The Woman Warrior
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40 free The Woman Warrior trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts has been argued over since the day it appeared. Part memoir, part myth, it follows a Chinese American girl in California who grows up on her mother's stories and has to work out which of them are true. This quiz walks through all five chapters: the forbidden family secret of 'No Name Woman', the mountain training of the swordswoman in 'White Tigers', Brave Orchid's haunted school days in 'Shaman', Moon Orchid's disastrous reunion in 'At the Western Palace', and the narrator's fight to find a voice in 'A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe'. There are also questions on how the book was written, published and received. It is written for students revising the book for class, for book clubs, and for anyone who read it once and wants to see how much stayed with them. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In 'White Tigers' in The Woman Warrior, which legendary swordswoman does Kingston imagine herself becoming?
Fa Mu Lan
Fa Mu Lan is better known in the West as Mulan, and Kingston's retelling helped popularise the legend there two decades before Disney's animated film.
Q 02In The Woman Warrior, where does the disgraced No Name Woman drown herself and her newborn baby?
The family well
The family well turns her into what Chinese tradition fears most, a drowned ghost who waits by the water to pull in a substitute.
Q 03In 'White Tigers' in The Woman Warrior, what do the swordswoman's parents do to her back before she goes to war?
Carve words into it
Carve words into it: the cuts list every wrong done to the family, so the swordswoman carries her village's grievances into battle on her own skin.
Q 04In The Woman Warrior, what does Brave Orchid say she cut when the narrator was a baby?
Her tongue
Her tongue: Brave Orchid sliced the membrane underneath so that her daughter would never be tongue-tied, yet the girl grew up painfully shy about speaking.
Q 05In The Woman Warrior, whom does Brave Orchid teach her children to call 'ghosts'?
White Americans
White Americans get a ghost name for every job, from Taxi Ghosts to Police Ghosts, which is why the subtitle recalls a girlhood among ghosts.
Q 06What kind of family business do the narrator's immigrant parents run in The Woman Warrior?
A laundry
A laundry: the man who opened it had been a village scholar and teacher in China, but in America he could find only menial work before owning a business.
Q 07In The Woman Warrior, where does Moon Orchid end her days after her husband rejects her?
A mental asylum
A mental asylum is the one place Moon Orchid seems happier; by then she is convinced that everyone she sees is plotting to kill her.
Q 08What did the silent young narrator of The Woman Warrior cover her school paintings with for three years?
Black paint
Black paint so alarmed her teachers that they feared for her sanity; she thought of the black as stage curtains about to rise on a show.
Q 09Whose place in the army does the swordswoman take in the 'White Tigers' chapter of The Woman Warrior?
Her father's
Her father's place: she dresses as a man to lead the army, and for a time her husband joins her and they have a baby in the middle of the campaign.
Q 10To which city do Brave Orchid and Moon Orchid drive to confront Moon Orchid's husband in 'At the Western Palace'?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles is where he has a new, younger wife who knows nothing about Moon Orchid; he offers to keep sending money but refuses to acknowledge her.
Q 11In which California city did the narrator of The Woman Warrior grow up, as Maxine Hong Kingston herself did?
Stockton
Stockton is where Kingston was born in 1940, the eldest of six American-born children; two older siblings had died in China before her mother emigrated.
Q 12The Woman Warrior closes with the story of which ancient Chinese poet, held captive for years by nomads?
Ts'ai Yen
Ts'ai Yen could not talk with her captors until she sang along to their reed pipes, and she brought that song back to her own people when she was finally returned.
Q 13As a student in China, which spirit does Brave Orchid fight overnight in a haunted room in The Woman Warrior?
Sitting Ghost
Q 21In 'White Tigers' in The Woman Warrior, what does the young girl follow up into the mountains?
A bird
A bird leads her through brambles and over rocks to the summit; Kingston later notes bitterly that birds also lured her uncle to his death in Communist China.
