Here--for the first time in one volume--are two classic, brilliantly
original works on the experience of Chinese immigrants in America. In
both books the acclaimed author mines her family's past and her
culture's stories, weaving myth and memory to fashion works of enormous
revelatory power.
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, which won the
National Book Critics Circle Award, is Kingston's disturbing and
fiercely beautiful account of growing up Chinese-American in California.
The young Kingston lives in two worlds: the America to which her parents
have emigrated, a place inhabited by white "ghosts," and the China of
her mother's "talk stories," a place haunted by the ghosts of the past.
Her mother, who had been a doctor in China but in the United States is
reduced to running a laundry, tells her daughter traditional tales of
strong, wily women warriorstales-that clash puzzlingly with the real
oppression of Chinese 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, a National Book Award winner for fiction, is Kingston's
unforgettable imaginative 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 details of the historical hardships faced by Chinese immigrants in
different times and places, Kingston illuminates their long, arduous
search for the Gold Mountain.
