["The Woman Warrior"] is a brilliant memoir. It shocks us out of our facile rhetoric, past the clichés of our obtuseness, back to the mystery of a stubbornly, utterly foreign sensibility, and I cannot think of another book since Andre Malraux's melancholy artifice, "La Tentation de l'Occident," that even starts to do this. "The Woman Warrior" is about being Chinese, in the way the "Portrait of the Artist" is about being Irish. It is an investigation of soul, not landscape. Its sources are dream and memory, myth and desire. Its crises are the crises of a heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it. (p. 1)

Maxine Kingston writes with bitter and relentless love. Her voice … is as clear as the voice of Ts'ai Yen, who sang her sad, angry songs of China to the barbarians. It is as fierce as a warrior's voice, and as...