Kingston, Maxine Hong

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Maxine Hong Kingston

Personal

Born October 27, 1940, in Stockton, CA; daughter of Tom (a scholar, a manager of a gambling house, and a laundry worker) and Ying Lan (a practitioner of medicine and midwifery, a field hand, and a laundry worker; maiden name, Chew) Hong; married Earll Kingston (an actor), November 23, 1962; children: Joseph Lawrence Chung Mei. Education: University of California, Berkeley, A.B., 1962, teaching certificate, 1965.

Addresses

Office—University of California, Department of English, 322 Wheeler Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720.

Career

Writer. Sunset High School, Hayward, CA, teacher of English and mathematics, 1965-67; Kahuku High School, Kahuku, HI, teacher of English, 1967; Kahaluu Drop-in School, Kahaluu, HI, teacher, 1968; Honolulu Business College, Honolulu, HI, teacher of English as a second language, 1969; Kailua High School, Kailua, HI, teacher of language arts, 1969; Mid-Pacific Institute, Honolulu, teacher of language arts, 1970-77; University of Hawaii, Honolulu, visiting associate professor of English, beginning 1977; Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Thelma Mc-Candless Professor, 1986; University of California, Berkeley, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor, 1990—.

Awards, Honors

General nonfiction award, National Book Critics Circle, 1976, for The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts; Mademoiselle Magazine Award, 1977; Anisfield-Wolf Race Relations Award, 1978; The Woman Warrior was named one of the top ten nonfiction works of the decade by Time magazine, 1979; National Education Association writing fellow, 1980; named Living Treasure of Hawaii, 1980; China Men was named to the American Library Association Notable Books List, 1980; National Endowment for the Arts Writers Award, 1980 and 1982; American Book Award for general nonfiction, 1981, for China Men; Stockton (CA) Arts Commission Award, 1981; Guggenheim fellow, 1981; Hawaii Award for Literature, 1982; Hawaii Writers Award, 1983; PEN West Award in Fiction for Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, 1989; California Governor's Art Award, 1989; Major Book Collection Award, Brandeis University National Women's Committee, 1990;American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1990; inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1992; National Humanities Medal, 1997; China Men was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Honorary degrees from Eastern Michigan University, 1988, Colby College, 1990, Brandeis University, 1991, University of Massachusetts, 1991, and Starr King School for the Ministry, 1992.

Writings

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1976.

China Men (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1980.

Hawai'i One Summer (essays), Meadow Press (San Francisco, CA), 1987.

Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (novel; also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 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, CA), 1988.

Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1998.

(Editor, with Jack Hicks, James D. Houston, and Al Young) The Literature of California: Writings from the Golden State, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2000.

To Be the Poet, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2002.

The Fifth Book of Peace, Knopf (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Your Reading, edited by Jerry Walker, National Council of Teachers of English, 1975. Contributor of stories and articles to periodicals, including New York Times Magazine, Ms., New Yorker, New West, New Dawn, American Heritage, and Washington Post.

Adaptations

The Woman Warrior was adapted into a play by Sharon Ott and produced at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, California, 1994.

Sidelights

Called "the most influential Asian American author of the twentieth century," by Keith Lawrence and John Dye, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Maxine Hong Kingston has made the Chinese experience available to a large and diverse reading public. Her popular nonfiction and fiction titles blend "myth, legend, history, and autobiography into a genre of her own invention," wrote Susan Currier in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980. Kingston's books The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts and China Men are classified as nonfiction, but, according to Anne Tyler in the New Republic, "in a deeper sense, they are fiction at its best—novels, fairytales, epic poems." Both books are based on the history and myth imparted to Kingston by members of her family and other Chinese-American "story-talkers" who lived in her childhood community in Stockton, California. "The result," noted Contemporary Novelists contributor Sanford Pinsker, "is a species of magical realism, one that continually hovers between fact and the imagination, between what was and what might have been."

