A classic memoir set during the Chinese revolution of the 1940s and inspired by folklore, providing a unique insight into the life of an immigrant in America.
Throughout her childhood, Maxine Hong Kingston listened to her mother’s mesmerizing tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upwards. Growing up in a changing America, surrounded by Chinese myth and memory, this is her story of two cultures and one trenchant, lyrical journey into womanhood. Complex and beautiful, angry and adoring, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is an important piece of writing about emigration and identity.
It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 and is widely hailed as a feminist classic.
A Poem Turned into a Sword
The Woman Warrior was my book. I say this not to avoid accusations of parti pris – after all, everybody who writes about a book for Slightly Foxed can by definition be accused of that – but...
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