Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1976 book, “The Woman Warrior,” changed American culture. Now Kingston, who has kept a low profile in the past decade, plans to release her final work only after she dies.
have complicated that experience. But Kingston has kept a low profile in the past decade, and her books are no longer as pervasive in trendy bookstores or on college syllabuses.
When I first read Kingston, in my late teens, I was drawn to the familiarity of it all: the immigrant enclave where anyone non-Chinese was called a “ghost,” the cautionary folktales with the moral punch lines often lost in translation, the misunderstood silences. But what stayed with me was the realization that her characters weren’t merely trying to survive in this harsh, difficult world but to remake it through their fantasies and dreams.
“The Woman Warrior” initially created divisions among Asian-American writers and readers. In 1974, Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong had published a galvanizing collection titled “.” They shared Kingston’s interest in the psychological entanglements of being Asian-American. Chin also studied literature at Berkeley, though he and Kingston never met.
“I give the narrative to all these men, but there’s still this voice that’s me,” Kingston told me. “My father is dancing with this blonde—I described the cascading blond hair, the beautiful blue eyes. And I hope that the reader understands that I am very lonely, ’cause that’s the opposite description of me. That’s not me. Maybe indirectly you can feel my being left out of this scene.” Usually a slow and methodical writer, she finished the scene in an hour.
In the summer of 1991, Kingston’s father died. She and Earll had moved to Oakland; she was teaching at Berkeley and writing her next book. That fall, she was driving home from Stockton, where her family had gathered to mark the hundredth day since her father’s death, when she heard on the radio that a fire was sweeping through the East Bay. She began driving faster, hoping to reach their house in the hills of northern Oakland before the fire did.
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