Kingston is also the author of the novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, a mixture of magical realism and social realism featuring the Asian American protagonist Wittman Ah Sing, a recent graduate who is attempting to write an epic based on an old Chinese novel. With To Be the Poet, Kingston documents her attempts at adopting poetry as a new medium, and in her 2003 melange of nonfiction and fiction, The Fifth Book of Peace, she continues Wittman's adventures and also chronicles the tortured path that book took to publication, having been destroyed in a 1991 fire and then rewritten anew.

Renee H. Shea, writing in Poets & Writers, noted that the National Book Award-winning Kingston is credited by many "with opening the door for a whole generation of Asian-America writers." An "agent provocateur," as a contributor for Publishers Weekly dubbed her, Kingston is still best known for her first two works. Another reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that The Woman Warrior has become "a collegiate fixture and a centerpiece for the Asian-American canon." Pinsker, writing about both The Woman Warrior and China Men, observed that the author often blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction. He added, "the confusion of actuality and invention may be worth quarreling about, but what matters finally are the stories themselves—and they are quite good. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to think of books that detail the joys and pains of growing up within a strictly defined ethnic community that could match Kingston's sentence for sentence, paragraph for paragraph, page for page. She is, quite simply, a marvelous writer." The Woman Warrior and China Men, he said, "remind us that what James Joyce, an Irishman on the other side of the world, set out to accomplish when his protagonist set off to forge on the smithy of his soul 'the uncreated conscience of my race' can also happen when a young Chinese-American writer sets out to discover who she is amid the rich tapestry of memory and the imagination."

Living in Two Worlds

Maxine Hong Kingston was born in Stockton, California, on October 27, 1940, the first of six Americanborn children of Tom Hong and Chew Ling Yan, Chinese immigrants. Kingston's mother, referred to as Brave Orchid in the book, married her father in China, before he immigrated to New York City in 1924. For fifteen years the father, a scholar in China, worked in a laundry and sent part of the money he earned back to China, enabling Brave Orchid to study for certifications in medicine and midwifery, which eventually provided her with a good income and respect in what Ms. critic Sara Blackburn called "a starving society where girl children were a despised and useless commodity." She came to the United States in 1939 when her husband sent for her, having to give up her medical practice to work for the benefit of her family as a laundress and field hand. Her first two children had died in China while she was alone, but within her first year in the United States, at the age of forty-five, she gave birth to Maxine in Stockton, where the family later settled. Maxine was named after a lucky blonde American gamester in a gambling parlor her father managed at the time, having been swindled out of his share of his New York laundry.

Kingston's first language was Say Yup, a dialect of Cantonese; she also grew up around other recent and not-so-recent immigrants from her parents' village in China. Her mother, determined that her children would retain their Chinese heritage despite their education in English at school, steeped them in tales, introducing her to the ghosts of ancestors in this way. But ghosts did not only exist in her mother's tales: Americans, or "foreigners," were also considered "ghosts" by her mother. Flunking kindergarten because she was unwilling to speak, Kingston soon gained confidence, learning to negotiate a life in two worlds. By the time she was nine, she was writing poems in English, and had become an excellent student. Graduating from high school, she received eleven scholarships that allowed her to attend the University of California at Berkeley. Initially she studied engineering, but quickly switched to English literature, graduating in 1962. That same year she married a fellow Berkeley graduate, Earll Kingston, a budding actor. In 1964, Kingston gave birth to her one child, a son, Joseph; the following year she earned a teaching certificate and began teaching English and mathematics at a high school in Hayward, California.

The Kingstons, depressed by the political and social situation of the late 1960s, decided to move to Japan; a stopover in Hawaii lasted for seventeen years. Setting up their home on Oahu, the Kingstons both taught school. By the early 1970s Kingston had begun writing the stories and vignettes that would later be gathered in The Woman Warrior. Initially these stories were published in magazines and newspapers from Viva to the New York Times. As far as she was concerned, she did not want to label these tales either autobiography or pure fiction; she would generally refer to them as real stories. In 1976, Knopf brought out the first of what were projected at two volumes of such memoirs.

