The Woman Warrior ~ by Maxine Hong Kingston

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts ~ by Maxine Hong Kingston, 1975, 1976

The back cover of this paperback says "Fiction/Literature" and has this quote from The New York Times:   "As an account of growing up female and Chinese-American in California, in a laundry of course, it is anti-nostalgic; it burns the fat right out of the mind.  As a dream — of the 'female avenger' — it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword."

Maxine Hong Kingston

This is the book we're reading this month in the Feminist Classics challenge.  The book is introduced here.  Some readers will also be "working our way through the rest of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir," but Kingston's book, which is already on my bookshelf, is the one I plan to read.

The Woman Warrior blends memoir with Chinese folktale to portray the experience of Chinese-Americans in the wake of the Chinese revolution.  I was surprised to read on A Year of Feminist Classics that The Woman Warrior is the most frequently taught text in modern university education.

I've read other books by Maxine Hong Kingston, and really like her writing.  But I haven't gotten to this one yet.  Have you read it?  What did you think?