The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

Kingston, Maxine Hong

ISBN 10: 0808589768 ISBN 13: 9780808589761

Publisher: Turtleback Books, 1989

Synopsis

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. A first-generation Chinese-American woman recounts growing up in America within a tradition-bound Chinese family, confronted with Chinese ghosts from the past and non-Chinese ghosts of the present.

About this title

Review:

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.

From the Inside Flap:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Turtleback Books
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0808589768
• ISBN 13: 9780808589761
• Binding: School & Library Binding
• Number of pages: 224