The Woman Warrior

Currier described The Woman Warrior as "a personal work, an effort to reconcile American and Chinese female identities." Washington Post Book World reviewer William McPherson commented that it is "a strange, sometimes savagely terrifying and, in the literal sense, wonderful story of growing up caught between two highly sophisticated and utterly alien cultures, both vivid, often menacing and equally mysterious." Primarily a memoir of Kingston's childhood, The Woman Warrior also concerns itself with the lives of other women in her family, as embellished or imagined by the author. According to Washington Post critic Henry Allen, "in a wild mix of myth, memory, history and a lucidity which verges on the eerie," Kingston describes "their experiences as women, as Chinese coming to America and as Americans." Its companion volume, China Men, "attempts a broader synthesis," indicated Currier, "dealing with male Chinese 'sojourners' in North America and Hawaii, but it is inextricably tied to the autobiographical interests of The Woman Warrior. Kingston's mother dominates The Woman Warrior, her father, China Men, "wrote Currier. "In both books," she further commented, "additional characters flesh out the social, political, and cultural history Kingston introduces." China Men also includes the fictionalized histories of several members of Kingston's family and the community in which she grew up.

Harper's critic Frances Taliaferro remarked that the books' "titles plainly speak their ostensible subjects, female and male; just as plainly the books must be read together. Though I have no inherited command of the terms yin and yang, it seems to me that like those opposing principles the two books form one whole, for the shaping imagination is indivisible." Kingston told New York Times Book Review critic Timothy Pfaff that she considers the two works "one big book. I was writing them more or less simultaneously. The final chapter in China Men began as a short story that I was working on before I even started The Woman Warrior. "

Many of the stories included in The Woman Warrior are reconstructed from those Kingston's mother related to her as "lessons 'to grow up on,'" wrote Currier. According to New York Times Book Review critic Jane Kramer, the young Maxine, "in a country full of ghosts, is already a half-ghost to her mother." Kingston's memoir, described by Time critic Paul Gray as "drenched in alienation," is also characterized by ambiguity, since, as he pointed out, it "haunts a region somewhere between autobiography and fiction." It is difficult to distinguish whether the narrator of the book's stories "is literally Maxine Hong Kingston," Gray commented. "Art has intervened here. The stories may or may not be transcripts of actual experience." Kingston takes some of her adapted stories from Chinese folklore, as in the Fan Mu Lan myth of the "White Tigers" section. More personal tales are recounted in sections such as "No-Name Woman," about one of Kingston's great aunts in China whose sense of independence was the undoing of her. Portents of the Vietnam War are exposed in "At the Western Palace," and in "Shaman" Brave Orchid is beset by terrifying ghosts while in medical school, and these are contrasted with a sort of Bigfoot character captured in America and brought back to China in a cage. The collection also includes "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," a "Chinese historical tale recast as a kind of American Indian captivity narrative," according to Lawrence and Dye.

China Men

Kingston turns to the men of her family in China Men, a book which also "span[s] two continents and several generations," according to Currier. New York Times reviewer John Leonard commented that it is "framed, on the one hand, by a wedding and a funeral, and, on the other, by the birth of boys.… In between is sheer magic: poetry, parable, nightmare, the terror and exhilaration of physical labor, the songs of survival, the voices of the dead, the feel of wood and blood, the smell of flowers and wounds. History meets sensuality." In China Men, wrote Allen, Kingston "describes the men slaving for a dollar a week building sugar plantations; smuggling themselves into America in packing crates; building the railroads; adopting new names, such as Edison, Roosevelt and Worldster." Although women are not prominent as characters in China Men, Kingston told Pfaff, "There still are women who take the role of storyteller. The women are not centerstage, but without the female storyteller, I couldn't have gotten into some of the stories."

