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The Woman Warrior (1976)

Helena Grice

in Maxine Hong Kingston

Much of the critical debate surrounding The Woman Warrior has centred upon the book's troubling generic status. Ostensibly a memoir—the subtitle is ‘Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts’—the book won ... More

Much of the critical debate surrounding The Woman Warrior has centred upon the book's troubling generic status. Ostensibly a memoir—the subtitle is ‘Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts’—the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, but it blends together elements of several genres, including fiction, myth, auto/biography and memoir, in a manner that is not easily categorised. Ultimately, for Maxine Hong Kingston, the talk-story form becomes a new kind of genre, one malleable to her own purposes.Less

Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989)

Helena Grice

in Maxine Hong Kingston

After Kingston's first two books, the quiet bemusement of critics which was the predominant response to Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book came as quite a change. Tripmaster Monkey actually only covers ... More

After Kingston's first two books, the quiet bemusement of critics which was the predominant response to Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book came as quite a change. Tripmaster Monkey actually only covers a two-month period in 1963 in the life of young would-be beatnik, Chinese American graduate Wittman Ah Sing, but through a series of nine relatively unconnected episodes, Kingston manages to capture the mood and tone of the whole era. The nine episodes or chapters which comprise Tripmaster Monkey track Wittman's literal journey through Berkeley and its environs, and his metaphorical journey in search of his identity. Along the way, he encounters a series of characters, including would-be sexual partners, his future wife Taña, soul-mates, friends and relatives, all of whom ultimately all come together to help Wittman stage a play at the culmination of the novel.Less

Contexts and intertexts

Helena Grice

in Maxine Hong Kingston

This chapter suggests that the debates over the veracity, or otherwise, of Maxine Hong Kingston's cultural sources, and the vast body of critical material on the feminism-mother/daughter nexus in The ... More

This chapter suggests that the debates over the veracity, or otherwise, of Maxine Hong Kingston's cultural sources, and the vast body of critical material on the feminism-mother/daughter nexus in The Woman Warrior, has simultaneously obscured other, perhaps more pertinent and abiding, preoccupations in Kingston's work. This book locates Kingston within two interconnected, specific cultural contexts: Chinese American history and politics; and the emergence of ethnic feminism in a post-civil rights era. It contends that Kingston's body of work not only raises important questions concerning cultural authenticity, the role of different interpretive communities and canon formation, but that increasingly her oeuvre offers her readers a manifesto of pacifism for a contemporary era.Less

China Men (1980)

Helena Grice

in Maxine Hong Kingston

The original title of Maxine Hong Kingston's second book was not ‘China Men’ but ‘Gold Mountain Heroes’. In Kingston's rendition of the gamut of Chinese American men's experiences on Gold Mountain, ... More

The original title of Maxine Hong Kingston's second book was not ‘China Men’ but ‘Gold Mountain Heroes’. In Kingston's rendition of the gamut of Chinese American men's experiences on Gold Mountain, literature, history, biography, cartography and law all figure as discourses producing ideas of nationhood. Although Kingston was to discard the title ‘Gold Mountain Heroes’ in a later draft, her original use signals her intention to create a history of her Chinese American male ancestors that both mythologised and celebrated their arrival in America, a place Chinese immigrants named ‘Gold Mountain’; and to commemorate their efforts to bond with their new land and country, and the hard labour they undertook in these endeavours.Less

Refractions of Harm: Maxine Hong Kingston

erin Khuê Ninh

in Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature

This chapter interprets Maxine Hong Kingston's narrative strategies in The Woman Warrior, in which the imaginary is inextricable or indistinguishable from the “real,” as an attempt to relate a ... More

This chapter interprets Maxine Hong Kingston's narrative strategies in The Woman Warrior, in which the imaginary is inextricable or indistinguishable from the “real,” as an attempt to relate a subjectivity haunted by dire threats, but marked by no empirical harm. Kingston's daily life is one in which nothing of account “happens”; however, her formation as a daughter is structured by the constant threat of violent disownment. That threat conveyed in the anecdotes and legends of her childhood imaginary deploys discourse to condition the subject. Through the fierce tales of her imaginary, Kingston is enabled to articulate an anger proportionate to the harm threatened, and to recognize the threat itself as a type of harm done.Less

Practicing the Future in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace

Amy C. Tang

in Repetition and Race: Asian American Literature After Multiculturalism

This chapter explores the work of Asian American literature’s matriarch, Maxine Hong Kingston, through her recent work, The Fifth Book of Peace, a book that revises each of her earlier texts and, ... More

This chapter explores the work of Asian American literature’s matriarch, Maxine Hong Kingston, through her recent work, The Fifth Book of Peace, a book that revises each of her earlier texts and, along with them, the canonical understandings of repetition they have helped establish. As Kingston redirects the self-reflexive, autobiographical writing for which she is best known from a technique for consolidating the ethnic self into one for building cosmopolitan community, she also forwards a new understanding of repetition through the concept of “practice.” Understood as both action in the present and preparation for the future, the idea of “practice” reveals unexpected continuities between the radical 1960s and our institutionalized present, suggesting new ways in which repetition helps us inhabit the impasses of official multiculturalism.Less

