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

reflective sad medium-paced

3.0

The prose in this book was wonderful, beautifully written. Hong Kingston is an incredible writer, and I like to teach, “How to Tame a wild Tongue,” elements of which are present in the last section of the book. I thought the fictional and mythical components were stronger than the memoir ones, or preferred the stories about the author’s mother’s life rather than interactions with her directly, or from the author’s own memory. There is a lot of critique of Chinese culture on a sociocultural scale, especially toward its treatment and abuse of women, but also from the perspective of the author’s experience as a Chinese-American person. There is a sort of guilty desire for whiteness, and a thorough, continuous condemnation of Chinese ways of knowing, practices, and priorities in contrast with American ones, that come through most strongly with arguments and critiques of the author’s mother. I sometimes feel like the author is asking for our validation—wouldn’t anyone fight back against such a brutal tormentor? It’s just hard to do this in a black and white way, amid the detailed snapshots of her mother’s life we’re also given, and the author’s own cruelty to others to convince herself of her own worth, replicating the ruthless treatment she feels given by her mother. I think because this is mostly a memoir, its conflict is a necessary component of becoming as a person, and that messiness need not be realized in something complete or tidy. It is not necessarily an instructive or informational text, and I do not believe it should be monolithic in its representation of Chinese people, history, culture, or the Chinese-American experience; however, it conveys the difficulty in reconciling many identities, histories, and influences in being a person, one’s own person, very well, calling upon themes of tradition, family, and heritage poetically throughout.