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Biographies
2007 2006 2004 2003 2002
Maxine Hong Kingston
2001 2000
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HOME > SCHOLARSHIPS AND AWARDS > LOCAL LEADERS IN PHILANTHROPY > BIOGRAPHIES
Maxine Hong Kingston
[Note: The following biography was prepared and presented at the 2002 gala by Board Member and KRON News Anchor Emerald Yeh.] Our honoree has won numerous prestigious awards including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the national Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities. There is no question that her most famous book is among the most widely taught of any living writer in America. But perhaps the most startling/intriguing testimony of the power and influence of her writings comes from a bookstore owner in Berkeley…. Andy Ross of Cody's Books… who says the three most universal pieces of literature are Homer's The Odyssey, Plato's Republic and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. How a Stockton-born daughter of Chinese immigrants in the 20th century became a celebrated writer whose first book put her in the category with such historic and titanic literary and philosophical giants as Homer and Plato is not such a far-fetched notion as one might first think. The power of intelligence, the definition of a just and ideal society, the belief that wisdom leads to goodness and the act of questioning and challenging our perceptions of reality… some of the themes explored by Homer and Plato… also echo and resound in Maxine Hong Kingston's works. Maxine's childhood is in itself a story. Her father was Tom Hong who named himself after Thomas Edison. He was trained as a classics scholar in China, but stopped writing poetry when he came to America. An article had this poignant description of Maxine's father: "In the old world, he learned how to think. In the new world, he learned how to hustle." He ran a laundry shop and then an illegal gambling house, changing identities to avoid immigration officials. Maxine was the oldest of six children who grew up poor, "street urchins" as Maxine would say. While Tom Hong had named himself after an inventor, he named Maxine after a lucky blond gambler who frequented his place. Ironically, it was Maxine who would become the inventor, creating tales out of fact and fiction, merging the fantastic and the concrete, and fashioning a synthesis of American and Asian culture. With her father's poetic voice silenced in the new country, Maxine's mother who was trained as a doctor in China, also learned to hustle---as a maid, laundrywoman and tomato picker by day--- but by night, Ying Lan, whose name means Brave Orchid, unleashed a torrent of bedtime stories to her children--- family stories, myths and folk tales with little distinction between real and unreal, a liberal story-telling trait that would be a hallmark of Maxine Hong Kingston's style of writing. As she absorbed her mother's tales, she began writing poems as a child. She won 11 scholarships that allowed her to attend UC-Berkeley. It is a little known fact that Maxine began college as an engineering major. The Russians had launched Sputnick. She considered it her duty to help the American space program. But that goal fizzled out to her literary impulses and she switched to English literature. The breakthrough "Woman Warrior" was written in 1976, Maxine's first book. It happened while she was living and teaching creative writing in Hawaii. The stories had been inside her, waiting to be told, but it was a broken movie projector that Maxine credits as the impetus for her finally putting her ideas for the book down on paper. Maxine and her husband, Earll Kingston, a fellow English major she had met at UC Berkeley, had gone on vacation to the sleepy neighbor island of Lanai which had only one hotel, a 12-room hotel at that. The Kingstons went to see a movie, but the projector broke down, so with nothing to do on that little desolate island, she sat down and wrote what was to be the outline for "Woman Warrior" and her subsequent book "China Men." "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts" received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977. To this day, it is the book that Maxine Hong Kingston is most defined by… even though she's gone on to write other books, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey and Hawaii One Summer. In 1991, Maxine suffered a devastating setback. She was among the victims of the Oakland Hills fire that burned 3500 (?) homes and killed 25 (?) people. Maxine downplays her own loss in the fire compared to those who lost their lives, but the fire did destroy her home, a book manuscript she had labored over for two years, and the notes of all her writings. "The whole scene looked like a battlefield," she recalls. "I was standing ther ein the middle of it thinking, 'I'm homeless and I'm bookless. What am I going to do? 