The Woman Warrior is subtitled “Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.” This is true in more ways than one.

Real ghosts swarm through the pages of The Woman Warrior. The ghost of Kingston’s drowned aunt, the eerie Sitting Ghost who tries to stifle Brave Orchid, and the Sit Dom Kuei who rise up as snakelike pillars of smoke are only a few examples. These ghosts are part of Kingston’s family’s daily life and are greeted with little surprise. Those ghosts who aren’t propitiated are often demanding, frightening, or outright malicious; it takes a strong nerve and a good digestion to defeat them.

But these are not the only ghosts. Kingston’s family considers every non-Chinese person a ghost, and as immigrants to California they’re surrounded by ghosts all the time. Ghostliness, here, makes suspect and alien even the most quotidian activities: The young Kingston imagines the white newspaper-boy as a sinister figure luring real children to their deaths.

Chinese culture itself is a kind of ghost to Kingston. While she has worked hard to separate herself from the injustices and restrictions that were part of her cultural inheritance as a Chinese woman, she feels the perpetual presence of Chinese myth and folklore in her daily life—often uncomfortably, as when she senses the presence of a dead baby weeping and straining in bathrooms at night.