#41 The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

Some women become doctors, some become lawyers and others become warriors.  Maxine Hong Kingston is a warrior. She uses this phantasmagorical memoir to battle the many “ghosts” of her childhood.  Some of these are the ghosts of her mother’s talk-story about life in China.   Others are the unfamiliar and frightening faces of her American neighborhood: mail-carrier ghosts, meter-reader ghosts,  teacher ghosts, white ghosts and black ghosts.  Maxine, a Chinese-American, must make her way among these specters while trying to find her place among the Chinese who believe that it is “better to raise geese than girls.”   But in becoming an American, she finds that she has become a ghost herself.