Kingston, Maxine Hong

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KINGSTON, Maxine Hong

Born 27 October 1940, Stockton, California

Daughter of Tom and Ying Lan Chew Hong; married Earll Kingston, 1962

Maxine Hong Kingston's parents immigrated from China in the 1930s, eventually setting up a laundry in Stockton, where Kingston worked as a child. She received a degree in English from the University of California at Berkeley and studied toward an advanced degree in education. In 1967 she moved to Honolulu and from then until 1977 taught English at the Mid-Pacific Institute, a private coeducational high school. In 1977 Kingston was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Hawaii, where she taught creative writing. She has contributed many articles and reviews to popular and literary magazines.

Winner of the 1976 National Book Critics' Circle Award for nonfiction, her first book, The Woman Warrior, has been variously viewed as a novel, a memoir, and an autobiography. In it Kingston recreates in five sketches the imagined life of a Chinese aunt who committed suicide after bearing a child out of wedlock; the training and exploits of a legendary Chinese woman warrior; the disjunctively similar training and exploits of Kingston's own mother, first as a doctor in China and then as the mother of six children born after she arrived in America at the age of forty-five to run a Chinese laundry; the failure of another of Kingston's aunts to adapt to modern life after the husband she came from China to reclaim after 30 years rejected her in favor of his modern American wife; and, finally, the author's own struggles with all the ghosts of her past as she balances the Chinese heritage, largely unarticulated, and the American life which impinges so painfully and immediately upon her childhood.

Throughout the book move ghosts. There are the shrouded villagers who terrorize the "no-name" aunt; the old-young couple who trains the woman warrior in their fantasy mountain fastness. We confront our everyday selves in the multitude of ghosts who populate the world of the young Kingston: garbage ghosts, meter-reader ghosts, newsboy ghosts, half-ghosts of Chinese immigrant children raised in America, and finally the unnamed but insistent ghost of Kingston's own Americanized self as she torments a remnant of her past who, like her, refuses to speak in public. It is these ghosts that unite the five sketches—ghosts of the past, of otherness, of a larger, corporeal world which only gradually merges with emotional reality.

It is only by attempting to retrace the legends told by her family and to remake them into her own life that Kingston comes to uneasy terms with them. And yet she is beset by difficulties: her mother will not tell what is truth and what desire, and the child cannot often distinguish. "I don't see how [the Chinese] kept up a continuous culture for five thousand years," she remarks. "Maybe they didn't; maybe everyone makes it up as they go along." But her attempt to shape the world through her own legends proves insufficient too, and she flees from the spectre of forcing another shy Chinese girl into the legend Kingston would, but cannot quite, create. With maturity comes the inevitable questioning: Perhaps the ghosts have nothing to do with the struggle; perhaps "what I once had was not Chinese-sight at all but child-sight that would have disappeared eventually without such struggle." Oneself becomes the ultimate elusive ghost.

Kingston crosses the ultimate cultural barrier into the mind, where cultural patterns are but archetypes. The unheroic, vulnerable American-born child both embodies and is descended from the woman warrior, invulnerable symbol of heroism from whom all of us are descended and whose blood, both heroic and ghostly, runs in all veins. The Woman Warrior is short and elliptical. It sounds like a Chinese translation, with simple sentences and flat direct statements. As in poetry, much is left to the reader. The book achieves through style and tone a force of pure incontrovertibility which in large part creates its aura of universality.

Since the publication of The Woman Warrior (1976), Kingston has become one of the most critically praised and best known contemporary writers in the U.S. and by far the most studied Asian-American writer. Devoting herself wholly to her writing since the late 1970s, she won the 1981 nonfiction American Book Award for her narrative China Men and the American Academy and Institute of Art and Letters Award for literature in 1990.

A series of biographical/autobiographical narrations, China Men recounts the encounters of several generations of Kingston's male ancestors with the U.S. and graphically examines the difficult questions of race, ethnicity, and nationality in America. These men often work in menial or marginal jobs—as a farmworker clearing land in Hawaii, as a laborer building the transcontinental railroad, as the owner of a small laundry. Yet these jobs are often at the foundation of the communities in which these men and their families live. The men whose stories are told remain outside "mainstream" U.S. society in many respects, victims of virulent racist discrimination, culturally enforced silence, and violence. Their identification as "Chinese" is also called into question, however: one uncle, deranged by dreams of the U.S. and the Communist Revolution in China, goes there, to a "home" he may never have previously seen, and disappears; the narrator's father is cheated by his Chinese partners in a laundry. As in Kingston's earlier work, dreams of China and American dreams collide with American racial constructions and the actual conditions of immigrant life in the U.S., producing an unstable story of hope, disappointment, and disquiet in which neither side of the hyphen in "Chinese-American" can be either erased or made to remain fixed.

