Reviews with content warning for Ableism - The Woman Warrior: Memoirs Of A Girlhood Among Ghosts

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The Woman Warrior: Memoirs Of A Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

8 reviews

hanaspages's review against another edition

5.0

reflective medium-paced

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l_e_lavalle's review against another edition

3.25

adventurous emotional reflective slow-paced

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zombiezami's review against another edition

2.75

dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

I originally read this in high school, and remember really liking it then. I've been wanting to reread it for a long time, and now that I finally have, I feel disappointed in it. It was a slog to get through, and a lot of stuff just really hasn't aged well. I do still love the blending of legend and life events.

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readingpicnic's review against another edition

4.0

emotional reflective medium-paced

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scripturizzy's review against another edition

5.0

challenging emotional reflective tense medium-paced

"Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?"

Kingston's memoir is just as disjointed and haunting and confusing as the experience of Chinese American girlhood. The title alone is jarringly revealing while still holding that ugly truth of our lives: there are no words to explain. The use of the word "girlhood" specifically, that experience all its own from boyhood. Trying to compare the two under the falsely neutral "childhood" would be a lie. And the knowledge of ghosts, ghosts in this book which are Them, the whole mass of "Everyone Else" that is not Chinese, and to Kingston who is not Chinese and not American, may be the only identifier that is familiar.

Throughout the entire memoir the lines between truth and lie, waking and dreaming, story and fairytale, are blurred to the extreme. There were times when I was unsure if Kingston was telling a true story, or a talk-story, or a memory, and slowly the difference between them all mattered less and less as the true emotion behind the stories came into light.

There is a certain and Specific alienation in the intersections of girlhood and Chinese-American ness, in the ways both identities can grow off the other's similarities. Kingston taps into the feeling of being unmoored in the familial memory of china, in the invisible immigrants' world, in the solid world of America. This is the kind of statelessness all Chinese-Americans feel, and it's made worse through the crime of being a girl. There is some "hope of forgiveness" for Chinese boys, because they are "worth something", and even as an adult at the time of this book's writing it's clear Kingston is still grappling with the idea of her place in a world that doesn't want her. At every turn, every story, every collective memory, there is nowhere for a girl to hide and no way for a girl to win. It brought me back to my own childhood and that unbridled and unexplainable anger of realizing what being a girl and being a Chinese girl means. Even after reading this book though I couldn't say what it is. The only meaning I can land on is the absence of meaning, and defining myself by what I am not.

This book was evidently crazy introspective, as I'm unable to form a coherent review and have just been diving into a personal essay about all my feelings. This book is everything I wish I had at age twelve, except hearing it all so plainly and so young might have broken me. It feels so so good to be known in literature like this, to hear another writer so similar and so different to me write across time and reach me. 10/10.

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turtleghost's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous dark emotional informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad fast-paced

Told as a series of stories, some fact, some fiction, some about the author, some about her mother, some about legends. All are connected by the themes of identity as an Chinese woman, in China and in America. Brutally emotional and occasionally darkly funny, it doesn't tell you how to feel or what to do, just presents ideas in an incredibly engaging way.

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ladymedievalist1's review against another edition

4.0

challenging informative reflective tense slow-paced

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sherbertwells's review against another edition

5.0

challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

In a perfect world, I would only keep 20 or 30 books in my house. Because I can access many books via my local library, the ones worth keeping are the ones I want to reread, to annotate and to keep close to my heart. Chinese-American author Maxine Hong Kington’s 1976 memoir The Woman Warrior deserves a place among these personal favorites.

Although it spans generations, The Woman Warrior feels heartbreakingly intimate. Like another of my favorite books, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Kingston’s memoir is divided into smaller, glittering essays that detail her experiences and those of her female relatives. Forgotten aunts and mythical ancestors in pre-revolutionary China take their places alongside Kingston’s immigrant mother and eventually the author herself. Growing up in mid-century California, Kingston and her family experiences a world “full of machines and ghosts— Taxi Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts” and other figures unwilling to acknowledge their humanity (96-97). Perhaps the scope of The Woman Warrior seems so private because its characters are frequently marginalized for their gender and race. For example, “No-Name Woman,” the first essay, imagines the life of an aunt who died shortly after giving birth to an illegitimate child, whose existence had been erased for years by Kingston’s family.

“My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes. I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water.” (16)

For many writers, a family memoir is a preservative act, and Kingston never works alone. She is aided by her medically-inclined mother, her unjustly-spurned aunt, sisters, classmates, teachers and other manifestations of the titular “Woman Warrior.” Each character is unique, powerful and flawed, but Kingston is unsparing in the depiction of their difficulties. I was shocked by how many girls and women in The Woman Warrior end up confined or killed. Although these small tragedies underscore Kingston’s own eventual success as a scholar, I didn’t get the impression that she was setting herself above her fellow women. One disturbing scene that appears in the last essay highlights the author’s fallibility and serves to exhibit her mounting frustration with the limitations of Chinese and American culture. But theme is the least of The Woman Warrior’s strengths.

“Surrounding [my mother] were candles she burned in daylight, clean yellow diamonds, foot-lights that ringed her, mysterious masked mother, nose and mouth veiled with a cowboy handkerchief. Before undoing the bundles, my mother would light a tall new candle, which was a luxury, and the pie pans full of old wax and wicks that sometimes sputtered blue, a noise I thought was the germs getting seared.” (105)

Kingston crafts distinct, iridescent prose that makes her upbringing feel like a brilliant, tragic adventure. Each essay is filled with sharp details that build nuanced, realistic portraits of the almost-lost. Kingston is a stubborn child and a percipient commentator. Her mother is a practical shaman and an alienated tyrant. From scene to scene, the prose shifts to show each character in a different light as Kingston’s own understanding increases. Maybe I’m just overly-infatuated with Bindungsromane and meditations on childhood, but The Woman Warrior feels like a half-mythological backstory for one of the foremost American writers of the 20th century.

While doing research about The Woman Warrior, I encountered the companion account China Men, detailing the lives of Kingston’s male relatives. I eagerly await the opportunity to check it out. Kingston deserves a place among my favorite authors. Her memoir deserves a place among my favorite books.

For readers who want something nuanced and fantastical that reveals truths about growing up outside of the American mainstream, The Woman Warrior will definitely rise to the challenge.

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