The Woman Warrior’s complex and experimental mixture of folktale, family history, and memoir makes Kingston as much character as author.

In her childhood, Kingston is rebellious, reclusive, and angry; she is enraged that her community devalues girls, and she takes habitual stereotyping and dismissals personally.

She’s also a creative, imaginative, and even mystical person. Her consciousness, influenced by her mother’s stories, inhabits myth and “talk-story” as easily as reality. Her alter ego, a woman warrior, goes on an intense vision quest that reveals an inner light in all humanity, and Kingston’s humane empathy for the people she writes about suggests that this image reflects a real conviction.

Kingston struggles with her feelings of simultaneous closeness and separation from her culture. She feels inexorably drawn back to her Chinese roots, even as she cleaves to American ideals about global citizenship and empowerment. These conflicts emerge most strongly in her difficulties with communication: She often struggles to speak, makes childhood art that she covers over with black paint, and feels she must sacrifice her mother’s magical way of seeing the world to make a life for herself in America.

But through writing The Woman Warrior, Kingston unites her American and Chinese heritage into a unified whole—albeit one deeply concerned with its own inherent tensions.