Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong
Kingston (born 1940) is one of the first Asian American writers in the United
States to achieve great acclaim for both her nonfiction and fiction. With her
vivid portrayals of the magic of her Chinese ancestry and the struggle of
Chinese immigrants to the United States, she makes the Asian American
experience come alive for her readers.
Maxine Hong was the eldest of six American-born
children of Chinese immigrant parents. Hong’s father, a scholar, had left China
in 1924 and immigrated to New York City; unable to find work as a poet or
calligrapher, he took a job in a laundry. Hong’s mother had remained behind in
China and joined him in the United States in 1939.
Hong attended the University of California, Berkeley,
as a scholarship student, graduating in 1962. At Berkeley she met aspiring
actor Earll Kingston. They were married in November 1962 and had a son in 1964.
The couple taught at Sunset High School in 1966–67 in Hayward, California , then moved to Hawaii,
where she held a series of teaching jobs for the next 10 years.
Bridged
the Gap Between Two Worlds
Growing up as she did feeling the pull of two very
different cultures, Kingston has sought a reconciliation of sorts through her
writing. Her goal has always been to incorporate the mystery of China in her
work without fostering the stereotypical exotic image that appeals to so many
white Americans. She believes that such an image "cheapens real mystery,
" as she remarked to journalist Bill Moyers in an interview published in Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas II.
Her first book, a combination novel and memoir entitled The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a
Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976),
explores the lives of women who have had the strongest impact on Kingston
throughout her life-women whose voices have never been heard. One of the most
poignant stories deals with her aunt, who gave birth to an illegitimate child.
Because having a child outside of wedlock was absolutely taboo and thus a
threat to the community's stability, her whole village rose up against her,
forcing her to kill not only herself but also her child. From then on, even
mentioning her name was forbidden; for all intents and purposes, it was if she
had never existed. By writing about her aunt, however, Kingston felt that she
was able to rescue the unfortunate woman from oblivion and give her back her
life. Time magazine namedThe Woman Warrior one of the top ten nonfiction works of
literature of the 1970s.
Kingston was also interested in giving voice to the
male side of her family. In 1980, she published China Men, another blend of fact and fantasy that
won the 1981 American Book Award for nonfiction and was runner-up for the
Pulitzer Prize. Based on the experiences of her father and several generations
of other male relatives, the book explores the lives of Chinese men who left
their homeland to settle in the United States. It contains stories of
loneliness and discrimination as well as determination and strength, enhanced
and embellished by Kingston's own formidable imagination. The project also
inspired a unique dialogue between father and daughter. In the Chinese
translation of the book, Kingston invited her father to note his own comments
in the margins of each page, a tradition in ancient Chinese literature. She is
especially proud of this edition, because it allowed her father to be
recognized and honored once again for his writing.
Kingston's third book, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, earned the 1989 PEN West Award in
fiction. In this book, Kingston examines the life of a young, fifth-generation
Chinese American named Wittman Ah Sing (a tribute to poet Walt Whitman).
Somewhat of a hippie who believes in doing what you please no matter what the
consequences, Wittman majors in English in college during the 1960s and then
sets out to find his place in the world. He ends up in Berkeley, California,
where he struggles to make a go of it as a playwright.
Many readers and critics have found Wittman to be an
especially annoying character. While Kingston admits that Wittman means to be
offensive at times, she has been dismayed by the negative reaction to him. As she
told Moyers, "What's sad is that when many people tell me that they don't
like Wittman and his personality, what they're also telling me is that they
don't like the personalities of a lot of actual Asian American men out
there." Kingston wants Wittman to offend people; she believes
that it is his way of making himself his own man. "He does know how to be
charming, " she explained to Moyers. "Minority people in America all
know how to be charming, because there are very charming stereotypes out
there."
Kingston has also published numerous poems, short
stories, and articles in her career. Hawaii
One Summer, a book of 12
prose essays, was published in a limited edition in 1987. In 1991, she
co-authored Learning True
Love: How I Learned and Practiced Social Change in Vietnam, essentially a compilation of talks
given by a Vietnamese Buddhist nun who has spent her life in service to the
poor of her country. That same year, fire raged through Kingston's home in
Oakland, California, and destroyed the manuscript of The Fourth Book of Peace, a project she had been working on that
was inspired by the Chinese legend of the three lost books of peace. She has
since completed The Fifth
Book of Peace, which
attempts to imagine in realistic rather than utopian terms what a world of
peace might be like.
Classroom
Techniques Combined East and West
After teaching at the University of Hawaii and Eastern
Michigan University, Kingston joined the faculty of the University of
California at Berkeley in 1990. Many of the same qualities of Eastern and
Western culture and folklore that appear in her writing also surface in her
classroom. For example, while discussing traditional Western literature,
Kingston has been known to introduce concepts of Zen meditation.
Kingston is hopeful that the day will soon come when
she is no longer considered "exotic." She would like to be viewed as
someone who writes and teaches about Americans and what it means to be human.
As she told Moyers, "I think I teach people how to find meaning." She
encourages her readers as well as her students not to hesitate to reexamine the
past and find new meaning in events that took place long ago.
For Kingston herself, meaning changes as she grows
older. Looking back over her earlier works, she realizes there are additional
details that she wishes she had incorporated into her stories. In the case of The Woman Warrior, for instance, she pointed out to
Moyers that "the earlier meaning was we feminists have masculine powers,
too. We can go into battle and lead armies." But the passing years have
altered her perspective a bit. "This new meaning I'm finding from that
myth is that war does not have to brutalize us, " she said. "In that
sense I want to rewrite it, to bring in these new meanings that I've discovered
in my life."
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