Present Books During The Woman Warrior
| 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) |
Maxine Hong Kingston
Paperback | Pages: 204 pages Rating: 3.73 | 23920 Users | 1489 Reviews
Describe Appertaining To Books The Woman Warrior
| Title | : | The Woman Warrior |
| Author | : | Maxine Hong Kingston |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First 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 |
Explanation Conducive To 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.
Rating Appertaining To Books The Woman Warrior
Ratings: 3.73 From 23920 Users | 1489 ReviewsCrit Appertaining To Books The Woman Warrior
An excellent book. I read this memoir of growing up Chinese American in California in graduate school, and was deeply moved by it. I particularly appreciated Hong Kingston's intertwining of ancient myth and contemporary immigrant challenges. Beautiful, powerful language. The first chapter, No Name Woman, about the terrible fate of a pregnant aunt in China, is unforgettable. This book, more than any other, made me believe my immigrant stories were also worth telling. This book, more than anyProbably 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
Last year, I read that "The Woman Warrior" was one of the books President Obama put on his daughter's Kindle and I resolved to (finally) read it. And I'm so glad I did. It is a poetic hybrid of memoir, myth and invention; set in contemporary California and Kingston's mother's China. Kingston creates her own version of family stories, inserts herself into Chinese folklore and beautifully describes the isolation of growing up female and Chinese-American. The shifts between the past and present,
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
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
''I inspired my army, and I fed them. At night I sang to them glorious songs that came out of the sky and into my head. When I opened my mouth, the songs poured out and were loud enough for the whole encampment to hear, my army stretched out for a mile.'' A young girl lives among ghosts, standing at the crossroads. Her mother is a formidable woman, a doctor and a shaman, who tries to communicate with her children through the myths of their homeland. But the child is confused, she doesn't know
To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear. (87)I understand why this book is listed as both fiction and a memoir. Maxine Hong Kingston weaves a personal memoir with shamanic/indigenous storiesthe kind of tales you read in
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