Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-fiction

“A book of fierce clarity and originality” (Newsweek), Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiography tells of her early life in California and the cultural confusion she experienced as the daughter of Chinese immigrants.

“A remarkable book. . . . As an account of growing up female and Chinese-American in California, in a laundry of course, it is an anti-nostalgic; it burns the fat right out of the mind. As a dream—of the ’female avenger’—it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.” —The New York Times

 
WINNER 1976 - National Book Critics Circle Awards
WINNER 1978 - Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

 
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 Hawai’i 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 Hawai’i.”