'A brilliant memoir...it is about being Chinese in the way A Portrait of the Artist is about being Irish; it is an investigation of soul, not landscape, its sources are dream and memory, myth and desire; its crises are the crises of a heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it...Maxine Hong Kingston writes with bitter and relentless love. Her voice, now, is as clear as the voice of Ts'ai
Divided into four sections - Fire , Paper , Water and Earth , this title is neither fiction, nor autobiography nor memoir, but a unique form of Chinese talk-story in which real and imagined worlds intrude upon and enrich each other, built upon stories of war.