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Maxine Hong Kingston

Teoksen The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts tekijä

17+ teosta 7,290 jäsentä 88 arvostelua 18 Favorited

Tietoja tekijästä

Born in California to immigrant Chinese parents, Kingston was educated at the University of California at Berkeley. Kingston soared to literary celebrity upon the publication of her autobiographica The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976). The Woman Warrior is dominated by näytä lisää Kingston's mother; her next work, China Men (1980), although not autobiographical in the manner of her previous book, is focused on her father and on the other men in her family, giving fictionalized, poetic versions of their histories. The combination of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and myth in both books create a form of balanced opposites that one critic has likened to yin and yang. Her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, was published in 1989. (Bowker Author Biography) näytä vähemmän
Image credit: Gail K. Evanari

Tekijän teokset

Associated Works

Rakastaja (1984) — Johdanto, eräät painokset5,105 kappaletta
In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) — Esipuhe, eräät painokset4,449 kappaletta
The Best American Essays of the Century (2000) — Avustaja — 774 kappaletta
The Norton Book of Women's Lives (1993) — Avustaja — 409 kappaletta
Women's America: Refocusing the Past (1982) — Avustaja, eräät painokset333 kappaletta
For a Future to Be Possible (1993) — Avustaja — 247 kappaletta
We Are the Stories We Tell (1990) — Avustaja — 193 kappaletta
Modern American Memoirs (1995) — Avustaja — 189 kappaletta
This Is My Best: Great Writers Share Their Favorite Work (2004) — Avustaja — 159 kappaletta
American Dragons: Twenty-five Asian American Voices (1995) — Avustaja — 124 kappaletta
The Penguin Book of Women's Humour (1996) — Avustaja — 117 kappaletta
Growing up Asian American: An Anthology (1993) — Avustaja — 101 kappaletta
The State of the Language [1980] (1980) — Avustaja — 82 kappaletta
The Vintage Book of American Women Writers (2011) — Avustaja — 56 kappaletta
California Uncovered: Stories For The 21st Century (2005) — Avustaja — 31 kappaletta
Asian-American Literature: An Anthology (2000) — Avustaja — 30 kappaletta
Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing (2001) — Avustaja — 19 kappaletta
Wonders: Writings and Drawings for the Child in Us All (1980) — Avustaja — 18 kappaletta
Don't Look Back: Hawaiian Myths Made New (2011) — Avustaja — 6 kappaletta

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Kirja-arvosteluja

A haunting story of a Chinese American trying to make sense of her heritage and confusing family history. She uncovers a story so powerful that finally allows her to accept her position in life.
 
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marquis784 | 69 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Oct 17, 2023 |
Another one I remember reading some years ago, without now recalling its details. But I do remember it was enjoyable.
 
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mykl-s | 5 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Mar 2, 2023 |
Kingston is a master at weaving first, second, and third voices into a memoir filled with anicient Chinese folklore and cautionary tales about womanhood. I felt a lot of sadness in Woman Warrior. The tragedy starts early in as Kingston describes her mother, a former Chinese doctor, telling a horrifying tale about an aunt giving birth to a sexless child in a pigsty and then committing suicide with that baby; drowning together in a well. There was such shame in this pregnancy, "To save her inseminator's name she gave a silent birth" (p 14). So much contradiction in culture! There is a crime to being born female and yet there is the story of the fierce woman warrior, the legend of the female avenger. My favorite parts were when Kingston addresses the difference between American-feminine and Chinese-feminine.… (lisätietoja)
 
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SeriousGrace | 69 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Oct 3, 2022 |
This is an extraordinary book. It is a memoir of Kingston's childhood and adolescence, interspersed with Chinese legends featuring women.

There is no question that it requires committed reading, especially at the beginning where the line is blurry between reality and "talk-stories", or cultural myths (including that of Mulan, of Disney fame). This confusion is further complicated by Kingston's use of the first, second and third person narrative voices. But the rewards are worth the effort, as we become part of her unique experience. “Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.”

There seem to have been two reactions to this book when it was first published. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, no small achievement. But it was also dissed by a number of Chinese-American critics who felt her interpretations of the Chinese-American experience lacked authenticity.

From what I've been able to determine by a quick internet search, those critics were primarily male, which brings us to a key element of this book: It is not simply an exploration of the overall first generation Chinese-American experience, it is a specific Chinese-American woman's experience.

I would posit that any memoir legitimately reflects the life of the person writing and no one else. This 2017 quote from a much younger Chinese-American author, Angela Chen, who avoided reading [b:The Woman Warrior|30852|The Woman Warrior|Maxine Hong Kingston|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1541333110l/30852._SY75_.jpg|1759] for many years expresses that opinion more elegantly than I can: "But taken off this pedestal, the innovations and craft of The Woman Warrior become more apparent. It is a complex account of what it was like to be Kingston, writing about experiences at a time that few others did. It is the personal and not the general. It is not template, not beginning or end."

This came to be my first read of 2021 by chance. I recently listened to a series of lectures about American best sellers through the centuries, and the only book that I hadn't already read that piqued my curiosity was [b:The Woman Warrior|30852|The Woman Warrior|Maxine Hong Kingston|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1541333110l/30852._SY75_.jpg|1759]. I'm so glad it did; it was a great way to begin the year.
… (lisätietoja)
 
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BarbKBooks | 69 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Aug 15, 2022 |

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Teokset
17
Also by
30
Jäseniä
7,290
Suosituimmuussija
#3,355
Arvio (tähdet)
3.8
Kirja-arvosteluja
88
ISBN:t
66
Kielet
5
Kuinka monen suosikki
18

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