Here-for the first time in one volume-are two classic, brilliantly original works on the experience of Chinese immigrants in America. In both books Maxine Hong Kingston mines her family's past and her culture's stories, weaving myth and memory to fashion works of enormous revelatory power. THE WOMAN WARRIOR: MEMOIRS OF A GIRLHOOD AMONG GHOSTS, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, is Kingston's disturbing and fiercely beautiful account of growing up Chinese-American in California. The young Kingston lives in two worlds: the America to which her parents have emigrated, a place inhabited by white "ghosts, " and the China of her mother's "talk stories, " a place haunted by the ghosts of the past. Her mother, who had been a doctor in China but in the United States is reduced to running a laundry, tells her daughter traditional tales of strong, wily women warriors tales-that clash puzzlingly with the real oppression of Chinese women. Kingston learns to fill in the mystifying spaces in her mother's stories with stories of her own, engaging her family's past and her own present with anger, imagination, and dazzling passion. CHINA MEN, a National Book Award winner for fiction, is Kingston's unforgettable imaginative journey into the hearts and minds of generations of Chinese men in America, from those who worked on the transcontinental railroad in the 1840s to those who fought in Vietnam. Mixing vivid fables and legends, personal stories from her own family, and details of the historical hardships faced by Chinese immigrants in different times and places, Kingston illuminates their long, arduous search for the Gold Mountain.

"Since exploding onto the literary stage with The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston has, in book after book, made words sing and soar, search and scorch. But she is more than a writer's writer. She is writer as pioneer, writer as visionary, writer as bringer of peace. A champion, not so much of irony and wit as of love and compassion, she has often worked as much through aura as words--paradoxically cutting, as she does, a most singular and challenging swath. She is a gift to all, a national treasure and an American original." -- Gish Jen "Maxine Hong Kingston made a stunning entrance on the American literary scene with the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning The Woman Warrior (1976), her "memoirs of a childhood among ghosts." An account of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California, the book is at once an audacious feat of imaginative storytelling and a path breaking work of feminist autobiography, drawing on the myths, folktales, and family stories her mother brought over from China to make sense of a transformed life in the United States. "The Woman Warrior changed American culture," writes Hua Hsu in The New Yorker. "For those who understood where Kingston was coming from, it was encouragement that they could tell stories, too. For those who didn't, The Woman Warrior became the definitive telling of the Asian immigrant experience, at a time when there weren't many to choose from." --