The Woman Warrior ─ China Men

Here - for the first time in one volume - are two original works on the experience of Chinese immigrants in America. In both books Maxine Hong Kingston mines her family's past and her culture's stories, weaving myth and memory.
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is Kingston's account of growing up Chinese-American in California. The young Kingston lives in two worlds: the America to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother's "talk stories." Her mother tells her traditional tales of strong, wily women warriors - tales that clash puzzlingly with the real oppression of women. Kingston learns to fill in the mystifying spaces in her mother's stories with stories of her own, engaging her family's past and her own present with anger, imagination, and dazzling passion.
China Men is Kingston's journey into the hearts and minds of generations of Chinese men in America, from those who worked on the transcontinental railroad in the 1840s to those who fought in Vietnam. Mixing vivid fables and legends, personal stories from her own family, and historical details, Kingston illuminates the long, arduous search for the Gold Mountain.

Maxine Hong Kingston is Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. For her memoirs and fiction, The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and Hawaii One Summer, she has earned numerous awards, among them the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the title of “Living Treasure of Hawaii.”