The Woman Warrior

(Paperback)

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Description

When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talking-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Throughout her childhood, Maxine Hong Kingston listened to her mother's mesmerizing tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upwards. Growing up in a changing America, surrounded by Chinese myth and memory, this is her story of two cultures and one trenchant, lyrical journey into womanhood. Complex and beautiful, angry and adoring, The Woman Warrior is a seminal piece of writing about emigration and identity. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 and is widely hailed as a feminist classic.

Reviews

This is a delightful book . . . tells more than I ever imagined about the strangeness of being Chinese and a woman; it also gives a superb account of what it's like simply to be alive -- Victoria Radin * New Society *
A strange, enchanting book . . . As a manual of self-discovery through the channels and terrors of one's own rejected communal memory, it is unbeatable * Guardian *
As a dream - of the "female avenger" - it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword . . . reimagining the past with such dark beauty, such precision and anger that you feel you have saddled the Tao dragon and see all through the fiery eye of God -- John Leonard * New York Times *
A book of fierce clarity and originality * Newsweek *
It [has] crossed cultural boundaries and fused literary genres in startlingly original ways * Guardian *

Author Bio

Maxine Hong Kingston is a Chinese-American writer of fiction and non-fiction. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.