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by: Maxine Hong Kingston
List Price: $12.95Amazon.com's Price: $10.36 You Save: $2.59 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 979.4053092
EAN: 9780679721888
ISBN: 0679721886
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: April 23, 1989
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: April 23, 1989
Sales Rank: 1708
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity.
Amazon.com:
The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing 'talk-story' tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white 'ghosts'--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Eliptical Elusiveness Still Elucidates Immigration
The women ancestors of a geeky Chinese-American girl pile up impressive resumes, no worries ! They are kungfu heroines, joining peasant armies that overthrow the very Imperial throne. They are doctors who brave ghosts and come to America. They are mothers and grandmothers who remain staunchly Chinese in the face of the full press of American culture. They are sisters or aunts in Chinatown apartments or unknown relatives killed for following their hearts instead of the rules back in ... Read More
Rating:  - Woman Warrior, a hauntingly lyrical memoir.
Woman Warrior is among the most gripping lyrical-memoirs I've read. It is author Maxine Kingston's Chinese ancestry that teaches her that girls are half-ghosts that walk a tight wire: one wrong step and they transcend into full-pledged ghosts, with all memory of their existence erased from time. Girls in the history of her Chinese culture are regarded much the way Middle Eastern women are regarded today: burdensome and dangerous. The Chinese saying "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful ... Read More
Rating: - the power of memory
Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is a powerful
gem about the relationship between the author and her
mother and other women in her family. It is a memoir
but reads like fiction. I loved this book and especially
how she utilizes symbols, particularly ghosts to represent
people from different backgrounds, whom the author draws
upon for wisdom, strength and remembrance.
I usually have a tough time with "literary" fiction but
the author writes ... Read More
Rating: - Brilliant!
An excellent book, funny, insightful, poignant. Ms. Kingston brilliantly conveys how cultures can clash within the minds of those who straddle them. After reading this book I bought half a dozen copies to give to close friends.
Rating: - Prepare for the unexpected.
This is a tremendous novel. The author threads the stories her mother told her when she was a child, through the retelling of her own life, using them to draw you into her own imagination. As she grows up, living half immersed in traditional myth and half in gritty reality, where mothers and daughters are only human, the reader grows up with her. The first person telling of her childhhood stories puts the reader directly in the shoes of a child/young adult working through the stories she has been told, ... Read More
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