The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

by Maxine Hong Kingston

Excellent Book

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Feminism, Classics, China, Biography, School

Unknown Binding

First published August 12, 1976

About the author

Best known works, including The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980), of American writer Maxine Hong Kingston combine elements of fiction and memoir.

She was born as Maxine Ting Ting Hong to a laundry house owner in Stockton, California. She was the third of eight children, and the first among them born in the United States. Her mother trained as a midwife at the To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton. Her father had been brought up a scholar and taught in his village of Sun Woi, near Canton. Tom left China for America in 1924 and took a job in a laundry.

Her works often reflect on her cultural heritage and blend fiction with non-fiction. Among her works are The Woman Warrior (1976), awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and China Men (1980), which was awarded the 1981 National Book Award. She has written one novel, Tripmaster Monkey, a story depicting a character based on the mythical Chinese character Sun Wu Kong. Her most recent books are To Be The Poet and The Fifth Book of Peace.

She was awarded the 1997 National Humanities Medal by President of the United States Bill Clinton. Kingston was a member of the committee to choose the design for the California commemorative quarter. She was arrested in March 2003 in Washington, D.C., for crossing a police line during a protest against the war in Iraq. In April, 2007, Hong Kingston was awarded the Northern California Book Award Special Award in Publishing for her most recent novel Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (2006), edited by Maxine Hong Kingston.

She married actor Earl Kingston in 1962; they have had one child, Joseph Lawrence Chung Mei, born in 1964. They now live in Oakland.

Kingston was honored as a 175th Speaker Series writer at Emma Willard School in September 2005.

Reviews

[chai ♡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Woman Warrior is a trenchant, gorgeous, and discomforting memoir that follows in a rich tradition of feminist writing that cleaves to undisciplined modes of thinking and unexpected forms of agency. It does so by privileging silence, refusal, indeterminacy, and a certain infidelity to form and genre; but also by thinking in terms of collectivities and communal traditions instead of the singular, all-obliterating experience of the “I”—or, at least, with an acute sense of its difficulties.

The Woman Warrior is Maxine Hong Kingston’s story of growing up in the US as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. The memoir begins with the injunction, from mother to daughter, “You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you,” which immediately oxidizes into betrayal when Kingston subsequently reveals the content of her mother’s words. The story Kingston is offered is a cautionary tale that rises out through layers and layers of silence: an adulterous “no-name aunt” who is punished for transgressing her community’s sexual norms by being treated as a ghost, “as if she had never been born.” It’s an intense beginning that suggests something of the weight of trauma and loss that shapes the narrative on the pages, and it is enough to press the breath from your lungs. What follows is an internal journey that leads to an equally terrifying sense of having to stand down a hostile world that holds certain lives so cheaply.

Maxine Hong Kingston tracks the processes of self-creation and self-understanding through the complicated, devastating (and in many ways unresolvable) territories of silence, erasure, misremembrance, rupture, and violence. Her coming of age is cobbled together through myth and imagination. She does more than reproduce the material facts of her life: she expands her life into a mythology more enduring and more substantial than the impoverished existence scripted for her, interconnecting her story to deep, perennial lineages that echo endlessly into the present. She shifts perspective, slips from the indicative to the subjunctive, collapses space and time: she is the "no-name" slave woman, the filial daughter, the sword-bearing warrior Fa Mu Lan, the poetess Ts’ai Yen shoring up the narrative of her life through song. In this surplus, Kingston locates an essential agency that cannot be reduced to nothingness. She uses all herself up in a desperate longing for a language that might hold her. And she refuses annihilation.

At the heart of this narrative is the author’s struggle to negotiate her subject position as a woman, on the one hand, and her dual identity as both Chinese and American, two poles laboring for mastery in her life, warping her into a permanent outsider. In this delicate negotiation, Kingston grapples with the nature of articulation itself. Throughout the book, one senses a real strain to criticize the subjugation of women and the culture of silencing that is transmuted into her, without concealing and conceding to the forces of stereotype. This effort does not always succeed, and the memoir sometimes shades into contemptuous generalizations. But this is perhaps expected: few stories, particularly ones as vulnerable as this, can be dichotomized into a neat narrative of either transgression or nothing at all. Kingston depicts the inner workings of her immigrant family as a seething cauldron of anger, resentments, misrecognition, and difficult intimacies in the wake of uprooting and displacement. Beneath this turbulent surface, however, lurks a real sense of love and caretaking, and a longing to express the fullness and earned integrity of her mother, her aunt, all the indomitable women in her life, real or otherwise—and, of course, herself. I think of Kingston’s memory of her mother cutting her tongue, an act of violence unfathomable to Kingston who “felt sorry for the baby whose mother waited with scissors or knife in hand for it to cry.” Yet, when she asks her mother about it, the answer is not what she expects: “I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language.” The act of violation becomes an imperfect expression of love.

