The Woman Warrior

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is a book by the Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1976. It blends autobiography with old Chinese folktales.

Kingston writes about growing up Chinese-American in California, where she lives in the America her parents emigrated to and in the China of her mother's stories. Her mother tells her traditional tales of strong, wily women warriors, and those tales clash with the life of a girl in a Chinese-American household and with what the people around the family expect of her. The result is a book that mixes memoir with folktale, and the mixture is deliberate: Kingston uses the two together to give the cultural, familial and personal context needed to understand her position as a first-generation Chinese-American woman. The genre of the book has been disputed for that reason, because it blends perspectives in a way that neither pure autobiography nor pure fiction would allow.

The gap between what the stories promise women and what the family and the community permit them is the argument that runs through the whole book.