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Maxine Hong Kingston Chinese-American novelist, nonfiction writer, academic, and activist

Maxine Hong Kingston

Biography Maxine Hong Kingston was born on October 27th, 1940, in Stockton, California. She was the first of six American-born children; her parents, Tom and Ying Lan Hong, had had two children in China before they came to America. Her mother trained as a midwife in To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton. Her father had been brought up a scholar and taught in his village of Sun Woi, near Canton. Tom left China for America in 1924, but finding no work for a poet or calligrapher, he took a job in a laundry. Tom was swindled out of his share of the laundry, but Ying Lan joined him in 1939 in New York City, and they then moved to Stockton where Tom had been offered a job in a gambling house. Maxine was named after a lucky blond gambler who frequented his work.

Kingston’s first language was Say Yup, a dialect of Cantonese. She grew up surrounded by other immigrants from her father’s village, and the storytelling she heard as a child influenced her later writing. By the age of nine, her progress in English enabled her to write poems in her new language, and though she was a gifted storyteller like her mother, she preferred the solitary task of writing. An extremely bright student, she won eleven scholarships that allowed her to attend the University of California at Berkeley. Kingston began as an engineering major, but she soon switched to English literature. She received her B.A. degree in 1962 and her teaching certificate in 1965. In 1962, she married Earll Kingston, an actor, and they moved to Hawaii where they both taught for the next ten years.

In 1976, while Kingston was teaching creative writing at the Mid-Pacific Institute, a private school, she published her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. One reviewer, Michael T. Malloy, described the book as having an exotic setting but dealing with the same subjects as mainstream American feminist literature, specifically the “Me and Mom” genre. Other reviewers were surprised by its fresh subject matter and style, and they sang the praises of this poetic, fierce, delicate, original novel/memoir. Kingston strove for a Chinese rhythm to her voice, a typical Chinese-American speech, and rich imagery; her first book was a great success. In the end of Woman Warrior, her shy girl character finds resolution as she breaks female silence and inherits an oral tradition that she carries on as a written tradition.

Kingston’s second book, China Men, published in 1980, was a companion to Warrior Woman and received more controversial reviews. The book, steeped in historic detail and set in early California and Hawaii, details the male influences of her life and describes the lives of the men in her family who came to America--”Gold Mountain.” China Men includes a chronological list of discriminatory laws regarding Chinese immigrants and celebrates the strengths and achievements of the first Chinese men in America as well as the exploitation and prejudice they faced. Several sinologists complained that Kingston reconstructed myths that are only remotely connected to original Chinese legends and that her pieces don’t accurately portray high culture. Kingston responded to this criticism by explaining that she is not trying to represent Chinese culture, she is simply trying to portray her own experiences. She points to William Carlos Williams as one of the influences of China Men.

In 1987, Kingston published a collection of twelve prose selections, Hawaii One Summer. After the success of her first books, she was financially able to give up teaching as an occupation and continued to write, but she continued to teach on and off as a visiting professor in Hawaii, Michigan, and California. In 1988, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, a picaresque novel set in the San Francisco area during the 1960s, was published. The protagonist of this novel, Wittman Ah Sing, is a fifth-generation Chinese-American, and like many of Kingston’s characters, he struggles to escape racism as he grows and questions the world around him.

She was awarded the 1997 National Humanities Medal by President of the United States Bill Clinton. Kingston was a member of the committee to choose the design for the California commemorative quarter. She was arrested in March 2003 in Washington, D.C., for crossing a police line during a protest against the war in Iraq. In April, 2007, Hong Kingston was awarded the Northern California Book Award Special Award in Publishing for her most recent novel Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (2006), edited by Maxine.

In 2006, named by Time magazine as one of the great artists and thinkers in its special issue, “60 Years of Asian Heroes.”

Relationship

  • Yes

Family

  • Tom Hong, a first-generation immigrant from China, owned a laundry in Stockton, California. Mother: Ying Lan (Chew) Hong ("Brave Orchid"), first-generation immigrant from China. Husband: Earll Kingston, actor. Son: Joseph Lawrence Chung Mei, born in 1964

Causes I Support

  • Amnesty International

University Affiliation

  • Professor Emeritus
    University of California, Berkeley

Publishers

  • Harvard University Press
    Koa Books
    Random House
    University of Hawaii Press
    Vintage