In order to "understand the men with whom she is connected," Kingston adopts many of the same techniques she used in The Woman Warrior, indicated New York Times Book Review critic Mary Gordon, "the blend of myth, legend and history, the fevered voice, relentless as a truth-seeking child's." She begins with the story of her father, who has trained as a scholar in China, and, according to Gray, "is subject to black moods and bitterness over his low estate" during much of Maxine's childhood. Perhaps in reflection of his heritage, "his angriest curses vilify women's bodies," wrote Gray. "The girl both understands and is bewildered." But, since her father was not a "story-talker" like Brave Orchid, and was silent about his past, Kingston must "piece together the few facts she has and invent the rest," Gordon noted. Newsweek critic Jean Strouse commented that "in a dreamlike mix of memory and desire, she tries out versions of her father's life, weaving them through her narrative." Not only does the author recreate his life in China and provide five different versions of how he entered the United States; she also widely separates the story of "the father from China" from that of the man she knew and refers to as "the American father."

In Kingston's tale, "the father from China" found his skills in calligraphy and poetry useless in the United States. After immigrating, he became part-owner of a laundry in New York City, observed Frederick Wakeman Jr. in the New York Review of Books, "along with three other China Men who spend their salaries on $200 suits, dime-a-dance girls, motorcycles, and flying lessons." Kingston follows this account of idyllic bachelor existence with an ancient Chinese ghost story about a beautiful spirit woman who, wrote Wakeman, "beguiles a handsome traveler until he loses nearly all memory of his family back home." Eventually, the man is "released from her spell" and returns to his wife. "In the same way," pointed out Wakeman, "the father from China turns away from the lure of his three high-living friends, and puts the temptations of bachelorhood behind him after his wife joins him in New York." But, according to Kingston, soon after Brave Orchid arrived in the United States and weaned her husband away from his companions—she cooked the men elaborate meals and insisted they keep the Chinese holidays—the partners cheated the father from China out of his share of the business. The couple then left for California where "the American father" had to struggle to support his family.

The book, commented Strouse, "is about a great deal more than sexual warfare, however. It tells of emigration, persecution, work, endurance, ritual, change, loss and the eternal invention of the new." In a later section of the book, Kingston presents the story of the father she knew in Stockton, and she ends China Men with characters of her own generation, relating the tale of a brother's tour of duty in Vietnam and his attempts to locate relatives in Hong Kong. Rounding out the book are the highly representative, embellished histories of earlier China Men who preceded her father to America. She tells of a great-grandfather who traveled to Hawaii to clear the land and work on a sugar plantation. The overseers forbade talking, she relates, and Gordon maintained that "nowhere is Mrs. Kingston's technique—the close focus, the fascination with the details of survival strategies, the repetitive fixated tone—more successful than in her description of the plantation workers' talking into the earth in defiance of the silence imposed upon them by white bosses. The men dig holes and shout their longings, their frustrations, down the hole to China, frightening their overseers, who leave them alone." "The poignancy of that moment is the fruit of stunning historical reconstruction coupled with the imagination of a novelist," Gray indicated.

Throughout the rest of the work, Kingston often blends history with pure fantasy. "What makes the book more than nonfiction," wrote Anne Tyler in the New Republic, "are its subtle shifts between the concrete and the mythical." Washington Post Book World critic Edmund White commented that "by delving into her own girlhood memories, by listening to the tall tales her Chinese immigrant parents told her … by researching the past in books and by daydreaming her way into other lives, the author has stitched together a unique document so brightly colored that it seems to be embroidery sewn in brilliant silk threads, a picture of fabulous dragons sinuously coiling around real people, a mandarin square of triumph and privation, of memorable fact and still more vivid fancy." Kingston, he indicated, has "freely woven fairy tales into her recital of facts and rendered her account magical." As Tyler observed, "Edges blur; the dividing line passes unnoticed. We accept one fact and then the next, and then suddenly we find ourselves believing in the fantastic. Is it true that when one of the brothers was born, a white Christmas card flew into the room like a dove?"

In her imaginative fervor, Kingston often alters and even popularizes classical Chinese myths. Although, in general, Wakeman found China Men praiseworthy, he wrote that "as Kingston herself has admitted, many of the myths she describes are largely her own reconstructions. Often, they are only remotely connected with the original Chinese legends they invoke; and sometimes they are only spurious folklore, a kind of self-indulgent fantasy that blends extravagant personal imagery with appropriately voelkisch themes." He added that "precisely because the myths are usually so consciously contrived, her pieces of distant China lore often seem jejune and even inauthentic—especially to readers who know a little bit about the original high culture which Kingston claims as her birthright."

