The Woman Warrior Lesson Plan

What is “talk-story”? How does it relate to this memoir?

“Talk-story” is a term stemming from Chinese oral tradition. In the narrator’s memoir, it often describes the way her mother tells stories that do not have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather flow freely between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. The narrator often mentions trying to decipher what is true and what isn’t in her mother’s talk-stories. Yet the narrator’s writing style itself could also be described as talk-story: just as the narrator tries to distinguish truth from fantasy in her mother’s stories, so do we as readers try to do the same in the narrator’s stories.

How does the narrator’s...