
The Woman Warrior
Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
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Narrated by:
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Ming-Na
About this listen
Acclaimed author Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior broke new ground when it was first published 35 years ago, weaving autobiography, history, folklore, and fantasy in to a candid and revelatory story about the daughter of Chinese immigrants in mid-20th century California.
Now in audio for the first time, The Woman Warrior is read by television and movie star Ming-Na (ER, Mulan) in a performance that captures the book’s amazing spectrum of hope, longing, fear, and strength.
Kingston, winner of the National Book Award and National Humanities Medal, beautifully mixes reality and fantasy in relating her experience growing up a stranger in America and an outsider to her family’s history in China. Thanks to the author’s unique storytelling style and voice, this book remains one of the most commonly taught college texts in America. Hear it performed here for the first time.
©1975, 1976 Maxine Hong Kingston (P)2010 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Editorial reviews
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston enchantingly swirls to life through actor Ming-Na’s spirited reading. A modern classic that was originally published in 1975, The Woman Warrior is perfectly suited for audio production as the author brilliantly cloaked her childhood memories and family history in the rich brocade of Chinese folklore and superstition. Reality and folk tales became interwoven as Kingston, the child of Chinese immigrants, simply had no other way to figure out the world except through stories told to her by her mother and Kingston’s own maturing awareness.
Ming-Na captures it all: the folklore ghosts, the family secret ghosts, and the ghosts who symbolized all that was new, confusing, and sometimes terrifying about life in America for Kingston’s parents. There is a deep well from which to draw: a story that the author created to honor an aunt whose name had never been spoken after she shamed the family in China, the sometimes comical but distressingly painful story of another aunt’s descent into mental illness after she simply could not transform from Chinese villager to Los Angeles-based American grandmother, and finally the piercing, heartbreaking tirade as teenaged Maxine unleashes a lifetime of pent-up confusion and anger at her Chinese mother. Through it all Ming-Na astounds and entertains and perfectly characterizes the author as she grows from a small child with a child’s sensibilities and impatience to the complex adult and gifted writer Kingston became.
The variety of characters in The Woman Warrior will have all who enjoy this selection certain that more than one performer is interpreting the book. Like the work itself, Ming-Na creates a wonderfully enjoyable illusion. Carole Chouinard
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Story
Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination. Rose Mary painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family; she called herself an "excitement addict."
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What's normal?
- By Kmrsy on 11-30-13
By: Jeannette Walls
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Me Talk Pretty One Day
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Abridged
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David Sedaris' collection of essays - including live recordings! - tells a most unconventional life story. With every clever turn of a phrase, Sedaris brings a view and a voice like no other to every unforgettable encounter. You can also listen to Sedaris in an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
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Subtly Funny Musings on Life Experiences
- By FanB14 on 09-03-12
By: David Sedaris
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
- By: Zora Neale Hurston
- Narrated by: Ruby Dee
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years.
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perfection
- By Mel on 04-06-15
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The Bluest Eye
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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Amazing
- By psiegler on 07-25-18
By: Toni Morrison
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On Writing
- A Memoir of the Craft
- By: Stephen King
- Narrated by: Stephen King, Joe Hill, Owen King
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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“Long live the King” hailed Entertainment Weekly upon publication of Stephen King’s On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King’s advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported, near-fatal accident in 1999—and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery.
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Who needs a print edition when King reads King?
- By Cather on 11-18-05
By: Stephen King
Can be confusing
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Literature is Great
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Wonderful Story Telling
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Poetic Fable and Fiction
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liked the "talk-stories"
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Enchanting
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Transportive & entertaining
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Of course, time and place are interconnected. If the 20th century is the “American Century” then the 7th century (and maybe the 8th and 9th centuries as well) disserve(s) to be called the “Tang Century(s)”. So this is also about the collision of Chinese Village culture on the cusp of modernity and American culture near the maximum of its rate of ascendancy..
It seems to me like this book should be studied in literature classes as a quintessential example of the modern literacy style. It is a non-linearly collection of stories each of which plays with the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. It deliberately bends the distinction between autobiography and social commentary. It talks about ordinary people to make points about Great civilizations. It tells the most painful stories of desperation and betrayal as humor (although the humor is probably sharper if you are in fact Chinese). It toys with many of the other classical demarcations in literature (perhaps all of the classical demarcations) and yet manages to not feel (too much) like a teenager rebelling against tradition for the sake of rebellion. It is worth reading just to improve one's taste for high art.
It is dated. It’s usually different for Chinese born after Deng Xiaoping. But it’s a must read for understanding older Chinese women.
I have a ratings monetary policy problem. Too many of my ratings are 5 star, and too often, as in this case, I feel the need to give 6 stars. Perhaps I need to give more 4 star ratings so I save some room at the top.
Hilariously Vicious; Touchingly Empathetic
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Talking Story
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Very well written and read
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