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Maxine Hong Kingston

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Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston
Occupationnovelist
NationalityUSA
Notable worksThe Woman Warrior, Tripmaster Monkey
Notable awardsNational Book Critics Circle Award
National Book Award
National Humanities Medal
SpouseEarl Kingston
ChildrenJoseph Lawrence Chung Mei

Maxine Hong Kingston (Chinese: 湯婷婷; born October 27 1940) is a Chinese American author and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962.

Biography

Maxine Hong Kingston was born in Stockton, California to first generation Chinese immigrants, Tom and Ying Lan Hong. Tom ( a laundry worker and gambling house owner) and Ying Lan (a practicioner of medicine)had eight children in which Kingston was the third born. She was the eldest of six children born in the United States.Her mother trained as a midwife at the To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton. Her father being brought up a scholar taught in his village of Sun Woi, near Canton. Tom left China for America in 1924 and entered the laundry industry; he was able to bring his wife overseas in 1939. 

From a young age Kingston was drawn to writing and won a five dollar prize from “Girl Scout Magazine” for an essay she wrote entitled “I Am an American”. Endeavoring to receive a higher education Kingston attended the University of California at Berkeley originally majoring in engineering, but eventually switching to English. In 1962 Kingston married Earll Kingston an actor and began a career in teaching high school. The two began a family the following year with the birth of their son Joseph Lawrence Chung Mei. After relocating to Hawaii in 1967 Maxine began writing extensively finally completing and publishing her first novel , “The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood among Ghosts”.

Her works often reflect on her cultural heritage and blend fiction with non-fiction. Among her works are The Woman Warrior (1976), awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and China Men (1980), which was awarded the 1981 National Book Award. She has written one novel, Tripmaster Monkey, a story depicting a character based on the mythical Chinese character Sun Wu Kong. Her most recent books are To Be The Poet and The Fifth Book of Peace.

A documentary produced by Gayle K. Yamada, Maxine Hong Kingston: Talking Story, was released in 1990. Featuring notable Asian American authors such as Amy Tan and David Henry Hwang, it explored Kingston's life, paying particular attention to her commentary on cultural heritage and both sexual and racial oppression. The production was awarded the CINE Golden Eagle in 1990.[1] Kingston also participated in the production of Bill Moyers' PBS historical documentary, Becoming American: The Chinese Experience.

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 anthology, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (2006), edited by Maxine Hong Kingston.

Kingston was arrested on International Women's Day (March 8) of 2003. Participating in an anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. coordinated by women-initiated organization Code Pink, Kingston refused to leave the street after being instructed to do so by local police forces. She shared a jail cell with author Alice Walker; renowned writer Terry Tempest Williams was also a participant in the demonstration. Kingston's anti-war stance has significantly trickled into her work; she has stated that writing The Fifth Book of Peace was initiated and inspired by growing up during World War II.

She married actor Earll Kingston on November 23, 1962 (IMDb bio); they have had one child, Joseph Lawrence Chung Mei, born in 1964. They now live in Oakland.

Kingston was honored as a 175th Speaker Series writer at Emma Willard School in September 2005.

Influences

In an interview published in American Literary History, Kingston disclosed her admiration for Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, and William Carlos Williams, who have served as inspirational influences toward her work, shaping her analysis of gender studies. Concerning the importance of Walt Whitman's work, Kingston stated: "I like the rhythm of his language and the freedom and the wildness of it. It's so American. And also his vision of a new kind of human being that was going to be formed in this country—although he never specifically said Chinese—ethnic Chinese also—I'd like to think he meant all kinds of people. And also I love that throughout Leaves of Grass he always says 'men and women,' 'male and female.' He's so different from other writers of his time, and even of this time. Even a hundred years ago he included women and he always used [those phrases], 'men and women,' 'male and female.'" [2] Kingston named the main character of Tripmaster Monkey, Wittman Ah Sing, after Walt Whitman.

Of Woolf, Kingston stated: "I found that whenever I come to a low point in my life or in my work, when I read Virginia Woolf's Orlando, that always seems to get my life force moving again. I just love the way she can make one character live for four hundred years, and that Orlando can be a man. Orlando can be a woman. Virginia broke through constraints of time, of gender, of culture." [3] Similarly, Kingston's praise of William Carlos Williams expresses her appreciation of his seemingly genderless work: "I love In the American Grain because it does the same thing. Abraham Lincoln is a 'mother' of our country. He talks about this wonderful woman walking through the battlefields with her beard and shawl. I find that so freeing, that we don't have to be constrained to being just one ethnic group or one gender-- both [Woolf and Williams] make me feel that I can now write as a man, I can write as a black person, as a white person; I don't have to be restricted by time and physicality."[4]

Criticism and Debate

Though Kingston's work is highly acclaimed, it has also received a great deal of criticism, especially from the Chinese American community. American playwright and novelist Frank Chin has severely criticized Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, claiming that she had tainted the purity of Chinese tradition in reinterpreting stories and myths. Chin has accused Kingston of "liberally adapting [traditional stories] to collude with white racist stereotypes and to invent a 'fake' Chinese-American culture that is more palatable to the mainstream."[5] Kingston subtly commented on her critics' opinions in a 1990 interview, in which she stated that men believe that minority women writers have "achieved success by collaborating with the white racist establishment," by "pander[ing] to the white taste for feminist writing... It's a one-sided argument because the women don't answer. We let them say those things because we don't want to be divisive."[6]

Recognition

  • Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: National Book Foundation, 2008
  • PEN West Award in fiction for Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, 1989
  • National Endowment for the Arts Writers Award, 1982
  • American Book Award for General Nonfiction for China Men, 1981
  • National Endowment for the Arts Writers Award, 1980
  • Anisfield-Wolf Race Relations Award, 1978
  • General Nonfiction Award: National Book Critics Circle for The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, 1976

Selected Works

See also

References

  1. ^ CINE Golden Eagle Award Archives
  2. ^ American Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 782-791
  3. ^ American Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 782-791
  4. ^ American Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 782-791
  5. ^ "Frank Chin (1940-)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 135. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. 150-202. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. St. John's University Library. 10 April 2009
  6. ^ Chin, Marilyn. "A MELUS Interview: Maxine Hong Kingston." MELUS, Vol. 16, No. 4, Toward the Multiculture (Winter, 1989 - Winter, 1990), pp. 57-74
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