Incoming frosh to read 'Woman Warrior' for fall

The Class of 2002 will read the book for this year's Penn Reading Project. Members of the Class of 2002 will spend their summers delving into the complex world of a Chinese-American woman torn between her ancestry and her life in America. It is the world of Maxine Hong Kingston's 1976 memoir The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. More than 2,000 incoming freshmen will read Woman Warrior for the eighth annual Penn Reading Project, officials announced yesterday. The program requires them to read a given book sent to them in the summer. Faculty members from every school and most departments then lead group discussions of the text during freshman orientation. "The Penn Reading Project sparks an interest in freshmen that goes on for the rest of the year," said College of General Studies Associate Director David Fox, one of the heads of the committee that chose the book. "We wanted a book that would do that." Kingston's "tale of an immigrant experience that is also very American" is constructed as a series of essays that take the reader "through a poetic world of contemporary reality and past dreams, of real lives and ghosts, and of the coming-of-age of one particular person," according to the statement announcing the selection. Fox added that the selection is timely because next year marks the 25th anniversary of the inception of the Women's Studies Program at the University. The book would "endorse and celebrate" the anniversary because of its female author and focus on a woman's experience, he said. He stressed that the book "can speak to men and women alike" because it combines the genres of immigrant tale, coming-of-age story and memoir. Follow-up events related to the book are being planned, including a possible visit from Kingston herself. Born in Stockton, Calif., in 1940 to Chinese immigrant parents, Kingston currently teaches English at the University of California at Berkeley. A committee of administrators, faculty and students chose the memoir from a list of past suggestions and recent nominations. Reading Project Chairperson Al Filreis likened the committee to a seminar because of the group's large reading load and intense discussions. "I've rarely been associated with so collegial a process," said Filreis, an English professor and the Van Pelt College House faculty master. "We were able to choose a book that is a great choice because it is challenging, difficult, but at the same time, exotic and strange." Although the committee debated several other possible choices during its decision-making process, Woman Warrior eventually bested such competition as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Emily Dickinson's poetry and Art Spiegelman's Maus. Other recent selections for the project have included Garry Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg and Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. As in past years, incoming freshmen will receive the book by mail in the early summer.

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