However, Kingston has observed that, as a sinologist, Wakeman "is a scholar on what he calls the 'high tradition,' and so he sees me as one who doesn't get it right, and who takes liberties with it. In actuality, I am writing in the peasant talk-story Cantonese tradition ('low,' if you will), which is the heritage of Chinese Americans. Chinese Americans have changed the stories, but Mr. Wakeman compares our new stories to the ancient, scholarly ones from the old country, and finds them somehow inauthentic." Furthermore, claimed Gordon, "the straight myth and the straight history are far less compelling than the mixture [Kingston] creates." As Kingston told Pfaff, "I have come to feel that the myths that have been handed down from the past are not something that we should be working toward, so I try to deal with them quickly—get them over with—and then return to a realistic kind of present. This time I'm leaving it to my readers to figure out how the myths and the modern stories connect. Like me, and I'm assuming like other people, the characters in the book have to figure out how what they've been told connects—or doesn't connect—with what they experience." "This sort of resurrection," concluded Wakeman, "is an important way for Kingston to establish a link between her present Americanness and the China of her ancestor's past. The myths—which by their very nature mediate the irreconcilable—initially make it possible for her to rediscover an otherwise lost China, and then summoning it, lay that spirit to rest."

Turns to Fiction

Kingston's first outright novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, presents Chinese history and myth with a wild humor through the character of Wittman Ah Sing, a young Chinese-American in 1960s San Francisco whose philosophy of life calls for doing as one pleases whatever the consequences. His life is not without frustration, though, as white Americans fail to accept him fully—even though he is a fifth-generation American, "as American as Jack Kerouac or James Baldwin or Allen Ginsberg, as American as Walt Whitman, 'the poet that his father tried to name him after,'" noted LeAnne Schreiber in the New York Times Book Review. But he also is an incarnation of the mythical Monkey King. "Like Monkey, the trickster saint of Chinese legend who helped bring Buddha's teachings to China, Wittman will bring China to America," Schreiber explained, and he means to do so by staging a massive theatrical production. Herbert Gold, in his review for Chicago's Tribune Books, believed that the novel "blends the kind of magic realism familiar to readers of Latin American fiction with the hard-edged black humor of flower-epoch comic writers and performers—a little bit of Lenny Bruce and a whole lot of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Kingston's energy, talent and unique perspective make an odd dish work, like some sort of hefty Chinese nouvelle maxi-cuisine stew." Schreiber thought, "Wittman is at times compelling, touching, wildly imaginative, and yet he made me long for another voice.… Except in occasional descriptive passages, I cannot hear the precise, sinewy, and, yes, let's admit it, beautiful voice of the author above the racket of her creation." Writing in the New Republic, Anne Tyler allowed that Wittman occasionally "wear[s] us out with his exuberance," but she said he and his story hold the reader's interest thanks to "the tiny, meticulously catalogued details that fill his quieter moments." She summed up Tripmaster Monkey as "a great, huge sprawling beast of a novel, over 400 pages densely packed with [Wittman's] rantings and ravings and pranks and high jinks.… That Wittman is Chinese gives his story depth and particularity. That he's American lends his narrative style a certain slangy insouciance. That he's Chinese-American, with the self-perceived outsider's edgy angle of vision, makes for a novel of satisfying complexity and bite and verve."

Poetry and Twice-Written Prose

The Kingston family returned to the mainland in 1984, and was living in Berkeley when the 1991 fire in the Berkeley hills destroyed their home along with scores of others. Lost among all the rest of her possessions were the manuscript and all the back-up disks to the novel she was just then finishing, the continuation of the saga of Wittman Ah Sing during the Vietnam War. So devastated was Kingston that for many months she could not even read, let alone write. She slowly began to find her way back to writing, however, running a series of writing workshops with veterans of various wars. Working with several other California writers, she also helped to edit the 2000 volume, The Literature of California: Writings from the Golden State.

