The Woman Warrior is a strange, sometimes savagely terrifying and, in the literal sense, wonderful story of growing up caught between two highly sophisticated and utterly alien cultures, both vivid, often menacing and equally mysterious. Reality in its bewildering complexity is at the heart of it: what appears to our senses, the mind transforms, into a whole set of myths and phantoms (language, number, emotion, relation, abstraction) to become what we perceive as real. Ghosts from the Chinese past may thus be as real—and as unreal—as persons from the California present; and vice versa. Is a parent any the less real to us, less true, because he is dead? It is not the same as not existing. Mrs. Kingston mulls over these mysteries, these paradoxes in this extraordinary book.

William McPherson, "Ghosts from the Middle Kingdom," in Book World—The Washington Post (© 1976, The Washington Post), October...