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3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
This book is like retreating into another life, another world. I have read it at least twice. Very memorable story.
slow-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
I chose this book as part of the Mega Challenge, an award-winning book from the year you were born. This book won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976. It is an interesting mesh of Chinese folklore, myths, and intergenerational family stories. The book is a collection of 5 interconnected stories. There is a lot of discussion of misogyny, immigrant experiences, family conflict, and traditional roles in Chinese society. I found some of the myths/folklore super interesting (like the original story of Mu Lan) but some were long, tedious, violent, and meandering. In general, I found some of the personal stories interesting but overall it just fell flat. The short story format led to not a lot of depth or time to explore characters.
emotional
informative
medium-paced
Interesting insight into Chinese culture and superstitions, as well as the immigrant experience to America in the mid-1900s
In the afterword of her book, Maxine Hong Kingston discusses the classification of the text which was published in 1977, long before personal non-fiction became popular. She answers a common question:
"It is fiction. / It is non fiction. Nearly all reviews in the UK have puzzled over the ambiguousness of its genre...i place myself at the wider border between categories. I've invented a way to write about real people, who talk story and dream."
In the foreword of this book, Xiaolu Guo writes:
"There is something very characteristic about certain female authors— the argot of their childhood is the language of their literature; the politics suffusing their childhood becomes the political drive of their narrative."
In A song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe (the final story in the collection) the narrator writes;
"I continue to sort out what's just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living."
I loved this book. The delicate and imaginative way it merges surrealism with the memory of oral storytelling against the realities of political context. The writing is excellent and the force of the storytelling has the passion of welcoming the reader into the world of the narrators. A world rich with ghosts, family bonds, love silence and madness. A collection of stories full of resilience in the face of political upheaval and misogny. It is difficult to capture the mind of an individual, yet Hong Kingston does so with eloquence and beauty. The self is personal. After all, why do women have to prove they are warriors?
"It is fiction. / It is non fiction. Nearly all reviews in the UK have puzzled over the ambiguousness of its genre...i place myself at the wider border between categories. I've invented a way to write about real people, who talk story and dream."
In the foreword of this book, Xiaolu Guo writes:
"There is something very characteristic about certain female authors— the argot of their childhood is the language of their literature; the politics suffusing their childhood becomes the political drive of their narrative."
In A song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe (the final story in the collection) the narrator writes;
"I continue to sort out what's just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living."
I loved this book. The delicate and imaginative way it merges surrealism with the memory of oral storytelling against the realities of political context. The writing is excellent and the force of the storytelling has the passion of welcoming the reader into the world of the narrators. A world rich with ghosts, family bonds, love silence and madness. A collection of stories full of resilience in the face of political upheaval and misogny. It is difficult to capture the mind of an individual, yet Hong Kingston does so with eloquence and beauty. The self is personal. After all, why do women have to prove they are warriors?
Kingston played with my expectations of non-fiction with Woman Warrior. This weaves in and out of fantasy and dream-like reality that it becomes difficult to really tell where fiction begins and ends. Regardless, this is a beautiful book with some stunning imagery that has stayed with me for years.
This a story about a girl who cannot fit in with the villagers or the ghosts and decides to go on a journey to become a warrior princess.
"you became people in a book I had read a long time ago" ~102
"you became people in a book I had read a long time ago" ~102
read for Asian American lit class! review (coursework paper) coming soon :D
I'd had this book on my to-read list since 2011, when it was one of the picks for Feminist Classics Book Club, and I had no idea what to expect. The book is hard to categorize, being a mixture of memoir, folktales, and creative imaginings. At the heart is Maxine Hong Kingston's struggle to define herself and to reconcile her identity with her Chinese family history and her experiences growing up in America in the 1950s-70s. The "ghosts" in the title refers to actual spirits, Kingston's ancestors, and non-Chinese people in America.
From a feminist perspective, Kingston's stories are intriguing. She grapples with and rebels against the ways women have been devalued in Chinese society, vowing that she will not let her family "sell" her off to a husband:
"It was said, 'There is an outward tendency in females,' which meant that I was getting straight A's for the good of my future husband's family, not my own. I did not plan ever to have a husband. I would show my mother and father and the nosey emigrant villagers that girls have no outward tendency."
And Kingston also tries to reclaim the lost stories of Chinese women such as her aunt, who was driven to suicide for committing adultery. But she also exalts the strength of Chinese women like her mother, who became a doctor and was revered in her village before coming to America. She retells the legend of Fa Mu Lan and draws strength from her legacy.
Kingston's telling of her relationship to Communism in China is also complex. On the one hand she outlines the atrocities her family members in the village experienced as a result of Mao's "land reform" and expresses confusion at why her family would be targeted as landowners when they were relatively poor. On the other hand, she later praises the revolution for liberating women from child slavery and child marriage and says: "The Revolution put and end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own."
So in the end, there aren't a lot of plain truths in this book. What it is is an emotional, creative journey that combines past and present (to the 1970s), real and imaginary, child and adult, America and China.
From a feminist perspective, Kingston's stories are intriguing. She grapples with and rebels against the ways women have been devalued in Chinese society, vowing that she will not let her family "sell" her off to a husband:
"It was said, 'There is an outward tendency in females,' which meant that I was getting straight A's for the good of my future husband's family, not my own. I did not plan ever to have a husband. I would show my mother and father and the nosey emigrant villagers that girls have no outward tendency."
And Kingston also tries to reclaim the lost stories of Chinese women such as her aunt, who was driven to suicide for committing adultery. But she also exalts the strength of Chinese women like her mother, who became a doctor and was revered in her village before coming to America. She retells the legend of Fa Mu Lan and draws strength from her legacy.
Kingston's telling of her relationship to Communism in China is also complex. On the one hand she outlines the atrocities her family members in the village experienced as a result of Mao's "land reform" and expresses confusion at why her family would be targeted as landowners when they were relatively poor. On the other hand, she later praises the revolution for liberating women from child slavery and child marriage and says: "The Revolution put and end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own."
So in the end, there aren't a lot of plain truths in this book. What it is is an emotional, creative journey that combines past and present (to the 1970s), real and imaginary, child and adult, America and China.