The Woman Warrior Lesson Plan

Maxine Hong Kingston was born Maxine Hong in 1940 in Stockton, California. Her parents were Chinese immigrants who came to the United States fifteen years apart, just as Hong Kingston recounts in The Woman Warrior. Her father, Tom Hong, arrived in New York City in 1924. He was a poet and scholar in China, but in the United States he managed a gambling house before leaving that business to open a laundry. Her mother, Ying Lan Hong, was a doctor in China. In the United States, she worked alongside her husband and worked as a field-hand. Hong Kingston is the eldest of her parents’ six surviving children. Their first two children, born in China, died before they left. Like her siblings, Hong...