dukegregory 's review for:

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

3.0

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There are highs and lows here, and part of that probably comes with the reality of being a contemporary reader whose first time at the Asian American literary rodeo this is not. This is a foundational work for many, and I imagine many readers have come across progenitors and other perspectives by this point. Anyway, that has less to do with the text itself. I appreciate the ways in which Hong Kingston melds genres into something ultimately quite idiosyncratic. You feel as if life really is a vast melting pot of tall tales, daily experience, memorial memories, and cultural mythologies interbreeding into a consciousness that proves difficult to reconcile. Something fresh remains in the discussion of immigrant parents when reading this: Hong Kingston describes growing up with parents who tell stories as a means of moral edification and one way of sharing a Chinese culture and history that may or may not actually, in the end, be true. It's not that Hong Kingston grows up amid a pack of compulsive liars, but that culture fogs up her home and she doesn't know where to look, because she breathes in its aroma all day, every day. Out of that fog, this book arises, which, for all the contemporaneous criticism I've read online, seems to have a fascinatingly nuanced perception of womanhood in a midcentury Chinese American family, one recognizing the plentiful implicit and explicit misogyny while also expressing the ferocity and intelligence and thoughtfulness of the women in her life and within the stories that sustain her.