Unlike most writers who tackle such volatile material, Kingston never simplifies. in search of prosperity only to encounter a racism as ghastly as the misogyny highlighted in The Woman Warrior. Kingston continued that search for freedom in her more expansive and angrier second book, China Men, which focuses on the experience of the Chinese men who came to the U.S. She also asserts her right, as an act of self-liberation, to scrutinize her mother's dictates, the ghosts that haunt the Chinese past, and the American values that surround her.

In telling this story she's not supposed to tell us, Kingston underscores a cruel truth about traditional Chinese culture - its oppression of women. We learn that Maxine's father had a sister who got pregnant out of wedlock, killed herself and her baby in disgrace, and her whole family simply pretended she never existed. This was clear from her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, which begins with one of the killer opening lines in American literature: ''You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I'm about to tell you.'' Naturally, the narrator does tell us. She tells stories about creating your own identity, not settling for the one the world tries to give you.

She's now been placed alongside them in the prestigious Library of America, which has just released a volume that collects, among other great things, her three most famous works: The Woman Warrior, China Men and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. Book Reviews Making Room For A 'Broad Margin' To Life, In Verse

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