Maxine Hong Kingston

Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

The Woman Warrior

A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity.

Imaginative and parts that really gripped me, but not sure this style of auto fiction (fantasy elements) appeals to me 

Shohini Gupta

Katherine Yang

Immersive, escapist, important. Chinese mothers talking-story. 

My favourite quote:
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?

and this:
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

Xiaolu Guo

Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts

Woman Warrior

Ivy X

The first few stories were strong but just when I got invested it would change to another short story. I Wish that the stories were more in-depth because that really threw me off and I think I started losing interest in the stories the more I read. 

Pretty writing but I did not feel a connection to these Chinese elements as it went because I think the author grouped a lot of these depressing characteristics she experienced through her family together.

A.L.L.

Unlike any other memoir I have read, and it contains my favorite version of Mulan that I have ever read.

Natalia Hernandez

Dejé una reseña en español en mi blog: http://natified.com/2015/09/01/2015-e...

The Woman Warrior is the autobiography by Maxine Hong Kingston, a woman of chinese descent who was born in the United States in the 1940, and had to grow up surrounded by the traditions of a place she's never seen. 

It's an interesting read, not only because of who is writing - a woman who has to live in two worlds at the same time- but also because of the way the book is constructed, including tales of the Chinese tradition to illustrate what the protagonist is going through at the moment. Hong Kingston is able to mix those tales with her experience as the daughter of a very strict woman, who lost children in China and had to wait for her husband for over ten years before they reunited and started a new family together. 

I learned a lot from this book and that's why I liked it. It's a reality so foreign to me that it was an exersize to try and put myself in the shoes of all the women here, including Mulan and the author's mother. There is a lot about feminism, what it means to be a woman (in China, in the States, in the 1940s, in the 1970s) and what is like to be a woman in a man driven world. Sometimes it's sad, sometimes it's ridiculous and sometimes it makes you want to punch something. Personally, I love it when books make me have a physical reaction and this one certainly managed to do so.

Caroline Mao

4.5

wasnt sure if i liked it, but i def did! it's actually soooo good, the writing style is wonderful and it hit pretty close to home a lot of the time

Natalie Hanna

This book surprised me. There were parts that were hard to read because of disturbing animal abuse but overall the narrative came together perfectly. It’s wonderful the way Kingston takes all these fragments are weaves them. This story switches perspective, styles and timeline but I was never once disoriented. The narrator and her family are so compelling and the myths and legends are nothing less than captivating. Very impressed.

Jade Flynn

No-Name Woman - 4/5
White Tigers - 3/5
Shaman - 3/5
At the Western Palace - 4/5
A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe - 5/5

I think Kingston deserves to be more widely read than she currently is.

Bryan Alexander

I read The Woman Warrior this week for the first time, which surprised me. I thought I'd read it back in the 1990s, when I was teaching literature and writing at Centenary College of Louisiana. A colleague loved it and taught the book frequently, including in a class I organized, but somehow I missed it. Now my son is reading Kingston for his university class and I pounced at the chance to read with him.

The Woman Warrior is a memoir, sort of. It describes the narrator's experience of growing up in a Chinese immigrant family in California during the middle of the 20th century. It also includes stories about her mother, some of which take place in China before she emigrated. And the book also gives us a telling of the Hua Mulan and Cai Yan stories, plus various items of ghost folklore. So formally it's a tricky book to classify.

It's largely a dark book, one of those memoirs focused on pain and frustration that some readers somehow find to be inspiring. Maxine Hong Kingston shows us horror, suicide, madness, self-loathing, deformity, duplicity, and oceans of cruelty as she (or rather, her narrator) grows up and tries to understand the different societies she's bound up with. The emotional toll of this book is considerable.

It's also about storytelling. Time and again The Woman Warrior gives us a story or precis, then revises it from another perspective. From the first lines we learn about stories as transgressions, as secrets, as powerful forces shaping people and compelling behavior.

I've heard different views of how accurately the book portrays the Chinese-American experience. To be honest I don't know enough to comment, but I can see the power of the text in giving one such account.

The Woman Warrior Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

Reviews