Increasingly, Kingston began to turn toward poetry as a new expressive tool. The record of her attempts, as well as some of her work in progress, was gathered in the 2002 To Be the Poet, material first presented as the William E. Massey Lectures at Harvard. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly found the book to read like "short diaries," further commenting that Kingston's "devotees will appreciate [the book], even as they await her return to other forms." Ron Ratliff, writing in Library Journal, had a more positive view of the work, calling the effort a "multilayered book that is irreverent, serious, and playful but always instructive." Similarly, A. Van Jordan, reviewing the same title in the Washington Post, felt that To Be the Poet "has the potential to become a classic." For Jordan, Kingston's book "is not simply about being a writer; it's also a memoir with suggestions for coping with life."

With her 2003 The Fifth Book of Peace, Kingston finally completed what had been essentially a work in progress for over a decade. This hybrid novel/memoir was an outgrowth of her destroyed manuscript, "The Fourth Book of Peace," lost in the Berkeley fire of 1991. "Kingston has pulled fragments of that story (which dealt with the Vietnam War) into a saga of death and loss and reinvention, merging fact and fiction, truth and imagination, until the lines between them are irrevocably blurred," according to David L. Ulin, writing in the Los Angeles Times. The title comes from the mythical three "Books of Peace" of Chinese legend, and Kingston's book is divided into four sections: "Fire," "Paper," "Water," and "Earth." The third section is a recreation of her destroyed novel, while the other three are nonfiction descriptions of the events including the day of the fire and of her work with Vietnam vets and the writing group they formed as a result of her own quest after the emotional devastation of the fire. The book begins with the very day of the fire; this was also the day her family was performing the fire rites for her father, who had recently died. "Paper" is a chronicle of Kingston's own attempts to track down the original "Books of Peace," while "Earth" is a documentation of her writing workshops for war veterans. In "Water," Kingston returns to the world of Wittman Ah Sing and his wife Tana. In this reconstruction of the original manuscript, the two leave Berkeley for Hawaii to get away from the violence in America intendant on the anti-war movement and also to leave the drug culture behind. In Hawaii, the couple becomes involved in establishing a safe house for military resistors to the Vietnam War, much as Kingston and her husband did. "Earll and I did those things, including hiding the AWOL soldiers," Kingston told Shea. "But we were much more clumsy and unclear about what we were doing. It's taken me all these years to look back and organize it, because while it was happening, we hardly had time to breathe or think."

If you enjoy the works of Maxine Hong Kingston, you might want to check out the following books:

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 1989.

Gish Jen, Typical American, 1992.

Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine, 1999.

As with most of her work, Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace had its critical champions and detractors. Booklist's Donna Seaman felt the four sections of the book present "a radiant quartet … rich in myth, metaphysics, social critique, and story." Seaman also found the book to be a "many-faceted and involving spiritual meditation." A critic for Kirkus Reviews was less impressed, however, praising the "eloquent" first section, but also finding that the "rest rambles somewhat." The same reviewer concluded that The Fifth Book of Peace "is well-meaning but lacks the splendid insights of Kingston's best writing." Similarly, Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, writing in Entertainment Weekly, thought that the "gamble of mixed modes of storytelling doesn't pay off." Polly Shulman, writing in the New York Times Book Review, also had concerns about the book, finding that Kingston "lets ideals and abstractions blur the stories, so that for the most part the characters seem like wishes rather than real people, and the stories groan under the burden of their morals." On the other hand, a contributor for Publishers Weekly had praise for this "complex steam-of-consciousness memoir," calling the last section in particular, "poignant almost beyond bearability." And Kathryn R. Bartlet, writing in Library Journal, called the book a "lyrical memoir of momentous events in [the author's] life." Bartlet found the story of Wittman at once "disturbing and convincing," and concluded that with "this memoir, Kingston continues her life's admirable task, given to her by her mother, of educating the world."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 12, 1980, Volume 19, 1981, Volume 58, 1990.

Contemporary Novelists, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 173: American Novelists since World War II, Fifth Series, 1996, pp. 84-97, Volume 212: Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, 1999, pp. 153-163.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Feng, Pin-chia, The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston: A Postmodern Reading, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1998.

