Published in 1976, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is Maxine Hong Kingston’s first and best-known book, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Considered a fixture of Chinese-American literature, it is commonly taught in high school and colleges.
Though the book is typically is classified as a memoir, as it explores Kingston’s youth and adulthood, it is also an unusual mixture of fantasy and reality, fiction and truth. Kingston’s style seamlessly weaves her own memories from her childhood into stories her mother told her from Chinese tradition and from her mother’s life back in China. The memoir flits effortlessly between different eras,...
