The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

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

 “A classic, for a reason” – Celeste Ng via Twitter

Named by The New York Times as one of the 50 best memoirs of the last 50 years.

In her award-winning book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form—an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American. 

As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother’s “talk stories.” The fierce and wily women warriors of her mother’s tales clash jarringly with the harsh reality of female oppression out of which they come. Kingston’s sense of self emerges in the mystifying gaps in these stories, which she learns to fill with stories of her own. A warrior of words, she forges fractured myths and memories into an incandescent whole, achieving a new understanding of her family’s past and her own present.

204 pages (May 1976)

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Reading Guide from BookMovement.

Discussion Questions from PBS NewsHour

Discussion Questions from Digital Public Library of America

 

To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

The Woman Warrior at goodreads

 

Review from April Magazine

Review from The Arbiter

Review from Kirkus Reviews

Review from The New York Times

Review from PBS NewsHour

Review at Slate

 

"Maxine Hong Kingston’s Genre-Defying Life and Work" at The New Yorker

Maxine Hong Kingston at BookBrowse.

Maxine Hong Kingston at ReadingGroupGuides

 

Excerpt from Maxine Hong Kingston Talking Story from KQED Arts:

 

Excerpts from The Woman Warrior from SilvereyedKing:

 

Celeste Ng and Maxine Hong Kingston answer your questions about The Woman Warrior from PBS NewsHour:

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