In this sense, The Woman Warrior reflects the porous borders between knowing and unknowing, inside and outside, betrayal and devotion, love and disillusionment. It’s a book, in other words, about translation. Maxine Hong Kingston moves through awful and tender silences, reads between the lines, attends to the gaps in the narrative, and speculates when necessary. In the process, she repeatedly loses sight of herself, of her mother, of the past, and then regains it, only to lose it again. Everywhere, the very possibility of translation cannot be made inseparable from its impossibility.

I loved this book for its gestures of refusal, its willingness to be against the grain and in and alongside the contradictions of becoming one’s self and being in community with others. The Woman Warrior holds an underlying sadness that leashes into the words like rainwater through roots. And a kind of fury too—the fury of “a first daughter of a first daughter”—still chafing against the leash of a mind too accustomed to good behavior. It all rather “translates well.”

[Lisa of Troy · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?”

The Woman Warrior contains a strong collection of five short stories with a feminist tilt, a blend of fiction and non-fiction as Kingston weaves her own story using her Chinese roots and her present American reality.

Recently, I have read several works set in China, both fiction and non-fiction although I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a scholar of Eastern literature. These other works were published long after The Woman Warrior; however, this familiarity with Chinese culture/history took away the punch of Kingston’s revelations.

I can’t help but wonder if I would have an altered opinion of The Woman Warrior if I went into it with no such understanding.

While the stories are interesting and there are some great quotes with laugh-out-loud moments, the narrative wasn’t as strong as similar works (like Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China). The short story format didn’t allow for elements to be fully explored, and at times the pacing was too slow, particularly in At the Western Palace, when the aunt is uncomfortable about unexpectedly confronting her husband after so many years.

Kingston displays an admiral sense of vulnerability when depicting her characters. Her mother, Brave Orchid, isn’t painted as a perfect saint—while hardworking and smart, she can also be cruel, selfish, and borderline insane. “The last time we had stayed late, my mother had phoned the police and told them we had been kidnapped by bandits. The radio stations broadcast our descriptions.”

If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out Daughters of Shandong, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, and Lady Tan’s Circle of Women!

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Softcover Text - $6.49 at Blackwell’s
Audiobook - 1 Audible Credit (Audible Premium Plus Annual – 24 Credits Membership Plan $229.50 or roughly $9.56 per credit)

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[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Julie G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Road Trip 2020

Current location: California

The Beatles broke up the year before I was born, but two of their first albums still provided the soundtrack of my early childhood. Both my mom and big sister loved their early stuff, songs like “Please Mr. Postman” and “All My Loving.” They were played frequently in our living room.

I hated those songs. Back then, I didn't think The Beatles were one bit better than my mother's other favorites: Tammy Wynette and Hank Williams, Jr. (Only arsenic or whiskey could stop that pain, and I didn't have either).

Then, one day, as I was approaching adolescence, my sister, who shared a wall with me, put on a song that made me stop everything I was doing. It was like I couldn't even function, like I'd never heard anything better in all my life. I knocked on my sister's door and demanded to know, “What was that??”

The answer: “The Beatles. Hey Jude.”

My sister had just purchased “The Beatles 1967-1970” also known as “The Blue Album.” If you're old enough to remember, there were two records inside and they were both actually blue. I became obsessed with that music, and I would wait patiently for my sister to go to work so I could sneak into her room to play it over and over again (I can't wait until my sister shows up to read this particular review).

This album represented a huge shift for me, both in how I related to music and what I demanded of it, from that day on.

I guess you could say I experienced a Revolution.

I experienced another one this week, when I cracked open The Woman Warrior.

Thus began my Magical Mystery Tour.

