Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir of a Chinese-American girlhood presents … the female side of growing up in a tradition, perhaps any tradition. Women perform for any society the service of maladjustment that Kingston here brilliantly performs for the society of Chinese immigrants in California. She … (unlike most Chinese-Americans) fulfills an American pattern by moving away from an ethnic tradition the distance required to memorialize and cherish it…. (p. 19)

Like many other women, Kingston does not wish to reject female nature so much as the female condition, and at that she would reserve the female biological destiny…. But of course [there] are the bindings on every woman's feet. In the vivid particularity of her experience, and with the resources of a considerable art, Kingston reaches to the universal qualities of female condition and female anger that the bland generalities of social science and the merely factual history cannot describe.

Women...