The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) and To Be the Poet (2002)

Helena Grice

in Maxine Hong Kingston

This chapter examines Maxine Hong Kingston's latest novel, The Fifth Book of Peace (2003), and suggests that in addition to her popularity as a feminist writer, she deserves recognition as a pacifist ... More

This chapter examines Maxine Hong Kingston's latest novel, The Fifth Book of Peace (2003), and suggests that in addition to her popularity as a feminist writer, she deserves recognition as a pacifist writer and activist, and that we need to reconceive of her work as part of an on-going pacifist project. It also claims that Kingston can be considered alongside other Asian American authors, notably Le-Ly Hayslip, as contributing towards the evolution of an Asian American women's peace literature.Less

Maxine Hong Kingston’s Transpacific Imagination: From the Talk Story of the “No-Name Woman” to the Book of Peace

Yuan Shu

in Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies

In juxtaposing The Fifth Book of Peace with The Woman Warrior, this essay argues that Kingston has moved away from the narrative role as a native informant and presents a new multicultural United ... More

In juxtaposing The Fifth Book of Peace with The Woman Warrior, this essay argues that Kingston has moved away from the narrative role as a native informant and presents a new multicultural United States by inventing a Chinese American epistemology and intervening in US imperialism around the globe. Such a move substantiates Mignolo’s theory of “global decolonial thinking,” a critical process that reclaims non-Western notions of humanity and epistemology.Less

Writing place – the politics of locality: Hawai'i One Summer (1987/1998)

Helena Grice

in Maxine Hong Kingston

Published in the wake of her first literary success, but reissued in 1988, Hawai'i One Summer reminds us of Kingston's strong attachment to place: here the Hawai'i of her early married years, where ... More

Published in the wake of her first literary success, but reissued in 1988, Hawai'i One Summer reminds us of Kingston's strong attachment to place: here the Hawai'i of her early married years, where she worked as a teacher, raised her son and wrote her first fiction. As an extensive meditation upon place and environment in Hawai'i, the pieces here together represent Kingston's imbrication in a politics of ecology, and specifically a form of ecological feminism as well. This chapter argues that Hawai'i One Summer warrants critical attention as providing an additional, previously unconsidered, perspective upon this renowned writer.Less

The Female Ghost and Feminist History: The Woman Warrior and Beloved

Robin Roberts

in Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts and Toni Morrison’s Beloved engage with history by imagining the ghosts of actual women. Kingston’s memoir focuses on her ... More

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts and Toni Morrison’s Beloved engage with history by imagining the ghosts of actual women. Kingston’s memoir focuses on her dead aunt, and Morrison’s novel imagines the ghost of a young girl killed by her mother to prevent a return to slavery. In both instances, the explicit link to the real world provides an opportunity to retell history from a feminist perspective. By employing this figure, Kingston and Morrison avail themselves of the characters’ numerous feminist qualities and demonstrate the importance of this figure for women writers. Focusing on the female ghosts in these books allows us to see more clearly these critically acclaimed texts’ connection to, and use of, popular culture. At the same time, these books and their related films show how the female ghost haunts not only popular culture but also a canonical literary tradition.Less

Unlikely Daughters, Exemplary Mothers, and Disembedded China Men: Jade Snow Wong and Maxine Hong Kingston

Yoon Lee

in Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life

For Chinese-Americans during and after World War II, everydayness offered a means of constructing an identity that was both modern and American. Fifth Chinese Daughter exhibits a particular type of ... More

For Chinese-Americans during and after World War II, everydayness offered a means of constructing an identity that was both modern and American. Fifth Chinese Daughter exhibits a particular type of everyday thinking that relies on the repeatability of actions as the basis of knowledge. Wong claims modernity by presenting herself as an anomaly, an unlikely daughter of Chinatown. Thus she illustrates her fitness as a post-war American citizen. After the social movements of the late 1960s and 70s, everyday recurrence fails to offer an adequate basis of identity. Rather, identity comes to be equated with self-determination and unique laws of self-development. Kingston’s The Woman Warrior struggles to base a sense of self on her mother’s exemplary stories, but the project proves untenable in the face of the modern world’s repetitions and reductions. In her second work, China Men, she turns toward modern history, offering a portrait of the everyday as the realm of faceless, endless, and abstract labor, performed by generic subjects.Less

Schooling Bilinguals In and Against Multiculturalism

Jeehyun Lim

in Bilingual Brokers: Race, Literature, and Language as Human Capital

Chapter three examines multicultural literary models of growing up in two languages through Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. By reading ... More