I could cry with joy over what this book is.
Self-help? Hell, no!
A memoir? Well, no, not really, despite the subtitle.

No, folks, this is a “talk-story.”

A “talk-story,” and it's unlike anything I've ever encountered before.

This “memoir” took me Across the Universe. It's like literary LSD. I literally started this book one night in the bath, and, two hours later I realized I was sitting in cold water, and every member of my family had given up on me and gone to bed. I walked out of the bathroom into total darkness, wondering what century it was.

I can't believe it. Maxine Hong Kingston's the Chinese-American Lady Madonna, y'all.

There is a Chinese word for the female I--which is “slave.” Break the women with their own tongues!

[J.L. Sutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

“You must not tell anyone, what I am about to tell you.”




So begins Maxine Hong Kingston's 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 with the experience of an immigrant. 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 and there are layers of meaning in her prose. Story-telling is also a priority here, along with the corresponding family dynamics and emphasis on cultural values (and how they're passed on).

“Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.”

I had considered my favorite Kingston book to be Tripmaster Monkey, but might have to read the latter book again. 4.5 stars

[Mostly on Storygraph · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 upon the Mulan legend); and the poet and barbarian captive, Ts’ai Yen – the characteristics that unite them all are their determined attempts at asserting their own kinds of power, femininity, and individuality in patriarchal Chinese society.

The methods through which they do so revolve around words written, spoken, or not spoken: from the silence practiced by No Name Woman, to the words written on the warrior’s back, to the songs created by Ts’ai Yen and, finally, to the stories that Kingston as the author uses to find the marks of the woman warrior within herself, and to do so in a way that allows the readers insight into a life that even the narrator is grappling to understand.

The words that open Woman Warrior, which begins with the story of No Name Woman, are quite interestingly an admonition of silence: “’You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you’” (3). This admonition signifies a promise, and a breaking of a promise: The narrator’s mother Brave Orchid is showing courage and confidence in her daughter by sharing something that should not be remembered, yet at the same time, her mother is breaking the silence surrounding her sister-in-law, the titled No Name Woman. This is one of the first of many of the narrator’s mother’s talk-stories, ones that were told with a purpose to aid her children in life events, while sealing the bond between child and mother.

The story of the woman warrior, who is the protagonist of “White Tigers,” is created in history and then transformed by the narrator into one of triumph through the breaking of silences. Inspired by Kingston’s childhood and the stories of Yue Fei and Mulan, the chapter becomes another way for the narrator to celebrate the breaking of silences, something that continues throughout the book.

This union between mother and daughter the novel can be seen as the compromise of generations, an idea carried out in Kingston’s appropriation of myths and stories seen in the retelling of these woman warriors. Her mother, in fact, is the narrator’s guide of the methods in which to appropriate talk-stories for her own purposes. Kingston’s retellings are part of the idea that a culture growing up in one country can appropriate the lessons of their parents, who grew up in another. It is the idea and the hope that stories created by a patriarchal culture can still make room for its daughters, ultimately one the most important ideas Kingston communicates in her beautifully rendered book.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a small pile of books that has been sitting in my living room for 5 years collecting dust while waiting to be read. I made a deal with my husband that if he would find a home for his stacks [of DVD's] that are piled all over our cabinet, I would take care of my stack. So my first step was to pick up the book on the top of the pile and begin reading. I picked up Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts expecting an immigrant story. Well, I got that and much more.

Like Kingston during her childhood, I am sometimes confused as she blurs the line between fact and fiction in this work. What is real and what is story? Kingston brilliantly shows how her mother's stories have impacted and shaped her.

"Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She tested our strength to establish realities. Those in the emigrant generations who could not reassert brute survival died young and far from home. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America."

These first generation Chinese-American females had to navigate racism from the white American population and the tales of misogyny from their family and neighbors of life in China. They had to find a way to live with a foot in each culture. Kingston shows her individual experience to be a bigger discussion of family, folklore, and the immigrant experience. This is no linear work of childhood through adulthood. Rather it is a blend of myth and folklore, family stories, and actual events. Kingston shows that she has found her voice and learned to create her own stories.

Publication 1975

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as part of an English literature class. It was my first book by an Asian writer. It has opened my mind up in so many ways, and ever since, I've gone out of my way to seek more. In truth, it could've been taught as part of a Asian literature class or a feminism class too.