Gao, Yan, A Metaphorical Strategy: A Study of Maxine Hong Kingston's Creative Use of Chinese Sources, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1996.

Ho, Wendy, In Her Mother's House: The Politics of Asian-American Mother-Daughter Writing, AltaMira Press (Walnut Creek, CA), 1999.

Ludwig, Sami, Concrete Language: Intercultural Communication in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1996.

Rainwater, Catherine, and William J. Scheick, Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 1985.

Simmons, Diane, Maxine Hong Kingston, Twayne (New York, NY), 1999.

Skandera-Tromblay, Laura, editor, Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, G. K. Hall (New York, NY), 1998.

Skenazy, Paul, and Tera Martin, editors, Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1998.

Smith, Jeanne Rosier, Writing Tricksters, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1997.

Smith, Sidonie, A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1987.

Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: A Casebook, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

PERIODICALS

America, February 26, 1976.

Belles Lettres, summer, 1989.

Booklist, April 1, 2002, Mary Ellen Quinn, review of China Men, p. 130; July, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of The Fifth Book of Peace, p. 1844.

California History, summer-fall, 2001, Gerald W. Haslam, review of The Literature of California, pp. 142-143.

Christian Science Monitor, August 11, 1980.

Entertainment Weekly, September 12, 2003, Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, review of The Fifth Book of Peace, p. 159.

Guardian (London), December 13, 2003, Maya Jaggi, "The Warrior Skylark."

Harper's, October, 1976; August, 1980.

Horizon, July, 1980.

Hudson Review, spring, 1990.

International Fiction Review, January, 1978.

Journal of Adolescence & Adult Literacy, March, 2003, Angela Pitt, "'Words So Strong': Maxine Hong Kingston's 'No Name Woman' Introduces Students to the Power of Words," pp. 482-490.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2003, review of The Fifth Book of Peace, pp. 895-896.

Library Journal, October 1, 2002, Ron Ratliff, review of To Be the Poet, p. 94; July, 2003, Kathryn R. Bartlet, review of The Fifth Book of Peace, pp. 81-82.

Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2003, David L. Ulin, review of The Fifth Book of Peace, p. E1.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 22, 1980; April 23, 1989; July 2, 1989, pp. 1, 13; June 10, 1990.

Mademoiselle, March, 1977.

Michigan Quarterly Review, winter, 1987, pp. 177-187.

Ms., January, 1977; August, 1980.

Nation, June 5, 1989, pp. 768-772.

New Republic, June 21, 1980; April 17, 1989, Anne Tyler, review of Tripmaster Monkey, pp. 44-46.

Newsweek, October 11, 1976; June 16, 1980.

New Yorker, November 15, 1976.

New York Review of Books, February 3, 1977; August 14, 1980.

New York Times, September 17, 1976; June 3, 1980; April 14, 1989.

New York Times Book Review, November 7, 1976; June 15, 1980; April 23, 1989, LeAnne Schreiber, review of Tripmaster Monkey, p. 9; September 28, 2003, Polly Shulman, review of The Fifth Book of Peace.

Poets & Writers, September-October, 2003, Renee H. Shea, "The Story Revisited: A Profile of Maxine Hong Kingston," pp. 31-35.

Publishers Weekly, August 19, 2002, review of To Be the Poet, p. 82; June 23, 2003, review of The Fifth Book of Peace, p. 53.

San Francisco Review of Books, September 2, 1980.

Saturday Review, July, 1980.

Southwest Review, spring, 1978.

Time, December 6, 1976; June 30, 1980; May 1, 1989, p. 70.

Times Literary Supplement, January 27, 1978; April 16, 1989; September 15, 1989.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), April 16, 1989, Herbert Gold, review of Tripmaster Monkey, pp. 1, 10.

Washington Post, June 26, 1980; January 5, 2003, A. Van Jordan, review of To Be the Poet, p. T10.

Washington Post Book World, October 10, 1976; June 22, 1980; April 16, 1989.