The Woman Warrior

Kingston grew up in a Chinese American family in Stockton, California, saturated with Chinese mythology and ghost stories and the silences her mother kept about her life in China. This memoir-in-stories moves between California and China, between the real and the mythological, between the stories Kingston was told and the stories she made from them. The most formally radical Asian American memoir ever written — Kingston doesn't separate fact from legend because for her family they were never separate. A dispatch about what it means to carry a culture you only partly understand and to make literature from the gap.