The excitement of the first advance comments bears witness to the singularity and power of Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir of a "girlhood among ghosts." It is a book of marvels and terrors - an utterly unexpected revelation of life lived in present-day America and haunted by China and its past. The author was born in Stockton, California. Her parents came to America in the 1930's from a tiny peasant village in China. Her childhood was lived among the ghosts they brought with them - the millennia-old legends, traditions, imperatives, folk beliefs, the ways of making sense of life and surviving that they clung to in the face of American "reality". But she herself had to confront the new ghosts - Policeman Ghosts, Social Worker Ghosts, Garbage Ghosts, Wino Ghosts - the patterns of the West. With stunning force Maxine Hong Kingston evokes the China that lives for the child with a bizarre vigor in the endlessly fascinating cycle of her mother's "talk-story" - her aunt, her father's sister, willed by the village to kill herself and her bastard child, her punishment continuing even after death - her own mother, Brave Orchid, learning (in a time and place that considered it "better to raise geese than girls") to be a doctor and "a capable exorcist" ... and, above all, the fabled "woman warrior," so fascinating to the little girl that she "became" Mu Lan, seeing herself led away to the mountains to be magically trained in the arts of war, returning to right the wrongs done to the villagers ("their griveances carved into my back with knives"), leading avenging troops against the Emperor... And here, all the while, is the peculiar, impinging America where things never shut down ... where the laundry is fearfully hot on summer days - the parents working deep into the night, sorting clothes, while the little ones sleep on shelves .. the America where chidlren misbehave ... where there are bitter silences ("we have so many secrets to hold in") ... where the narrator, entering her teens (and her parents, saying nothing, begin to look for a husband for her), wears shoes with the tongues flapping and talks in her "dried-duck voice" to scare the chosen suitors away. Making us know a strange and hitherto impenetrable world, letting us experience the author's own battles and understand the challenges borne by millions of immigrants in a society pitilessly alien, The Woman Warrior startles and entralls. An electrifying book - as emotional truth, as literary achievement. - Dust jacket.