[Nicole~ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

The Swordswoman of Words

The 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 to China - yet the China they had left had since changed. All she knew of the place she had never been, was through the 'talk-stories' told by her mother; parables in the Chinese tradition of telling magical stories and incorporating them into their everyday life; of ancestors and relatives, and great tales of mythic and cultural heroines.
Her mother was exceedingly gifted in talking-story:

Night after night my mother would talk-story until we fell asleep. I couldn't tell where the stories left off and the dreams began, her voice the voice of heroines in my sleep. And on Sundays, from noon to midnight, we went to movies at the Confucius Church. We saw swordswomen jump over houses from a standstill; they didn't even need a running start.
At last I saw I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking- story. After I grew up, I heard the chant of Fa Mu Lan, the girl who took her father's place in battle. I had forgotten this chant...given me by my mother, who may not have known its power to remind. She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman.

In The Woman Warrior, MHK constructs her own identity and the meaning of her life. She places herself as the primary narrator in stories artistically woven with Chinese myth and legend, including other women characters- some known and unknown, real and imagined. The stories are highly imaginative; the narrative flows with wondrous elements of magical-realism.

The book is sectioned into five chapters, illustrating MHK's American experience: No Name Woman tells the story of her aunt who was ostracized for having an illegitimate child; White Tigers weaves the story of Fa Mu Lan- the mythical character to whom MHK most relates- who goes to battle in her father's stead and saves a village; Shaman tells the story of her mother, Brave Orchid, becoming a doctor in the old country and her immigration to America; At The Western Palace covers her mother's sister, Moon Orchid, in her journey to California in the hope of reconciling with her estranged husband; A Song for A Barbarian Reed Pipe reflects a poignant message of preservation of an ebbing culture and a melding of the current ones.

MHK would often rebel against the stringent Chinese-feminine model: "I refused to cook. When I had to wash dishes, I would crack one or two. 'Bad girl,' my mother yelled, and sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn't a bad girl almost a boy?" She knew that she must become a warrior woman- strong, independent, a fighter, a burden to no one, she won't be silenced. She confessed to her mother that she, too, could 'talk-story'; and how immeasurably gifted she was at that!

Her power was wielded in language, her 'loosened tongue', her voice; her sharpened pen became her sword, her strength.

In an interview in the Atlantis publication jun-nov 1988, Maxine Hong Kingston explained that she took care to find the force of reason within her stories, the middle ground between the real world and the supernatural. 'The Woman Warrior' was a vehicle for the many voices MHK heard within herself. She hoped that her writings would give a voice to Chinese-American women, and that their everyday existence growing up in America within a traditional Chinese culture, would be seen with more compassion and understanding, with a bright look toward a balanced resolution. For MHK herself, The Woman Warrior finally reconciled those clashes of the two cultures, to the formation of a beautiful, enduring, identifiable new one.

First read January 2009

[Zen Cho · Rating 3 out of 5]

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. (She kind of acknowledges this issue, in that she is like, I don't know what about me is Chinese and what is from my family and what is from the village etc. etc., but she then proceeds not to do anything about it.)

Also that kind of very deep ambivalence about being Chinese/Chinese culture is quite strange to me, so it kind of put me off. (As far as I can recall, Amy Tan had a similar thing -- like, you could tell she had Issues -- and similar issues with her mom.)

[Zanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 feels rejected and hated by, whose behaviour is a mystery to her because she refuses to explain anything, seems to expect her to raise herself Chinese in barbarian America, a land of ghosts. I felt the desire the narrator had to accomplish this feat, her frustration at falling short of performing the impossible task

This is a feminist text. It opens with a story, told by mother to daughter as a cautionary tale against promiscuity (or rather, the transgression of sexual boundaries) about the death of a female relative. The narrator, given only the bones of this story and perhaps haunted by it, has to imagine the details, and does so repeatedly, reorienting them each time to fit different perspectives. first, she rehabilitates her kinswoman's reputation by imagining her raped, blameless, caught in the fatal web of an intensely masculinist society. Second, she breathes life back into her by constructing a romance in which star crossed love comes to grief. Finally, she reviews the situation from the perspective of the villagers and family, delicately explaining their actions with chiaroscuro. And throughout each of these retellings, she integrates the effect the story had on her life in the USA, the way it changed how she thought about others' views of her and how she tried to behave socially. The result is a braided story that binds women's lives across time and culture, a half-tested guide-rope though hostile environments. A rope is many things, among them both saviour and weapon against oneself as well as others.