Kingston's first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), also deals with the unstable and inescapable categories of race and nationality in the United States. The protagonist of the novel, Wittman Ah Sing, is a fifth-generation Chinese-American living in San Francisco's Chinatown during the 1960s. He can speak, though not read much Chinese, as well as recognize and speak a number of Chinese-American vernaculars produced by various Chinese encounters with American English in U.S. "Chinatowns." He is also familiar with Chinese folklore and traditional culture. At the same time Wittman (named for Walt Whitman) is a poet, storyteller, and graduate in English at the University of California at Berkeley, familiar with both the "high" literary culture of Rilke and Joyce and the counterculture that seems on the cusp of the transformation from the period of the Beats, especially Jack Kerouac, to the hippies. He is also saturated and obsessed with American popular culture, particularly the images of Asians and Asian-Americans promoted in such movies as Flower Drum Song and The World of Suzie Wong. The son of Chinese-American vaudevilleans who traveled the country performing largely African American music, Wittman is at home, if not exactly comfortable, with theatrics, illusion, and ethnic types and stereotypes that can sometimes seem completely different and at other times strangely conflated. He frequently invokes and identifies with the trickster King of the Monkeys of Chinese folklore, which becomes an "American Monkey" by the end of the book.

Kingston has been criticized by some for promoting a fake exotic Asian-American image or for catering to "mainstream" tastes at the expense of ethnic authenticity. It is precisely the notion of "authenticity" that Kingston questions while she affirms the existence and significance of tradition and history. She is one of the premiere interpreters of the fluctuating and persistent nature of those racial and ethnic categories in the U.S. that are impossible both to escape and to fix with any certainty.

Kingston was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 1997. Since the publication of Tripmaster Monkey, she has been at work on a number of projects. She has also remained active in the literary community, participating on various panels throughout the country. Kingston's method of writing has changed in recent years. Following the fire that destroyed her home (and her manuscript in progress), Kingston decided she no longer wanted to work alone. Thus her stage adaptation of The Woman Warrior and China Men (combined into one work) was the result of a decade-long collaboration with a number of producers, screenwriters, playwrights, actors, editors, and musicians. The play opened at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in 1994.

Kingston has also been working on a new full-length piece, The Fifth Book of Peace. Like much of her work, it will be difficult to categorize as fiction or nonfiction, combining stories of her own experiences with those of invented characters. The Fifth Book of Peace is being created in her new collaborative mode; Kingston has been working extensively with a group of war veterans discussing and writing about their ideas of war and peace.

Other Works:

Hawaii One Summer (1987, originally published 1978). Through the Black Curtain (1987). "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers," in Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue (edited by Guy Amirthanayagam, 1982).

Bibliography:

Brown Ruoff, A. L. and J. Ward, eds., Redefining American Literary History (1990). Duke, M. S., ed., Modern Chinese Women Writers: Critical Appraisals (1989). Eakin, P. J., Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in Self-Invention (1985). Kessler-Harris, A. and W. McBrian, eds., Faith of a(Woman) Writer (1988). Yang, M. C. "From Ethnicity to a Wider World: The Education of Kate Simon and Maxine Hong Kingston" (thesis, 1992).

Reference works:

CANR (1987). FC (1990). Modern American Women Writers (1991).

Other references:

American Literary History (1990). Asian Week (17 June 1994, 31 Mar. 1995). Biography (Winter 1983, Spring 1986, Spring 1989). Humanities (1 Nov. 1997). MELUS (Winter 1982, Winter 1983, Fall 1985, Spring 1987, Spring 1988). Ms. (June 1989). Michigan Quarterly Review (1987). NYRB (3 Feb. 1977). NYTBR (7 Nov. 1976, 23 April 1989). PMLA (1988). Seven Days (28 Feb. 1977). VVLS (May 1989).