Book description
Maxine Hong Kingston, author of such seminal works as The Woman
Warrior and China Men, is one of the most important
American writers of her generation. In this remarkable memoir, she
writes from the point of view of being sixty-five, looking back on a
rich and complex life of literature and political activism, always
against the background of what it is like to have a mixed
Chinese-American identity.
Passages of autobiography, in which she describes such events in her
life as being imprisoned with Alice Walker for demonstrating against
the Iraq war, meld with a ficitonal journey in which she sends her
avatar Wittman Ah Sing on a trip to modern China. She also evokes her
own poignant journey, without a guide, back to the Chinese villages
her father and mother left in order to come to America.
Maxine Hong Kingston was born in California in 1940, the daughter of
Chinese immigrants. She studied engineering at Berkeley before switching
to English literature. After her marriage to actor Earll Kingston, she
moved to Hawai'i where she worked as a teacher and continued to write
her highly acclaimed books. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious
awards including, in 2008, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to
American Letters.
