by Maxine Hong Kingston

isbn: 0679721886
subject: Nonfiction, Biography
finished: 12/27/2000

The Woman Warrior is Kingston's memoir about growing up caught between two worlds: one was a small image of rural pre-communist China created by her immigrant family and their neighbors in San Francisco; the other was America, a world filled with ghosts, or non-Chinese. Not surprisingly, the Chinese world was usually the more substantial one, the setting for her day-to-day life and the subject of a hundred frightening stories that her mother told about ghosts and monsters, about how girl-children are worthless, and about brutal retribution for adultery by villagers. These stories are presented to Kingston as reality, and trying to make sense of them in America confuses and disorients her. The Woman Warrior is a good book, but an angry one: Kingston grew up not being fully accepted in either of her worlds. It's about searching for her own voice and identity during a difficult childhood.