Rage at the position of girls is worked into wish fulfilling self-mythologising in the delicate and poetic yet fierce story 'White Tigers', in which the narrator fantasises about doing what she imagines a girl must do to be valued. Tellingly this includes assuming a male disguise, but remaining a woman 'Marriage and childbirth strengthen the swordswoman, who is not a maid like Joan of Arc'. This protest story is a self-made talisman for the narrator, and it reflects images of Chinese culture that heal and sustain her, suppressing the words that chafe and damage. She makes her own empowerment by rooting down into her heritage, not by rejecting it.

Parallel to this self-care project of making images she can inhabit and revision herself through, run the narratives through which she constructs her mother's humanity and inner life, gradually building images of her she can make sense of and feel for. Once again, to me these vignettes illuminate an unfamiliar style of being, yet one I can appreciate and respect: 'the sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favoured by the gods'. Thus the narrator makes sense of her mother's secret night studying at medical school, covering the tracks of her path to shining success.

At times it was almost unbearable to read the things said about girl-children (vermin in rice, for instance) as an adult woman, but the narrator was recalling hearing them as a child. The little warrior screams in protest, throws tantrums uncontained, paints everything black, refuses for years to speak. How did Chinese girls in China avoid such anguish, if they did? What did they learn that protected them? Or what, on the other hand, made the narrator vulnerable among ghosts to the rage and misery such hatred called forth from her?

I remembered the miscommunications of The Joy Luck Club, and how lucid Tan made them by working both sides, playing out all the angles as omniscient author, comforting me with the reassurance that however differently, conflictedly and incommunicably, mothers and daughters loved each other. Kingston offers no such clarity. We have the narrator's feelings and her glorious, multivalent fantasies of her mother's inner life, her therapeutic self-mythologising, a patchy, lumpen blending of ways of being and knowing than opens doors and hearts, names spirits, recounts mysteries, but maintains, I felt, a kind of respectful refusal to assume. If Tan's edges cut cleanly, Kingston's are left rough. They scrape and hurt: something is catastrophically lost between China and the ghost country, the possibility of wholeness has fallen into the sea and sunk to the bottom. I gave The Joy Luck Club five stars, but Kingston's rejection of omniscience in this book makes its approach, to me, more... ethical, more admirable.

The honesty and care the narrator employs is humbling. she conceives of her need for explanation for her mother's careful keeping of tradition as pouring concrete over a forest, killing the subtlety and cleverness of Chinese communication styles and life, even though it's her earnest desire, and blameless, surely, even admirable, because she is willing to become the carrier of tradition but it denied the opportunity. Yet her mother cannot shoulder the blame either; explanation is not the mode of conveyance needed, only the osmosis possible in immersion could educate the wayward daughter. Locked in the paths or poses of their unanswerable desires, mother and daughter carve their shapes into each other by attrition as they are rocked and rolled by USian waves. There is no resolution, only the story and its scarred traces.

[Barbara K · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary book. It is a memoir of Kingston's childhood and adolescence, interspersed with Chinese legends featuring women.

There is no question that it requires committed reading, especially at the beginning where the line is blurry between reality and "talk-stories", or cultural myths (including that of Mulan, of Disney fame). This confusion is further complicated by Kingston's use of the first, second and third person narrative voices. But the rewards are worth the effort, as we become part of her unique experience. “Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.”

There seem to have been two reactions to this book when it was first published. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, no small achievement. But it was also dissed by a number of Chinese-American critics who felt her interpretations of the Chinese-American experience lacked authenticity.

From what I've been able to determine by a quick internet search, those critics were primarily male, which brings us to a key element of this book: It is not simply an exploration of the overall first generation Chinese-American experience, it is a specific Chinese-American woman's experience.