Chapter three examines multicultural literary models of growing up in two languages through Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. By reading Paredes’s novel side-by-side Kingston’s widely discussed text, the chapter suggests that a syncretic bilingual personhood in which various anxieties of language’s value as property are worked out in relation to an ethnic subject’s formation is a key element of literary multiculturalism. The much-discussed controversy around The Woman Warrior recapitulates in the real world the fictional controversy over Guálinto’s betrayal of his Mexican heritage in George Washington Gómez as Asian American cultural nationalists accused Kingston of misrepresenting Chinese American experiences. In light of the conditions of bilingualism’s valorization and stigmatization in Paredes’s novel, the chapter revisits this controversy as ultimately symptomatic of the competing visions of bilingualism as cultural and human capital in multiculturalism.Less

Sound and the Subject in The Woman Warrior and Tripmaster Monkey

in The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature

In her 1976 book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston appears to assert the incoherence of Chinese American identity. Kingston occupies a place in the history ... More

In her 1976 book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston appears to assert the incoherence of Chinese American identity. Kingston occupies a place in the history of Asian American literature as a native informant of sorts despite consistently undermining assumptions about cultural authenticity. She has won admiration by discarding the restrictive identity politics of cultural nationalism in favor of an anti-racist politics that guards against the dangers of essentialism. Writing about Asian America, Kingston invites us not only to read, but also to listen. This chapter examines works by Kingston and how she deploys music and sound tropes to imagine forms of community free from the debilitating limits of identity politics. It also argues that Kingston differs from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe with respect to treatment of rhythm because she remains deeply committed to a humanist politics through pacifism.Less

Inhabiting a Culture of Memory: The Autobiographical Process as a Form of Life

Jens Brockmeier

in Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process

This chapter investigates the autobiographical process as a cultural scenario—as a cultural form of life. It centers on the idea of remembering as a practice that is part and parcel of living a life, ... More

This chapter investigates the autobiographical process as a cultural scenario—as a cultural form of life. It centers on the idea of remembering as a practice that is part and parcel of living a life, a practice through which we bind ourselves into a cultural tradition, while binding this tradition into our minds. In this light, the autobiographical process is viewed as an element of a wider cultural economy of remembering and forgetting. In the first part of the chapter, this question is framed historically, investigating the development of modern European and North American concerns with self and autobiographical identity; in the second half, this picture is contrasted with a different cultural-historical perspective that is unfolded in a reading of a Chinese American autobiography, Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior.Less

The Chinese in America: Histories and Spatial Positions

Rocío G. Davis

in Relative Histories: Mediating History in Asian American Family Memoirs

This chapter examines three family memoirs that center on generational stories of Chinese immigrants in America: Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men (1980), Lisa See's On Gold Mountain (1995), and Bruce ... More

This chapter examines three family memoirs that center on generational stories of Chinese immigrants in America: Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men (1980), Lisa See's On Gold Mountain (1995), and Bruce Edward Hall's Tea That Burns (1998). All three texts tell the personal stories behind the paradigms of the history of Chinese Americans: the arrival of the first wave during the California Gold Rush in the 1850s; the building of the Central Pacific Railways; the fears about Chinese taking jobs away from Caucasian Americans; work in plantations and Chinese laundries; the creation of Chinatowns; the bachelor society; the existence of “paper sons”; anti-miscegenation laws; and the struggles of second-generation children to define their cultural identity in the land of their birth. In the narratives, the writers highlight their commitment to family stories as part of a process of the development of collective memory.Less

Beyond the Semantic Netherworld: Literature and the Iraq War

Giorgio Mariani

in Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature

This chapter examines Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace, a meditation on the difficulty of matching anti-war literature with some much-needed imagining of what peace might look like when ... More

This chapter examines Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace, a meditation on the difficulty of matching anti-war literature with some much-needed imagining of what peace might look like when disengaged from a context of war. The problem of how to turn war literature into peace literature runs like a red thread through Kingston's text. The Fifth Book of Peace interrogates the limits of war resistance not only in practice but also, and perhaps mostly, in literature. This chapter argues that Kingston's thoughts on the literature of peace and war are an inseparable part of her pacifist politics. It also considers Brian Turner's poetry and Helen Benedict's 2011 novel Sand Queen as two “cosmopolitan” responses to the Iraq War.Less

The Political Economy of Minority Literature

Mark Chiang

in The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University

This chapter examines the origins of the Asian American literary field in the writings of Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston—the authors of the book Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American ... More

This chapter examines the origins of the Asian American literary field in the writings of Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston—the authors of the book Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. These writers subordinate art to politics, and their own self-representation as the “radical” pole of Asian American cultural production. Juxtaposing this subordination with the reading of The Woman Warrior, the chapter argues that the dilemma motivating the narrative is not the anxiety of influence—as in the dominant literary tradition—but the anxiety of representation. Only within and against the writers' relation of representation to the community can they become a representative or an author.Less