Women's History

Maxine Hong Kingston

b. 1940
American writer

"I began writing when I was nine.... I was in fourth grade and all of a sudden this poem started coming out of me. On and on I went, oblivious to everything, and when it was over I had written 30 verses. It is a bad habit that doesn't go away."

Introduction

Maxine Hong Kingston is a highly acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction and was one of the first Asian Americans to make it to the top of the literary world in America. Her first book, a memoir published in 1976 called The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, won the National Book Critic's Circle Award and made her a literary celebrity at the age of 36. Kingston has since written two other critically hailed books. China Men, a sequel to The Woman Warrior, was published in 1980 and also received the National Book Critic's Circle Award; and in 1989 Kingston published her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.

Kingston's writing is often cited for its melodiousness and poetry. The New York Times Book Review commented, "The Woman Warrior is about being Chinese in the way that [the James Joyce novel] Portrait of the Artist [as a Young Man] is about being Irish. It is an investigation of soul, not landscape. Its sources are dream and memory, myth and desire. Its crises are the crises of a heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it."

A difficult childhood

Kingston's father, Tom Hong, and her mother, Chew Ling Yan, were both Chinese immigrants. They operated a gambling house in Stockton, California, when Maxine was born in 1940. (She was named after a gambler who always won.) Shortly after her birth, the family opened a laundry where she and her five brothers and sisters joined their parents in working long, arduous hours. Kingston attended public schools, where she was an excellent student. After graduation, with the help of 11 scholarships, she enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley, one of the finest public colleges in the country. She at first intended to study engineering, but changed her major to English literature. After her childhood, with its long, hard hours of labor, leaving the engineering program felt irresponsible to the young woman; she had come to believe that everything had to be difficult, and English was easy for her.

Kingston graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1962. In November of that year, she married Earl Kingston, whom she had met in an English course. She earned a teaching certificate from the state of California and in 1965 taught high school for a year in Hayward. In 1967, the Kingstons moved to Hawaii, where Kingston took various teaching posts. From 1970 to 1977, she taught at the Mid-Pacific Institute, a private boarding school.

The Woman Warrior

Published in 1976, The Woman Warrior was an immediate success. In the memoir, Kingston writes of the conflicting cultural messages she received as the daughter of Chinese immigrants growing up in the America of the 1950s. The book also tells the story of the generations of Chinese women that preceded her and the weight she felt as an American trying to emerge from their sometimes stifling presence. The subtitle of the book, Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, suggests the book's almost fantastic tone, but also refers specifically to the ghosts of Kingston's female relatives and the tragedy of many of their lives, lives lived in the extremely male-dominated society of China. She writes of Chinese folk sayings such as, "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls" and "There's no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls."

The Woman Warrior received excellent reviews. Newsweek called it "thrilling" and "a book of fierce clarity and originality." The New York Times termed it "a brilliant memoir." It became a bestseller, was awarded the National Book Critic's Circle Award, and is taught in high schools and colleges all over the country. In the swirl of publicity that followed the book's success, Kingston gave an interview to the New York Times about her life and her writing. "I began writing," she said, "when I was nine. The day was very clear to me. I was in fourth grade and all of a sudden this poem started coming out of me. On and on I went, oblivious to everything, and when it was over I had written 30 verses. It is a bad habit that doesn't go away." In The Woman Warrior, Kingston's mother can seem domineering and often cruel, but Kingston said, "My mother is the creative one — the one with the visions and the stories to tell. I'm the technician. She's the great inspiration. I never realized it until I finished the book."

China Men and beyond

Kingston's next book, China Men, was in many ways a companion to her first. In it she explores the Chinese American experience, this time as it was felt by the men in her family. This book, too, received glowing reviews. The New York Times deemed the volume "a triumph of the highest order, of imagination, of language, of moral perception," adding, "It is full of wonderful stories." Again Kingston was awarded the National Book Critic's Circle Award. She discussed her intention in China Men in a profile in the New York Times: "What I am doing in this book is claiming America. That seems to be a common strain that runs through all the characters. In story after story Chinese American people are claiming America, which goes all the way from one character saying that a Chinese explorer found this place long before [eleventh-century Norwegian explorer] Leif Erikkson did to another one buying a house here. Buying the house is a way of saying that America — and not China — is his country."

In 1989, Kingston published her third book, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. Her first novel, the story is set in San Francisco in the 1960s and tells of Wittman Ah Sing, a manic, playful, highly verbal young man who is one year out of college. After being fired from his job at a toy store, the irreverent Wittman turns his enormous energies to writing a contemporary epic based on an old Chinese novel. The book was a startling departure for Kingston and confused many readers. Still, critics praised it. The Nation called Tripmaster "less charming [than her memoirs] but more exuberant. Instead of falling into pattern or turning on wheel — there's something inevitable about everything in [her memoirs], something fated — this language bounces, caroms and collides; abrades and inflames. Instead of Mozart, Wittman's rock and roll." Other reviewers compared the main character to Holden Caulfield of J. D. Salinger's landmark Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain's Huck Finn.

After the publication of Tripmaster Monkey,Kingston gave an interview in which she speculated about the future direction of her work. "I'm beginning to have an idea that Wittman ought to grow up.... American literature is made up of great novels about young men. It has to do with our being a young country.... If I can write a novel in which Wittman grows up to be socially responsible, an effective, good man — forming a community around him, bringing joy to people ... then it means I will have made Holden Caulfield grow up; I will have made Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer grow up.... Then I will have helped us all grow up."

Writings by the Author

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (also see below), Knopf (New York City), 1976.
China Men (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; also see below), Knopf, 1980.
Hawai'i One Summer (essays), Meadow Press (San Francisco), 1987.
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (novel; also see below), Knopf, 1988.
Through the Black Curtain (contains excerpts from The Woman Warrior, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey), Friends of the Bancroft Library, University of California (Berkeley), 1988.
Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson), 1998.
The Fifth Book of Peace (nonfiction), Knopf (New York, NY), 2003.