I would posit that any memoir legitimately reflects the life of the person writing and no one else. This 2017 quote from a much younger Chinese-American author, Angela Chen, who avoided reading The Woman Warrior for many years expresses that opinion more elegantly than I can: "But taken off this pedestal, the innovations and craft of The Woman Warrior become more apparent. It is a complex account of what it was like to be Kingston, writing about experiences at a time that few others did. It is the personal and not the general. It is not template, not beginning or end."

This came to be my first read of 2021 by chance. I recently listened to a series of lectures about American best sellers through the centuries, and the only book that I hadn't already read that piqued my curiosity was The Woman Warrior. I'm so glad it did; it was a great way to begin the year.

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 like to be a daughter to Chinese immigrant parents in America in the middle of the 20th century.

Chinese ways, myths and beliefs are woven into the author’s autobiography. The book consists of five stories that are interconnected. Not only the author’s but also her mother’s and aunts’ lives are spoken of. Published in 1975, the book was written when the author was thirty-five.

Ming-Na narrates the audiobook very well, so four stars for the narration. It is easy to follow. The tone used for the different family members is perfect. Ming-Na really did have me laughing in the middle.

**********************

*The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father 5 stars by Kao Kalia Yang
*The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir 5 stars by Kao Kalia Yang
*On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family 4 stars by Lisa See
*The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures 4 stars by Anne Fadiman
*Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness 4 stars by Tracy Kidder
*The Woman Warrior 3 stars by Maxine Hong Kingston
*Fifth Chinese Daughter 3 stars by Jade Snow Wong

When I look at this list, I think how utterly amazing it is that books can be so very different and yet all worth reading.

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 forceful personality combined with village traditions brought over from China stunted her development to a great degree.

But to my way of understanding, the author turns on her heritage, almost wants to deny it, even to the point of torturing a classmate who (oddly enough) has many of the characteristics the author was trying to overcome at the time. This is sad because we should be proud of our background, not try to deny anything about it. Our ancestors and their traditions made us who we are. We do not have to feel forced to behave the same way, but we should not look back in disgust. That is denying a major part of our own selves.

Who we each are is a blend of the past, the present, and our dreams for the future. But we have to have the inner courage first to know ourselves and then to become who we are meant to be. We cannot let anything, even a forceful parent, stop us. Perhaps I only feel that way because I did not have generations of traditions weighing me down when I was growing up. All I had to deal with was a strong mother, and that issue of the author's I could identify with.

I had a sense of the author saying 'poor little me' behind every sentence, and that grew tiresome. Also tiresome was the author's way of portraying all Chinese as behaving the way her family did. No one can truly say that all the people from a country are a certain way, that simply is not true.

I ended the book feeling annoyed. I can only hope that in her later life she was able to work out some of her issues and learn to enjoy her heritage at least a little bit.

[Dona's Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kingston's text is beautiful, but challenging. The narrative in this book is difficult to follow, as it is told through the perspectives of five generations of Chinese and Chinese American family's women. Certain parts on the text rely on metaphor to define the characters' conflicts and motivations, so some readers may find it difficult to connect to the text. I enjoyed Kingston's use of metaphor and surrealism to explore certain topics in the text, but I did so for the beauty; I did not always find it easy to understand the material, even when I found it pleasurable reading.

*edit 2022 reread planned for 2024-5

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

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. Super-highly recommended.

[Betsy Robinson]

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 creation myths and ancestral indigenous stories transferred orally from generation to generation. It took me a little while to shift my Western mind to one that is open to the language of dreams, but once I did, I found this brutally compelling.

Through it I think I have more understanding of Chinese and Chinese American women I have known . . . as well as a conviction that I'm lucky not to have been born into their culture—in any era—as I would have been a complete failure and probably suffered an early death.

I had to put this book down a lot because it was so painful. In fact, had I not to committed to read this memoir for my book club, I probably would have abandoned it early—not because there is anything deficient about it; the writing is good, original, and alive—but because I do not enjoy stuffing my head "like the suitcases which [Chinese parents] jam-pack with homemade [nightmare] underwear." I am simply not a glutton for this kind of pain. The book is divided into five stories, and the fourth, "At the Western Palace," was so relentlessly harsh and realistic, conveying the strain and clash of Chinese vs. American and Chinese American conditioning that finishing was an act of will. The failing here is mine: I'm a wuss. Were I to find myself afloat in such an ocean of family pain, I'd leave.

