Stockton, California, is generally known for producing seed hybrids, not literary ones. But that all changed in 1940, when the town saw the birth of author Maxine Hong Kingston. Stockton would remain the same, but Asian American literature would be changed...
[more]Stockton, California, is generally known for producing seed hybrids, not literary ones. But that all changed in 1940, when the town saw the birth of author Maxine Hong Kingston. Stockton would remain the same, but Asian American literature would be changed forever.
Kingston was the third of eight children born to Chinese immigrant parents, and the first to be born in America. In China, her father had been a poet-scholar and calligrapher. In America he worked in a laundry and a gambling hall (Maxine was named after a lucky gambler), but he passed on his love of learning and literature to his daughter. Her first language was Say Yup, a Cantonese dialect. By age nine, she was writing in English. She was a bright and capable student, earning 11 scholarships to attend UC Berkeley. After graduating in 1962, she married actor Earl Kingston; the couple moved to Hawaii, where they taught for ten years.
Kingston's first book "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, published in 1976, practically created a new literary genre. She mixed nonfiction and fantasy, history and legend, autobiography and fairytales, Asia and America. It was something entirely new -- critics weren't sure what to make of it, but it soon found both a popular and an academic readership, due to its exploration of female power in myth and history.
In 1980 Kingston followed up with a companion volume, "China Men", which imagines the experience of emigration from a male perspective. The book won the American Book Award, but provoked a lot of controversy. Sinologists charged her with misconstruing certain Chinese myths. Kingston's response: she was not trying to represent a historical overview of Chinese culture, only her own experiences as a Chinese American. To those who objected to her use of invention, Kingston explained that the men in her family (and in her culture at large) had generally practiced silence about the hardships and humiliations they faced as newcomers in America. She had no choice but to invent their personal histories.
Kingston's third novel, "Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book", came out in 1989. The story of Wittman Ah Sing, a fifth-generation Chinese American hippie in 1960s San Francisco, the book garnered mixed reviews -- but, as always, it generated a lot of discussion. Some applauded Kinston for shattering stereotypes of Asian Americans; others thought her indulgence in '60s-style weirdness was a sell-out. Since that time, Kingston has had many opportunities to help readers interpret her work, teaching as a visiting professor in Hawaii, Michigan, and California.
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