Maxine Hong Kingston

Author

• Born: October 27, 1940
• Place of Birth: Stockton, California

WRITER AND EDUCATOR

Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston’s literary works touch on topics such as gender and ethnicity and blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Her books have received critical acclaim but have also sparked intense debate, especially among Chinese American writers and critics, some of whom believe Kingston’s work misrepresents Chinese and Chinese American culture.

Born: October 27, 1940; Stockton, California

Full name: Maxine Hong Kingston

Birth name: Maxine Hong

Areas of achievement: Literature, activism, education

Early Life

Maxine Hong Kingston was born Maxine Hong in 1940 in Stockton, California, to Tom and Ying Lan Hong. The Hongs were first-generation Chinese immigrants. Tom had trained as a scholar and a teacher in China but worked in a laundry and owned a gambling house in Stockton. Ying Lan had trained at the To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton and practiced medicine. Tom and Ying Lan’s first two children died in China; they had five more children after Maxine.

Maxine enjoyed writing from a young age. In 1955, while she attended Edison High School, her essay “I Am an American” was published in the Girls Scouts magazine American Girl and won her a five-dollar prize. By this time, she knew that her parents had immigrated to the United States illegally, which forced her to write the essay carefully to assert her identity as an American without revealing her parents’ immigration status. While growing up, she encountered prejudice and racism and questioned her identity, themes that recur repeatedly in her books.

In 1958, Maxine Hong won a scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). She initially decided to major in engineering but switched to English. She worked on the student newspaper, the Daily Californian. In 1962, she graduated with a BA in English and married actor Earll Kingston in November of the same year. Two years later, they had a son, Joseph Lawrence Chung Mei Kingston.

From 1964 to 1965, Kingston studied for a teaching certificate and taught at Oakland Technical High School as a student teacher. Afterward, she taught English and mathematics at Sunset High School in Hayward, California. Kingston was active in the Vietnam War protest movement, work that represented the beginning of a lifelong interest in peace activism.

The Kingstons moved to Hawaii in 1967, where Maxine taught at Kahuku High School, Kahaluu Drop-In School, Honolulu Business College, and Kailua High School. From 1970 to 1977, she taught language arts at the Mid-Pacific Institute in Honolulu and wrote her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, published by Knopf in 1976.

Life’s Work

The publication of The Woman Warrior changed Kingston’s career. The book received the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was met with both critical praise and complaint, particularly from Chinese American author, playwright, and UC Berkeley alumnus Frank Chin, who became one of Kingston’s harshest critics.

From 1977 to 1981, Kingston worked as a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu; her second book, China Men, was published in 1980. Like The Woman Warrior, China Men mixed history, myth, and memoir. Kingston later stated that she blended fact and fiction in her earlier books, partly because her parents were still alive and she did not wish to reveal their immigration status. China Men received the 1981 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. Kingston also wrote a weekly column called “Hers” for the New York Times, which included some essays on her life in Hawaii, later published as a limited-edition chapbook, and then a trade book entitled Hawai'i One Summer (1998).

Kingston’s career as a writer was established. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley began collecting some of her papers as a special collection, and Kingston began touring internationally. In 1984, she visited China for the first time, along with six other writers, including African American novelist Toni Morrison and beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Kingston and her husband moved to Los Angeles, leaving their son—later an established musician—in Hawaii. In 1987, the Kingstons moved to Oakland, and in 1989, Kingston published her first true novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.

Tripmaster Monkey is a postmodern novel, strongly influenced by both the beat literary movement and the Chinese character of the Monkey King from Wu Chengen’s mythological novel Xiyou ji (1592; The Journey to the West, 1977–83). The main character of Tripmaster Monkey, Wittman Ah Sing, is a Chinese American UC Berkeley graduate, believed by author Amy Tan to be partially based on Kingston’s critic Chin. In 1998, Tripmaster Monkey received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

Kingston became a professor at UC Berkeley in 1990 and continued writing. In 1991, the Kingstons’ Oakland home burned down, taking with it Kingston’s manuscripts, including a novel in progress, provisionally titled “The Fourth Book of Peace.” Kingston began writing a new book, The Fifth Book of Peace, which combined the continued story of Wittman Ah Sing from her lost manuscript with autobiographical material, once again blurring the lines between fact and fiction.

In 2002, Kingston published To Be the Poet, a collection of stories, notes, essays, and unfinished poetry, mostly about her attempts to write poetry. While it offered a view into her creative process, it was not as popular as her other books. The Fifth Book of Peace was published in 2003, again to a cooler reception than her earlier works.

During this time, Kingston obtained a fellowship from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund and began a writing workshop for veterans of the Vietnam War, the Bay Area Veterans Writing Group. Long a peace activist, she believed in the healing and cathartic power of writing, and the group soon expanded to include veterans of other wars as well as their family members, refugees, and antiwar protestors. Two of her brothers had served in Vietnam, which strongly affected her entire family. Kingston also participated in numerous workshops on nonviolence and the Vietnam War, as well as a 2003 protest of the Iraq War, because of which she was arrested for crossing a police line and shared a cell with author Alice Walker. Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, a 2006 anthology from the Veterans Writing Group, which Kingston edited, received the Northern California Book Award Special Award in Publishing in 2007.

In 2011, Kingston published a free-verse memoir about aging, entitled I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. It received mixed reviews, with some critics praising Kingston’s experimental form and interesting content and others panning it for what they considered poor poetry and lack of cohesion.

Kingston has also contributed to some film projects. She was profiled in a documentary, Maxine Hong Kingston: Talking Story (1990), which emphasized themes of cultural heritage, sexism, and racism, all of which appear in her literary work. Kingston later consulted on the Bill Moyers documentary Becoming American: The Chinese Experience in 2003.

Significance

Kingston’s literary influences include modernist poet William Carlos Williams, Romantic poet Walt Whitman, and modernist writer Virginia Woolf, as well as traditional Chinese legends, the custom of “talking story,” and writers of the beat movement. Her literary works have often been experimental in style and structure, although they concern similar themes—in particular, challenging ideas about race, culture, gender, identity, and violence. Generally well received by white literary critics, her works have met with a more mixed reception from the Chinese American literary community, whose members often have expressed concerns about cultural accuracy, representation, promotion of stereotypes, slanting for a white audience, and appropriation of mainland Chinese culture and legend by an author born and raised in the United States. However, it is undeniable that Kingston’s work has been extremely influential. It is widely assigned in high school, college, and graduate-level courses and performed in theatrical settings.

In addition to her work as a writer, Kingston has taught literature and writing at the college level and frequently led workshops. The Bay Area Veterans Writing Group, founded by Kingston in 1993, has included more than five hundred participants and has been imitated elsewhere in the United States, providing settings for survivors of violence to seek healing through art.

In 2014, Kingston was presented the 2013 National Medal of the Arts by President Barack Obama in a ceremony at the White House. She received the Emerson-Thoreau Medal for distinguished achievement in the field of literature from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.

Bibliography

Grice, Helena. Maxine Hong Kingston. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006. Print.

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

Kingston, Maxine Hong. I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. New York: Knopf, 2011. Print.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1976. Print.

La Ferla, Ruth. "For Maxine Hong Kingston, Age Is Just Time Going By," The New York Times, 24 Apr. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/style/maxine-hong-kingston-age.html. Accessed 19 Aug. 2024.

"Maxine Hong Kingston Awarded Literature Medal." American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2 Apr. 2023, www.amacad.org/news/maxine-hong-kingston-literature-medal. Accessed 19 Aug. 2024.