The Woman Warrior

There is nothing like this groundbreaking memoir—it is as good as it gets—and it has probably influenced every memoir since (including my own).

Kingston is a poet, and I find it impossible not to sink into the striking, gorgeous language and imagery as she describes growing up between multiple worlds: the China her parents emigrated from, the California of a first-generation daughter of immigrants, the ghost-filled China of her mother’s “talk stories,” and her inner life and growing awareness. She weaves family stories, famous myths, and her own girlhood experiences into a beautiful and unforgettable narrative.

I probably… show more.

A list like this cannot be complete without Kingston, who uses in her book a literary technique called “perhapsing”—defined by Lisa Knopp as “the use of speculation in creative nonfiction”—in which Kingston uses myth and the question “what if” to imagine what might’ve happened in the stories she half-knows about her family. 

Kingston’s classic opens with one of the best first lines of all time: “You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.” When I teach this book in my memoir writing classes, my students and I spend a long time discussing the implication of this first sentence—what it means for Kingston’s work, but also what it means for us, as memoirists, to tell stories we’ve been forbidden, in some way, to tell. The beating heart of this memoir is the idea that making art—literary or otherwise—is the process of saving your own… show more.

This astounding book of nonfiction folds outright fiction, in the form of folk tales and “talk-story”, into autobiographical narrative. The result is a mille-feuille of mirrors and arcs and threads that gives us the truest possible portrait of a woman told through the fullest expression of her cultural, familial, and personal contexts. Mary Karr says “God is in the truth,” but sometimes ‘actuality’ cannot tell the whole truth. Without breaking any covenant with her readers, Maxine Hong Kingston finds a way to widen our sense of what ‘truth’ is—at least for these 209 pages. 

Most people think magical realism is limited to fiction, but Maxine Hong Kingston proves that it can be used for memoir, too. This was the first non-fiction form of magical realism that I ever read, and it broadened the genre for me. I think the biggest element of magical realism found in this memoir is her thematic use of ghosts. Readers might have a hard time figuring out if certain characters are really ghosts or not, and that vagueness is one of the most beautiful elements of magical realism. 

This classic of Asian-American literature is full of fierce women and gentle men, and the first time I understood how powerful a non-linear, semi-mythological collection of stories could be. Maxine Hong Kingston, like Toni Morrison, was not writing to educate a broader readership, but to tell stories relatable to a very specific audience of Asian American readers. For this, I salute her courage and originality. 

In this 1976 literary classic, composed of five stories that blend folktale and memoir, Kingston describes growing up as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She is confused about what it means to be a girl and what is expected of her as she becomes a woman. Kingston wonders: Will she grow up to become a surgeon, as her mother had been in China; a fierce woman warrior; or like the ill-fated No Name Woman, who killed herself and her baby, born out of wedlock, after bringing disgrace to her family and village? She learns that women are the ones tasked… show more.