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The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of aGirlhood Among Ghosts(Maxine Hong Kingston),.“The Woman Warrior and the Hero’s Journey”by Lauren P. De La Vars,St. Bonaventure UniversityWhen Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior was published in1976, it caused a sensation, mostly because of its unusual subject, butat least partly because critics could not easily classify it. It won theNational Book Critics Circle Award for the best work of nonfictionin 1976, but the term nonfiction does not adequately describe its mixof fact and fantasy, dream and documentary. What kind of book is this?people wondered.In some ways, The Woman Warrior is a realistic work dealing withan American life and an immigrant family: a memoir of childhood, adocument of one family’s experience in the 1940s and 1950s as Chineseimmigrants to America, an autobiography of a girl’s claiming her individualityamid the clamor of Chinese and American expectations forgirls and women. But in other ways it is not at all American-realisticand certainly is not a conventional, chronological Western autobiography.First, the narrative has no one central narrator; only the last ofthe five chapters presents consistent first-person narration recognizableas Kingston’s voice. Instead, most of the book mediates Kingston’sown autobiography through her fictional or factual presentation of thestories of other women. In the second chapter, for instance, Kingston’sfirst-person Chinese-American girl narrator transforms into a girl215