The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Hardcover

Kingston, Maxine Hong

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394400674 ISBN 13: 9780394400679

Publisher: Knopf, 1976

Synopsis

A first-generation Chinese-American woman recounts the circumstances, conditions, and consequences of growing up in frantic America within a steadfastly tradition-bound Chinese family, and 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: Knopf
• Publication date: 1976
• ISBN 10: 0394400674
• ISBN 13: 9780394400679
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 209