Donna Woodford is a doctoral candidate at Washington University and has written for a wide variety of academic journals and educational publishers. In the following essay she discusses how the theme of the power of language unites the stories that make up Kingston's autobiography.

Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiography, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, differs from most autobiographies in that it is not a first-person narration of the author's life. Rather, it is a form of nonfiction that, as Paul Mandelbaum says, "allows for—even thrives on—the vagaries of memory, translation, and point of view." Kingston tells her own life story by telling the stories of other women whose lives have impacted hers. This work of nonfiction is made up of memories, fantasies, and speculations about these women. In telling the stories of her mother, her aunts, the folk figure Fa...