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. The only way I could regain my creativity was to write in a community." The manuscript that burned was called "The Fourth Book of Peace" which was to be an extension of the myth that at one time, three books of peace existed in China that contained methods for ending war. With the beginnings of that book destroyed, Maxine started over with the "Fifth Book of Peace," a non-fiction that begins with her discovery that her house and book have burned, but through her friendship with Vietnam veterans, goes on to tell of war and its aftermath. "My focus was on those who physically survived the war and how they arrived at peace. The book would have been called War and Peace but that title was already taken." Maxine was able to revive her creative spirit through a community of writers. She gathered a group of war veterans who wanted to write. "Very few of them had published anything, but in their hearts they were writers," she said. Some of those vets went on to become published authors, including John Mulligan, who wrote "Shopping Cart Soldiers." "I was an empty shell walking around the street, and writing made me feel like I had a soul," he said. To this day, 11 years later, the veterans writing group still meets. It was while finishing her book on war then peace that September 11th occurred. Maxine was asked to participate and speak at a memorial at UC Berkeley. But Maxine was speechless, literally. What is there to say so soon after the event, she wondered. It took Odysseus 20 years to fight a war and come home and tell his stories. It took Vietnam vets 20 years to be able to tell their stories and know their feelings. "Words don't come to me in a matter of days. I've been writing big books about events that happened 20 years before. It takes that kind of time to live with things and figure them out." So for her part in the memorial, Maxine chose to be silent and ring a Tibetan bell 11 times. Clearly, Maxine, whose Chinese name Ting Ting means "lone pine tree on a hill, stays true to her inner voice (or inner voices, as the case may be, if you're familiar with her writings), loyal to her own pace of revelation, and committed to her passionate belief in peace, goodness and the variable nature of truth. And goodness may be the strongest common thread between Maxine's works and Homer's Odyssey and Plato's Republic. When I asked her why she thought the owner of Cody's Books might have put her in the company of those two literary and philosophical touchstones of the Western culture, she thought a bit and said "Maybe it's because our books define how to find the good, how to remain good in times of war and peace." This remark of her reminded me of a very clever play of words in Maxine's book "Tripmaster Monkey," where the protagonist heard someone say "The Dow is up 2.53 points in light trading on the Big Board." Wittman Ah Sing hears the Dow as Tao (T-A-O) and thinks to himself, "The Tao is up. It's up 2.53 points which is good; we were good today, not a hell of a lot better than yesterday, but holding steady and not backsliding, yes some spiritual improvement. We are a people who measure our goodness each day." When Bill Moyers, in his book A World of Ideas, asked Maxine "Do you think it's your job as the writer to imagine a healthy world?" she replied, "Yes. I have to imagine it because how are we going to build it if we don't imagine it? We need to imagine the HUMANE being so we can put that archetype out there. So that we can become it. If we don't imagine it, how are we going to become it?" In wrapping up tonight's profile of Maxine Hong Kingston, it was recently announced that at the age of 60, she has made a major change in her writing career and turned, re-turned actually to poetry. She just last month published "To Be the Poet." After spending 12 years on "Fifth Book of Peace," she declares "I have almost finished my longbook. Let my life as poet begin, I won't be a workhorse anymore, I'll be a skylark." Even as Maxine Hong Kingston goes through her personal transformation, transformation is a gift she has always wanted to leave with her readers when they read any of her books. She says "I don't want them to speed read or skim. I want them to have their hearts and their minds and their eyes open as they are reading it and to read with their feelings. It's not just an intellectual book. They have to let the images come inside of themselves for the images to do their work. Something amazing happens with images and metaphor; we see these pictures and they go inside of our imaginations, and our imaginations change. So I hope that people will allow themselves to change as they are reading the books. (Maybe this is why they resist it; they don't want to become different people!" As a footnote, Maxine's father died 11 years ago… but not before his daughter's works inspired him to write poetry once more. Maxine's mother Ying Lan or "Brave Orchid," died five years ago, and Maxine says her mother, her biggest influence, still comes to her in her dreams asks her daughter, "Have you educated America yet?" Maxine says she tells her mother, "I'm still teaching. I'm still writing."
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