Postscript: The ending is good. A badly needed catharsis.

[Lisa Vegan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 somewhere. I'm curious about what the story said.

Vegan in spring 1988 after continuing to read and it was a book that got me to go vegan. Back then there were no vegan promoting films, no internet, etc. but even so books have such an influence on me. When I went vegan I knew no other vegans personally and when I went vegetarian I knew only one at the time.

[Owen · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 book where she's purporting to represent a monolithic and highly distorted Chinese culture? I've also seen her talk a few times and she's way foofy. Interestingly enough, she's a part of a writer's circle including Amy Tan, though of course Kington's books are nothing like the garbage Tan writes.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty)]

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.

[Nadia · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title is spot on. I loved the mix of voices, the array of topics. Ghost brides to second wives to warrior lore...the weaving, wandering conversations and musings tied it all together.

[Emily]

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 childhood (I'm assuming) as reality when describing her childhood, because I remember how real my dreams and games and wishes seemed to me as a child. But this was hard for me to read because I really was expecting to read something coherent. And her fantasy sequence bored me. I much more enjoyed the realism. The first chapter blew me away and I was disappointed that the rest of the book wasn't like that.

[Erin the Avid Reader ⚜BFF's with the Cheshire Cat⚜ · Rating 1 out of 5]

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 boring and stereotypical.

Kingston does not know how to transition from one event to the next. Many paragraphs and scenes in this book are poorly constructed and executed, bouncing back and forth like a jump-cutting B-movie. Kingston's voice sounds forced and lifeless, which is unfortunate, as this memoir sounded very promising.

This book fits colleges very well: It's politically correct to a point where it seeps off the pages in mass doses, the author's voice rings of one you'd hear from an NPR host, it talks about horrendous and perverse comportments in a tone so dull it's almost insulting, and the book just reeks of a holier-than-thou attitude that is common in college-assigned memoirs.

I picked up this book myself, not have it assigned to me. I knew nothing about it being popular in colleges until I finished it a 2nd time (and severely disliked it). I'm glad I had more time with it then other students did, because then I had more time to thoroughly study the narrative.

Unfortunately, I thought it was terrible. If you want to read some Asian-American lit, I don't recommend this one.

[Chitra Divakaruni · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 other, made me into a writer.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 was definitely confused why my family would encourage me to break a law, but mostly I was just scared. The whole game was spent apprehensively looking out the window for approaching police cars on the prowl for illegal child gaming.

At some later age, of course, I understood the point of those age recommendations. My family had deemed me old enough to sit still and show more interest in trying to answer questions than eating the plastic pie wedges. That was the end of thinking about it for them, while I sweated out the game swamped in guilt and fear. Everyone has lots of stories like this. Kids are strange unfinished creatures with bizarre impartial understanding of the world. I understood the mechanics of a trivia game but was completely mystified by the nuances of printed rules.

The Woman Warrior is Kingston's version of these kinds of stories, only the subtext is much more complicated and the fears much less trivial (wow did I not plan to set up that pun, but Zing!!). She grew up in the U.S., born to a Chinese immigrant family, worked in her family's laundry, and attended both American and Chinese schools. Her stories waft between facts, hearsay, and Chinese mythology to show how all her experiences growing up are filtered through two cultures, without her really understanding either until she was older. Very interesting, fascinating read outside my usual genres.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 and women's' experiences were finally being viewed with serious interest in America, and see how familiar and understandable it is now, when once it had seemed so jagged and unfamiliar and yes, exotic. It paved the way for so many books about ethnic mythos and American ambivalence and women's power that it lost some of its startling quality, while retaining its mastery and depth and the trueness of its questions.

[Maria · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 way through most of the book. Maybe it's just not the right time for this book for me!

[Pink · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 about Maxine, her family, their lives in America as well as their earlier history in China. Beautifully written and captivating to the end.

[Suhaib · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'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.

[Lisa (NY) · Rating 4 out of 5]

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, between the imagined and truth are sometimes disorienting but somehow work. At the end of the book she shouts to her mother: "You lie with your stories. You won't tell me a story and then say, "This is a true story,' or "This is just a story.' I can't tell the difference. I don't even know what your real names are. I can't tell what's real and what you make up."

Exactly.