasant army. It is highly inspirational to see such a strong female character. And when this is contrasted to the "No Name Woman" in chapter 1, one can understand why strong female role models and fables were so important to Maxine's self-esteem and sense of self-worth. I have visited China many times, but primarily the metropolises and my contacts with Chinese people have not been very deep. I was reminded of this by the scene in the last chapter "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" where Maxine is unable to get a word out of another girl who pretends to be mute except when she is reciting texts in class. I suppose that the cumulated suffering destroys one's voice as one feels powerless that even speech is too difficult. I did have one encounter years ago when I had dinner in Taiwan with a Chinese colleague whose family had fled with Chang Kai-Shek to Taiwan following Mao's victory in the Chinese Civil War. He tearfully described to me how his parents who were university professors had destroyed their fingers and backs digging trenches bare-handed during the Cultural Revolution. It was the rare moment when a Chinese person opened up to me about his suffering. And yet, that also bears some ambiguity because as bad was the Cultural Revolution was, before that, Mao had banned foot-binding (described several times in The Woman Warrior): "Nobody wrote to tell us that Mao himself had been matched to an older girl when he was a child and that he was freeing women from prisons, where they had been put for refusing the businessmen their parents had picked as husbands. Nobody told us that the Revolution (the Liberation) was against girl slavery and girl infanticide (a village-wide party if it's a boy). Girls would no longer have to kill themselves rathe than get married. May the Communists light up the house on a girl's birthday." p. 191. So as everything in history, there are great ambiguities surrounding Mao. This reminds me of the condemnation of Castro for his imprisoning of land-owners and homosexuals (all true) but the relative ignorance of the improvements in education and medicine (the best teams of doctors in any international crisis are bound to have a Cuban or more in them.) Such is life I suppose. The Warrior Woman is a provocative and challenging voyage into Maxine Hong Kingston's life and dreams as a Chinese woman and remains a great piece of literature 40 years later.

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Ratings: 3.73 From 23920 Users | 1489 Reviews

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''I inspired my army, and I fed them. At night I sang to them glorious songs that came out of the sky and into my head. When I opened my mouth, the songs poured out and were loud enough for the whole encampment to hear, my army stretched out for a mile.'' A young girl lives among ghosts, standing at the crossroads. Her mother is a formidable woman, a doctor and a shaman, who tries to communicate with her children through the myths of their homeland. But the child is confused, she doesn't know

I'm not sure that I've read anything quite like this book before. A collection of five stories, memoirs, woven with Chinese folktales and all slightly different in their construction. I can see why it doesn't quite fit into a specific genre. I'd never heard of Maxine Hong Kingston until recently and although I think this text is taught text in America, I don't think it's well known in England. I'm really glad that I discovered it though, as I was mesmerised by the different stories, learning

An excellent book. I read this memoir of growing up Chinese American in California in graduate school, and was deeply moved by it. I particularly appreciated Hong Kingston's intertwining of ancient myth and contemporary immigrant challenges. Beautiful, powerful language. The first chapter, No Name Woman, about the terrible fate of a pregnant aunt in China, is unforgettable. This book, more than any other, made me believe my immigrant stories were also worth telling. This book, more than any

This book is beautifully written, with some lovely flights of fancy in it, and some very dramatic portrayals. But ultimately it is a depressing, horrifying, traumatic tale that left me with very little sympathy for the author. I can see that she had a difficult childhood, being the first American-born child of her Chinese parents, who never really settled emotionally into their new country. I can see the many conflicting issues she had to deal with in her youth, and how her mother's extremely

4.5 starsThe Swordswoman of WordsThe Woman Warrior is Maxine Hong Kingston's own story of growing up Chinese-American, an irreconcilable position for her as the two cultures would seemingly clash, unable to provide her with a stable sense of identity. She grew up confused by the ideas and behavior of her parents and the villagers who had settled in Stockton, California, who saw their American-born children as very strange - not really Chinese. Her parents hoped one day to return the whole family

For a book that The New York Times called "A remarkable book...it burns the fat out of the mind. As a dream...it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword." , I am wondering if whoever wrote the review read Richard Wright's Black Boy, not this emotionless soliloquy. This book starts out conglomerating Chinese culture and people and ends in a similar fashion. If colleges really want to teach about Asian-American or Chinese cultures and life, I don't understand why they'd pick a memoir so

I wish we had read this in sophomore year of high school instead of Catcher in the Rye. This book is an amazing, lyrically written book about growing up as a girl between two cultures, neither of which is particularly empowering to adolescent girls. What I didn't like about the school system teaching Catcher in the Rye as a 'universal story of adolescence' was because I felt it was a very masculine story of adolescence--the things Holden does (punch walls, order a prostitute, be overly