Q 22Who trains the swordswoman in martial arts for fifteen years in 'White Tigers' in The Woman Warrior?
An old couple
An old couple take her in on a mountaintop and offer a choice: go home to pull sweet potatoes with her family, or stay and learn to avenge her village.
Q 23In The Woman Warrior's 'White Tigers', which animal leaps into the fire to feed the starving swordswoman?
A rabbit
Sitting Ghost presses down on her and nearly smothers her, but she outlasts it and at dawn leads her classmates in a ritual to purge the room.
Q 14Before emigrating, Brave Orchid of The Woman Warrior trained in China for which profession?
Doctor
Doctor and midwife: after ten years of waiting for her husband she spent her savings on two years of study, then returned to her village a respected healer.
Q 15How is Moon Orchid's husband lured down to the car in 'At the Western Palace' in The Woman Warrior?
A faked emergency
A faked emergency: Brave Orchid sends her son up to say that a woman has hurt her leg, and the husband hurries down to find the wife he left behind.
Q 16'At the Western Palace' is the only chapter of The Woman Warrior narrated from which point of view?
Third person
Third person appears nowhere else in the book; Kingston was not there, and the next chapter admits she heard the story from a sister, who heard it from their brother.
Q 17From which city does Moon Orchid fly to San Francisco at the start of 'At the Western Palace'?
Hong Kong
Hong Kong is where Moon Orchid had lived comfortably on the money her husband sent, waiting thirty years for an invitation to America that never came.
Q 18In 'At the Western Palace', what job does the second wife of Moon Orchid's husband hold in his office?
Nurse
Nurse: Brave Orchid goes up to the office alone and discovers that the beautiful young woman working there is the wife who replaced her sister.
Q 19After villagers wreck her family's house, where does No Name Woman give birth in The Woman Warrior?
A pigsty
A pigsty reflects an old belief: jealous gods would not bother to steal a baby born among pigs, and newborns were even called pigs to fool them.
Q 20The Woman Warrior opens with Brave Orchid giving her daughter which instruction about No Name Woman?
Never repeat the story
Never repeat the story, her mother warns, offering it only as a caution against disgrace; Kingston's answer was to open her first book with it.
A rabbit hops up to her fire and jumps in of its own accord, a gift of meat the famished trainee accepts only after refusing to kill it herself.
Q 24In 'White Tigers' in The Woman Warrior, what object lets the swordswoman in training watch her distant family?
A water gourd
A water gourd shows her everything at home, including her own wedding: her parents marry her to a childhood friend while she is still away.
Q 25After her army beheads the emperor in 'White Tigers' in The Woman Warrior, whom does the swordswoman enthrone?
A peasant
A peasant becomes emperor, a change from the old ballad, in which the heroine fights loyally for the emperor and then simply goes home.
Q 26In The Woman Warrior, which insult does the grandfather of Kingston's cousins use for the family's girls?
Maggots
Maggots is his word for the girls, while the boys' birthdays earn big celebrations and gifts such as bicycles.
Q 27Which crop does Brave Orchid pick in California fields to add to the family income in The Woman Warrior?
Tomatoes
Tomatoes were one of several jobs: she also worked in a cannery and as a maid, a long fall from the respected position she had held in her village.
Q 28What was Maxine Hong Kingston's original title for The Woman Warrior, dropped at her publisher's urging?
Gold Mountain Stories
Gold Mountain Stories sounded like a short-story collection, which publishers avoid; Kingston disliked the new title too, calling herself a pacifist.
Q 29In her final shouting match with Brave Orchid in The Woman Warrior, what does the narrator say she plans to do?
Go to college
Go to college, she shouts, adding that her mother cannot stop her from talking; Brave Orchid, a champion talker herself, yells right back.
Q 30The Woman Warrior won the National Book Critics Circle Award in which category?
Nonfiction
Nonfiction is how the book was published and prized, though Kingston herself says it combines truth and fiction in an autobiographical form.