Kingston the Woman Warrior

Response to this post.

 

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is a memoir by Maxine Hong Kingston and a unique one too. Jess Row from the Slate Magazine called it “a book without a genre.” While memoirs are usually autobiographical, The Woman Warrior is more precisely semi-autobiographical, as it incorporates a largely noticeable numbers of fictional elements within the writing.

I was actually looking forward to reading this book as memoirs are one of my favorite genres in literature. As I did begin reading, I came to realize that I was reading a very odd yet unique text. The first chapter (or story), “No Name Woman”, was very frank and easy to follow, regarding the narrator’s fictional and nonfictional history of her late “no name” aunt. However the second chapter, “White Tigers”,  was a puzzler. Compared to the prior story, this story was much more fictional, even fantasy-like, and the fact that the narrator suddenly identifies herself as the well-known heroine Hua Mulan threw me off at first. Although it is very predictable that the rest of this book will still have the turbulent balance of fictional and nonfictional elements, that is perhaps why this book was widely praised and became one of the most commonly taught text in educational fields. In a way, this book serves as a freedom of imaginations and thoughts of one girl who is a captive under her traditionally authoritarian parents. With this memoir, Kingston “fights” against this cultural aspect; she is the “woman warrior.” 

Maxine Hong Kingston the author

~ by aliciapark on October 30, 2008.