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 th...

''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

A five-part genre-bending work considering immigration, class, and Chinese-American identity, The Woman Warrior sketches a nuanced portrait of the artist as a young woman. Mixing together myth and memoir, fantasy and fact, Kingston reflects on her childhood, the lives of her mother and aunts, and her awakening as a writer. All five parts share common themes, from the cultural gap between Chinese immigrants and their children to the debilitating effects of American racism. The author writes preci...

“You must not tell anyone, what I am about to tell you.” So begins Maxine Hong Kingston: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Books with family secrets intrigue me and I remained engaged in Kingston's mix of myth, memoir and perspectives on growing up and the immigrant experience throughout. The chapters mixing the narrator's story, along with her desire to reclaim family/identity, with myth were my favorite (especially "White Tigers"). Kingston writes with poignancy and beauty...

Probably most intriguing about the structure of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, beginning with "No Name Woman” and ending in A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” is that it characterizes Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, told in the interesting format of non-sequential episodes, as one that begins in oppressed silence but ends in universal song. When looking at the three woman warrior figures in the book – her aunt, the No Name Woman; the rewritten legendary warrior in “White Tigers” (based upo...

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...

I'm writing this review up from my notes unfortunately, as I read it when I was too busy to sit down and type. It's one of the best memoirs I've ever read, marked by sensitivity, sorrow, unresolvable conflict transformed into a breathtaking work of art, an epic canvas unrolling intricacies and intimacies that made me miss my tube stop, get the wrong train, mix up bus routes, so absorbed was I by the character of Brave Orchid, the narrator's mother. This woman she admires and fears and at times f...

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston should not be judged until you reach its end.At the beginning it is confusing, disgusting and violent.As I got around towards the middle, I could make sense of what was going on and found myself laughing. I found myself nodding and saying that she, the author, HAS captured Chinese women, their manner and way of speaking--a sort of “Chinese-personality-type”.At the end, I had to acknowledge that the author had accurately and honestly drawn what it was lik...

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 fo...

Mmm, not a huge fan. Ought to write up a thinky review, with lots of discussion of representation and acknowledgment that it's unfair to expect every Chinese-American writer to describe the entire Chinese(-American) experience, but I am too lazy to do that right now. I think most of my issues with this book would've been solved if Hong Kingston stopped saying "Chinese blah blah blah", as if all Chinese people were one great homogeneous block and did the same thing, all the time and everywhere. (...

I think I read almost this entire book with my jaw dropped. Maxine Hong Kingston has an incredible ability to say so much, so brilliantly, within every single phrase. The structure of her memoir speaks to all three of her identifications - Chinese/ American/ Woman - merging fiction with non-fiction and her own story with those of relatives and mythic heroines, to create a piece that represents her own immersion in a culture far better than a more traditional autobiography or memoir ever could. S...

To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear. (87)I understand why this book is listed as both fiction and a memoir. Maxine Hong Kingston weaves a personal memoir with shamanic/indigenous stories—the kind of tales you read in c...

Interesting. I just read my Goodreads friend Chelsea's review of this book and she says there is a story in here that didn't convince her to go vegetarian but brought her closer to giving up meat than anything else had.I read this book in 1976 and became a vegetarian in January 1977. It was something I'd been considering for a while, and had been reading all sorts of things from 1973 on, but now I'm wondering if this book had some influence on my decision. I still have a copy of my book somewher...

I feel conflicted about this book. It is the first book by an Asian American writer accepted into the American canon (the first to be taught in universities etc.). And it has kind of an empowering message I guess. But her depiction of Asianness is so damn annoying. I had a prof who excuses it with this passage where Kingston has her grandma say something like, "do you really believe all these stories I tell you about China? they're just stories." how does that little paragraph excuse an entire b...

I couldn't tell, and I don't think the publisher could either, whether this book was fiction or not. It is called a memoir, but on the back of my copy, it says fiction, yet it won an award for nonfiction. I know an author has creative license, especially with a memoir, but the realistic chapters placed next to fantasy ones made the book too disjointed for me and I couldn't get into it. It didn't challenge my thoughts of what a memoir is, I liked the fact that she incorporated dreams from her chi...

A memoir of a Chinese-American woman of her experiences growing up in an immigrant family in Sacramento, and the tremendous weight and power of the mythical China her mother enveloped her in, her view of herself, stubborn and real, overlaid with her mother's Chinese sense of the worth of a girl (not much, and yet, the stories of the warrior girl makes us question that). Fascinating to reread a book so bold and new in form and content when it was first published in 1976, a moment women authors an...

I give up on this one. It was so hard for me to get through, and I can't figure out why. There are several short stories, which may be something I am not used to, or the fact that there is some fantastical writing in it and some hilarious things, too (old Chinese women following young kids around and talking out loud in description "and now she puts the spiders in the bowl and turns them on. Her eyes light up!") It's pretty good writing, but I just couldn't get into it and basically dragged my w...

I tried so hard with this because I know it's considered a classic of sorts, but I give up. Her writing style makes me dizzy. She jumps in and out of Chinese legend and actual family history, sometimes from one sentence to the next. It's too hard for my frazzled brain to follow.

Once when I was a kid some extended family came over and someone broke out Trivial Pursuit. Even though I was maybe 8, I got to be in on it because we were playing teams. Then I noticed the box stated the game was actually for ages "12 and up"--or whatever the number was--point is, I was below it. As a kid I believed this written statement to be LAW, and breaking the law was the worst thing you could do. I seem to remember bringing up my legal concerns and being unsatisfactorily brushed off. I w...

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' is a capital and 'you' is lower-case."This sums up the focus of Maxine's memoirs: the cultivation of a hyphenated Chinese-American self in a world full of ghosts! Can she do it without a hitch? Without struggling to cope with the conflicting demands of family, school and society?Recommended.

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 abo...

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 othe...

This is a remarkable book about female identity, female relationships, tradition and modernity, myth and truth, and Old World values revealed in "talk-stories" transported to the modern world in an assimilation of a collective sense of spirit of the Chinese-American woman and community. The stories of the book also reflect an ambiguity of feelings about what it means to be Chinese - a Chinese woman is supposed to be timid and be subservient to men and a girl is worthless compared to her male sib...

I've wanted to read this book for so very long and am so very glad it did not disappoint.MHK takes the reader on an entrancing journey, mixing memory with legend and creating a novel really unlike anything I've read before. It was a really compelling look at Chinese culture and at her own experiences growing up as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. It was especially interesting because I could see aspects of my own family experience in MHK's stories, even though I have generations removed and fro...

Fantastic.

"You must not tell anyone," my mother said, "what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born."I thought this book was amazing! So fantastic! Kingston instantly draws you in with her first line (above). I loved her story about being a Chinese-American and trying to find a culture that fit her. I would read this book for the first two chapters alo...

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 protectiv...

Last year, I read that "The Woman Warrior" was one of the books President Obama put on his daughter's Kindle and I resolved to (finally) read it. And I'm so glad I did. It is a poetic hybrid of memoir, myth and invention; set in contemporary California and Kingston's mother's China. Kingston creates her own version of family stories, inserts herself into Chinese folklore and beautifully describes the isolation of growing up female and Chinese-American. The shifts between the past and present, be...

This was an eye-opening look at Chinese American culture when I read it in the early-80s. It was a real soul-baring treatise of a life very, very unlike my own. So honest, yet so unbelievable. Appreciated so much the way Kingston portrayed traditional beliefs from across the ocean as a part of her family's American experience in modern San Francisco.A classic work for young Americans struggling to bridge generational differences both cultural and in general.