The Woman Warrior Paperback | Pages: 204 pages

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Original Title:	The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
ISBN:	0679721886 (ISBN13: 9780679721888)
Edition Language:	English
Literary Awards:	Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (1978), National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction (1976)

Commentary During Books The Woman Warrior

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.

Describe Regarding Books The Woman Warrior

Title	:	The Woman Warrior
Author	:	Maxine Hong Kingston
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 204 pages
Published	:	April 23rd 1989 by Vintage Books USA (first published August 12th 1976)
Categories	:	Autobiography. Memoir. Nonfiction. Feminism. Cultural. China

Rating Regarding Books The Woman Warrior

Ratings: 3.73 From 23920 Users | 1489 Reviews

Criticize Regarding Books The Woman Warrior

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.

You must not tell anyone, what I am about to tell you. So begins Maxine Hong Kingston: 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 and the immigrant experience throughout. 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

I wish we had read this in sophomore year of high school instead of Catcher in the Rye. This book is an amazing, lyrically written book about growing up as a girl between two cultures, neither of which is particularly empowering to adolescent girls. What I didn't like about the school system teaching Catcher in the Rye as a 'universal story of adolescence' was because I felt it was a very masculine story of adolescence--the things Holden does (punch walls, order a prostitute, be overly

Fantastic.

Probably most intriguing about the structure of Maxine Hong Kingstons Woman Warrior, beginning with "No Name Woman and ending in A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe, is that it characterizes Maxine Hong Kingstons 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

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

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