Maxine Hong Kingston (; born Maxine Ting Ting Hong; October 27, 1940) is an American novelist. She is a professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated in 1962 with a B.A. degree in English. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese Americans.
Kingston has contributed to the feminist movement with such works as her memoir The Woman Warrior, which discusses gender and ethnicity and how these concepts affect the lives of women. She has received several awards for her contributions to Chinese American literature, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1981 for China Men.
Kingston has received significant criticism for reinforcing racist stereotypes in her work and for fictionalizing traditional Chinese stories in order to appeal to Western perceptions of Chinese people. She has also garnered criticism from female Asian scholars for her over-exaggeration' of Asian American female oppression".
Life and career
Kingston was born Maxine Ting Ting Hong on October 27, 1940, in Stockton, California, to first-generation Chinese immigrants parents: her father, Tom Hong (d. 1991) and her mother, Ying Lan Chew. She was the third of eight children and the oldest of the six born in the United States.
In China, Tom Hong worked as a professional scholar and teacher in his home village of Sun Woi, near Canton. In 1925, Hong left China for the United States in search of better prospects. However, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—a xenophobic response to the influx of Chinese workers in the 19th century—was still in effect, preventing Hong from legally entering the United States. He attempted to enter from Cuba twice before finally succeeding in 1927. Hong was able to bring his wife over in 1939.
Her writing often reflects on her cultural heritage and blends 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), awarded the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Kingston also participated in the production of Bill Moyers' PBS historical documentary, Becoming American: The Chinese Experience.
Kingston was awarded the 1997 National Humanities Medal by President of the United States Bill Clinton. She was a member of the committee to choose the design for the California commemorative quarter.
In 2003, Kingston was arrested in Washington, D.C., while protesting against the impending Iraq War. The protest, which took place on International Women's Day (March 8), was coordinated by the 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 authors Alice Walker and Terry Tempest Williams, who were also participants 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.
Kingston was honored as a 175th Speaker Series writer at Emma Willard School in September 2005. In April, 2007, Kingston was awarded the Northern California Book Award Special Award in Publishing for Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (2006), an anthology that she edited.
In July, 2014, Kingston was awarded the 2013 National Medal of Arts by President of the United States Barack Obama. In Spring 2023, Kingston was awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal for distinguished achievement in the field of literature by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
She currently resides in Oakland, California, where she is retired and maintains her garden.
Influences
In an interview published in American Literary History, Kingston disclosed her admiration for Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, and William Carlos Williams, who were inspirational influences for her work, shaping her analysis of gender studies. Kingston said of Walt Whitman's work:
<blockquote>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.'</blockquote>
Kingston named the main character of Tripmaster Monkey (1989) Wittman Ah Sing, after Walt Whitman.
Of Woolf, Kingston stated:
<blockquote>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.
Kingston 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."
However, several female Asian scholars have also criticized Kingston's work. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, stated that Kingston's "representations of patriarchal, abusive Chinese history were playing to a desire to look at Asians as an inferior spectacle". Writer Katheryn M. Fong took exception to Kingston's "distortion of the histories of China and Chinese America" and denounced Kingston for her "over-exaggerated" depiction of Chinese and Chinese American cultural misogyny. "The problem is that non-Chinese are reading [Kingston's] fiction as true accounts of Chinese and Chinese American history," wrote Fong, who noted that her own father "was very loving" towards her.
Recognition
Literary prize
{| class="wikitable sortable"
!Year
!Title
!Award
!Category
!Result
!Ref.
|-
!1976
| rowspan="2" |The Woman Warrior
|National Book Critics Circle Award
|General Nonfiction||
|
|-
!1978
|Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
|Nonfiction||
|
|-
! rowspan="2" |1980
| rowspan="3" |China Men
|National Book Award
|General Nonfiction (Hardcover)||
|
|-
|National Book Critics Circle Award
|General Nonfiction||
|
|-
!1981
|Pulitzer Prize
|General Non-Fiction||
|
|-
!1989
|Tripmaster Monkey
|PEN West Award for Fiction
|Fiction/Novel||
|
|}
Awards
- National Endowment for the Arts Writers Award, 1980
- National Endowment for the Arts Writers Award, 1982
- National Humanities Medal, 1997
- Lifetime Achievement Award from the Asian American Literary Awards, 2006
- Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, 2008<!-- NOT the Literarian Award -->
- Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature Award, 2011
- National Medal of Arts, 2013Emerson-Thoreau Medal
Selected works
- "No Name Woman" (essay), 1975
- The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, 1976
- China Men, Knopf, 1980
- Hawai'i One Summer, 1987
- Through the Black Curtain, 1987
- Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, 1989
- To Be the Poet, 2002
- The Fifth Book of Peace, 2003
- Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, 2006
- I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, 2011
Notes
References
Literature
- Viet Thanh Nguyen: The woman warrior, China men, Tripmaster monkey, Hawai'i one summer, other writings, New York: The Library of America, 2022,
External links
- Maxine Hong Kingston: Talking Story 1990 (video)
- Becoming a poet and a peacemaker: Maxine Hong Kingston comes to PLU
- Reading at UC Berkeley, February 5, 2004 (video)
- Voices from the Gaps biography
- Literary Encyclopedia (in-progress)
- Guide to the Maxine Hong Kingston Papers at The Bancroft Library
- October 2007 interview with Maxine Hong Kingston discussing war and peace
- 2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letter from the National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards