Memoirs Of A Girlhood Among Ghosts By Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

When people listen to the word ‘autobiography’, they instantly expect a book which deals with the life story of the author. They believe that it must be a book of nonfiction. However, The Woman Warrior – Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts written by Maxine Hong Kingston is different than other autobiographies. First of all, it is an autobiography by a Chinese American woman. Then, she included lots of fantastic elements. Moreover, the protagonist of her autobiography is not only her, but her mother, fictive characters from Chinese folk ballads, as well as an aunt whom she never met. First published in 1976, it became a huge success and later it was listed as one of the fist canonized Chinese American writings. However, Kingston’s piece of writing …show more content…
Not only did it gain massive popularity right after its publication, but it received multiple positive reviews by various critics. For instance, the famous US-American weekly news magazine Newsweek described Woman Warrior as “a book of fierce clarity and originality” (qtd. in Kingston back cover). In addition, it won the “National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction” (Kingston front cover). Ever since the publication of Kingston’s book, it has been widely read in different US college courses such as in American literature, gender studies and anthropology (Wong, Casebook …show more content…
Also, Lim suggests that readers who read “life-writing genres”, expect to read “not invention and novelty but real life and actual events [which are] renarrated” (23). Indeed, some of the elements in The Woman Warrior seem to be rather fantastic than realistic. Kingston included Chinese folk tales of Fa Mu Lan and Ts’ai Yen in her writing, which are prominent parts of Kingston’s autobiography. Concerning the myth of Fa Mu Lan, a whole chapter called White Tigers is dedicated to this particular Chinese mythology. Furthermore, the narrator does not only identify herself with Fa Mu Lan, but she “casts herself” as the protagonist of the folk ballad, telling the legend from her perspective (Hunt 7). The modified story starts as follows: “I would be a girl of seven the day I followed the bird away into the mountains. The brambles would tear off my shoes and the rocks cut my feet and fingers, but I would keep climbing…” (Kingston 20). This quote describes the very first beginning when Kingston inhabits the role of Fa Mu Lan and retells the story, as well as further mixing her imaginations with the Chinese