The Fifth Book of Peace by Maxine Hong Kingston

Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition

First published: 2003

Type of work: Fiction and nonfiction

The Work

When the hillside fires raged into Oakland in 1991 and demolished the Kingston home, Maxine Hong Kingston was devastated. She lost to the flames The Fourth Book of Peace, a long labor of love that revisited Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book and carried out Kingston’s resolve to bring her characters to resolution by depicting them at older, perhaps wiser stages of their existence. Devastated especially since the fire followed close on the death of her father, she found herself unable to write. Her idea for the book had originally come from the search for the ancient Chinese Books of Peace, venerable books lost to war but supposedly capable, if rediscovered, of ending war. Given her own lifetime struggle against war and her willingness to go to jail to defend her right as a citizen to protest American wars abroad, she had invested much of herself into this “longbook”—now ashes. She went through a period of writer’s block, unable to return to this lost project. What resulted is a complex stream-of-consciousness memoir that questions why war exists and how the world can be educated into creating peace. The second section of this new book, entitled “Paper,” recounts her search for the Three Books of Peace, burnt by a warrior society.

This book marks her recovery from that loss and rises like a phoenix from the ashes, a re-creation that begins with an almost poetic description of the fire and its aftermath in a section appropriately entitled “Fire.” Therein she captures the way in which shared disaster makes friends of strangers and forces one to reconsider what is important, lasting, and valuable. Her recurring admonition, a mantra for our time, is, “In a time of destruction, create something.” Loosely structured and episodic, conveyed in a conversational voice that connects personal devastation with national loss, Kingston’s book takes readers on a journey of rebirth.

This urge to create sends her back in the third section, “Water,” to Wittman Ah Sing and his family as they give away their possessions to friends and fly to Hawaii to dodge the draft and the warmongering of an America in the midst of the Vietnam War. Her portrait of a divided America, the peace demonstrations, AWOL GIs and ones physically disabled and psychically traumatized sounds disturbingly familiar. In Kingston’s work, wars ancient and modern blend in a nightmare of fire and slaughter. As in the days of the Civil War, an underground railroad in Hawaii provides a lifeline for war-weary deserters finding their way back from unspeakable horrors. Amusing and at times both poignant and piquant, this book is vintage Kingston, a thinly guised fictionalization of the experiences of her family when they stopped in Hawaii on their way to Japan to escape the Vietnam War and instead stayed there to become more involved than ever in their fight against it.

The last section, “Earth,” describes how Kingston turned theory into action. She draws on Buddhist wisdom and her sense of commitment as a citizen to make her voice heard in a democracy, one that represents so many different civilizations, histories, and cultures. She describes the writing workshops that she conducted with Vietnam veterans, gathering them into a literary community and helping them verbalize their experiences. Her goal was to make the unbearable meaningful through language, to transform the chaos and the pain into art. In a similar way, she had transformed her own pain and disorientation at her father’s death and the destructive fires which followed into a moving artistic statement of commitment to spiritual healing, community, and peace through tolerance, understanding, and social responsibility. The war itself made conscientious objectors of these warriors, who could no longer live with the atrocities that they had both seen and committed. Vietnam and the two Iraqi wars merge, ashes on the national conscience. Yet, Kingston also provides magic images of Vietnam, its temples and its island refuges. This book has at its heart the horrors of all wars, the elusiveness of peace, and the healing power of art. Kingston’s admonition to readers is that a multicultural, multiracial America means that wherever the United States goes to war, its people suffer a “schizophrenic agony” because they are killing the relatives and ancestors of their own citizens.

Bibliography

Crow, Charles L. Maxine Hong Kingston. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 2004.

Huntley, E. D. Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001.

Janette, Michele. “The Angle We’re Joined At: A Conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston.” Transition, no. 71 (1996): 142-157.

Lee, Ken-fang. “Cultural Translation and the Exorcist: A Reading of Kingston’s and Tan’s Ghost Stories.” MELUS 29 (Summer, 2004): 105-127.

Royal, Derek Parker. “Literary Genre as Ethnic Resistance in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.” MELUS 29 (Summer, 2004): 141-156.

Shu, Yuan. “Cultural Politics and Chinese-American Female Subjectivity: Rethinking Kingston’s Woman Warrior.” MELUS 26 (Summer, 2001): 199-225.

Woo, Eunjoo. “’The Beginning Is Hers, the Ending, Mine’: Chinese American Mother/Daughter Conflict and Reconciliation in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.” Studies in Modern Fiction 9 (Summer, 2002): 297-314.