Author helped fuel success of other Asian Americans

By Hillel Italie
Associated Press

OAKLAND, Calif. — From the ashes of her own life, Maxine Hong Kingston felt the spirit rise. It was 1991, and the author had returned from a trip to find her house burned down by wild fires, the manuscript of her next book destroyed.

Maxine Hong Kingston completed her most famous work, "The Woman Warrior," 25 years ago. Associated Press

"And then, all of a sudden, I felt a rush. And it was a spirit or a feeling of joy of living, something invisible. And I thought, 'I don't have anything else, but I still have ideals and ideas and I can feel them palpably.' "

A decade later, the rush has not subsided and her material life is well repaired. A new manuscript, "The Fifth Book of Peace," has been completed and sent to her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. The book should be out early in 2003.

Meanwhile, fruit trees grow in her back yard and her new house makes room for East and West, from the Victorian porch in front, to the meditation room upstairs to the ornate living and dining area downstairs, with its cherry wood cabinets and dropped ceilings.

Standing just 4-foot-9, the 61-year-old author's soft face is lined and freckled, her hair is long and white, her build slender, her voice light and friendly, with a breathless quality.

The past year marked the completion of her new book and the 25th anniversary of her most famous work, "The Woman Warrior." A quarter of a century isn't much time to establish a literary legacy, but "Woman Warrior" now occupies the center of the Asian American canon.

While Asian Americans had written popular books before, notably C.Y. Lee's "Flower Drum Song" (the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical), "Woman Warrior" was an individual triumph and a sign of a community's self-discovery.

Written in Hawai'i, it was published in 1976, and won the National Book Critics Circle prize for nonfiction. It came out just as Asian American studies programs were getting started and, thanks to liberalized immigration laws, the Asian American population was rapidly expanding. Its success anticipated the rise of Amy Tan, Jessica Hagedorn and many others.

"I think her work is truly revolutionary," said Helen Zia, author of "Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People," a cultural history.

"It gave voice to a whole part of American life that had never really had a voice before. She introduced this voice to the American mainstream and declared it as an American voice."

"Woman Warrior," like the author's house, recognizes tradition and reinvents it. It is a novelized memoir, a dreamer's coming-of-age story. Kingston takes readers inside the lives and minds of Chinese immigrants — confronting wayward spouses, slaying giants out of the mythic past or sitting silently in a classroom for fear of speaking English.

With more than 700,000 copies in print, Kingston's book has become a contemporary standard. It has been taught, imitated and attacked (notably by author Frank Chin, who accused Kingston of reinforcing Chinese stereotypes). For younger Asian American writers, "Woman Warrior" looms like a great parental figure, to learn from and rebel against.

"We all have to write against her," says Gish Jen, whose fiction includes "Typical American" and "Who's Irish?"

"She's the person you have to overthrow because she defined in such a definitive way what the Chinese American experience feels like. If you're going to try to redefine it, you're going to have to take on Maxine Hong Kingston."

Kingston's influence has been greater than her actual output. Besides "Woman Warrior," she has published only two full-length books: "China Men," the male companion to "Woman Warrior," and "Tripmaster Monkey," a Beat-inspired portrait of California and the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s.

Presented a National Humanities Medal by President Clinton in 1997, Kingston has spent the last few years working on her book, teaching at the nearby University of California at Berkeley, and meeting periodically with a group of Vietnam veterans she assembled as a writing workshop.

"After the book was burned, I felt I was really dealing with the forces of destruction and creation. I started thinking about how does one create again and what is the process of creativity. So I invented the idea of writing in a community," she says.

Kingston, the eldest of six children, was born in Stockton, Calif., in 1940. Her father was a classics scholar in China who left for the "Golden Mountain" — the United States. In the old world, he learned to think. In the new world, he learned to hustle: He ran an illegal gambling house, changed identities to avoid immigration officials and eventually managed a laundry business.

While her father proved wise to master the art of silence, her mother perfected the art of storytelling. A worker by day — maid, laundrywoman, tomato picker — she was a "champion talker" after hours. The young Maxine absorbed countless myths, folk tales and family stories, learning a liberal stand on the boundaries between fact and fiction.

"Night after night my mother would talk story until we fell asleep. I could not tell where the stories left off and the dreams began," Kingston recalls in "The Woman Warrior."

She majored in English at Berkeley, and married fellow student Earll Kingston. The Kingstons then spent more than a decade in Hawai'i, where the author taught at the University of Hawai'i and wrote "Woman Warrior."

"When I was working on it I felt that I was on a journey into the know, that nobody was writing quite like me," she recalls. "I felt I was writing a new American language."

An intricate stream of stories, dreams and digressions, "Woman Warrior" reads like a modern feminist testament and a transcript from an ancient, oral culture. The book was so hard to define that it has been categorized as a novel and a memoir.

"To me, it's fiction and it's nonfiction," Kingston says.

"When you write a biography, when you write about a life, to tell the truth you have to tell what people dream about, what they imagine, especially if the characters have an amazing imagination. And you have to use fictional technique to get to that."

Kingston says her writing has been influenced by self-consciousness about language itself. Cantonese is her original tongue and growing up in the United States made her regard language as an "adventure," with herself as the uncertain protagonist.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison remembers traveling to China in the 1980s with Kingston and several other writers. The trip began in the north, where Kingston was unfamiliar with the local dialects.

"The farther south we went, the more she understood. ... Finally, when we got very close to where her mother was born, there was this glow about her. She not only could speak and be understood, but she understood the people around her," Morrison recalls.

"The funny thing was she began to talk to the Americans in this loud voice. 'TONI, DO-YOU-WANT-SOMETHING-TO-EAT?' She began to speak to us like a foreigner trying to make herself understood. I said, 'Maxine, please ...' I still tease her about that."

A member of the anti-war movement in the 1960s, Kingston hopes her next book will serve as "peace" literature. The title, "The Fifth Book of Peace," originates from a Chinese legend about three lost "books of peace." The manuscript lost in the fire was called "The Fourth Book of Peace," and Kingston attempts to resurrect it in the current work.

Like "Woman Warrior," her upcoming work is essentially imaginative nonfiction. The story begins with Kingston's discovery that her house and book have been destroyed and, inspired by her friendship with Vietnam veterans, it goes on to tell of war and its aftermath.

"I want to write about homecoming from war and what happens. I think we need to existentially grow into peaceful beings and part of this means telling the homecoming stories," she says.

"I want to write about peace and to write about peace you also write about war. I was going to call the book 'War and Peace,' but that title is already taken."