It's been 25 years since Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts was first published. Last Wednesday night in Kresge Auditorium, Kingston, 60, wondered aloud about the source of the book's staying power.

"Why do people read it through the years? What is it that lasts? I think, perhaps, it could be that I asked the right questions," said Kingston, who is teaching an undergraduate creative-writing seminar this quarter.

Standing on a small wooden box behind a podium, the writer and poet spoke before an audience of 250 people, a large majority of them freshmen -- or, as Kingston referred to them, "freshpeople" -- who had not yet been born when The Woman Warrior won the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.

They had been given the book in their Autumn Quarter Introduction to the Humanities courses as part of the Freshman Book program, which is now in its third year. Students are encouraged to read the book, think about it and discuss it with friends and roommates. Later in the academic year, the book's author talks to the students and answers questions.

Kingston described a telephone call she recently received from an Associated Press reporter.

"He wanted to know how I felt at the 25th anniversary of The Woman Warrior," she said. "And I was just amazed that someone was keeping track -- that he could remember when the book was published. It made me feel amazed and grateful because nowadays books have the shelf life of milk and eggs."

The book combines autobiography and fiction in evoking memories of the female narrator's childhood in California with her siblings and Chinese immigrant parents. The narrator examines her life through the experience of growing up in America and listening to her mother's "talk-stories," which involved relatives and ancestors, or legends, in China.

"In the book, I am looking for solutions for my life," Kingston said. In the process, she poses dozens of questions and dilemmas -- immutable and universal questions and dilemmas that would resonate, she suggested, with any ethnic minority.

She read from a passage toward the beginning of the book:

"Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?"

People continue to read the book because it looks at how culture and power can be retained through the generations -- about how "power [is] passed on," Kingston said.

"Power comes from knowing your history," she said. "Power comes from a receiving of the old stories and chants."

But even as a little girl, Kingston said, she knew she couldn't solve her problems in the same way as the legendary warrior Fa Mu Lan -- that is, by donning armor, grabbing a sword and killing her enemies.

"And as I developed as a pacifist, I started to doubt the stories even more," she said. On one hand, she explained, she wanted to tap the power of these stories, but on the other hand she does not approve of killing.

"And this put me in a dilemma that I'm still trying to solve," she added.

She called the book a "feat of integration" in which she is "trying to put together cultures and ideas that are seemingly the opposite."

She said that in China, translators have corrected versions of the legends she presented but that they were wrong to do so.

"The versions of these stories were carried by the immigrants," she said. "They turn into American stories."

After Kingston finished her remarks, about 10 students approached microphones, which stood in the auditorium's two center aisles, to ask questions. A young woman said that while she agreed with Kingston's pacifistic philosophy, she had responded most strongly to the idea of the woman as a warrior. She called it "an extremely powerful image." She said she was confused by the seeming discrepancy between the swordswoman's views on fighting and Kingston's own convictions of nonviolence.

"I think that you mustn't confuse pacifism with passiveness," Kingston replied. "Writing itself is a nonviolent act, but in it you can ... fight big, powerful things."

"I don't see pacifism as giving up power," she added.

Kingston said she is nearly finished with a new book titled The Fifth Book of Peace. The title, she explained, stems in part from a Chinese myth about three books of peace that once existed but were lost in a fire.

"So I tried to imagine a peace book for our times," she said.

Kingston had worked on the project for about two years when the destructive 1991 fire in the Oakland and Berkeley hills erupted. The blaze destroyed her book project. But she started writing it again.

"This is why I called it The Fifth Book of Peace," she said, predicting it should be completed in the next month or two. Then, lowering her voice, she added: "At one point, it was 2,000 pages long."

• Freshman Book and Author - The Woman Warrior