Maxine Hong Kingston

"The Woman Warrior!" That's what I think whenever I speak I with Maxine Hong Kingston. It's not just that I'm reminded of the title of her best-known book. It's that this tiny woman with large mind and spirit is the perfect embodiment of that phrase.

In conversation, Kingston will be chatting about being arrested at a peace protest in one breath and then she'll explain her process as a writer in the next. Her thoughtful use of language, her ability to expand the boundaries of literary style, and her resilience through storms of fire and criticism are an inspiration.

Kingston's first two books, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts and China Men, were written at virtually the same time, but it was The Woman Warrior that took everyone--including her publisher--by surprise. The glowing reviews and awards flooded in (including the National Book Critics Circle Award), the first printing sold out in a matter of weeks, and Kingston's career took off. Her unique style--a mix of fiction, nonfiction, myth, and other literary genres--left countless readers dazzled and some critics confused. But Kingston always managed to keep her creative engine primed--until "the fire."

At the time of the devastating Oakland-Berkeley fire of 1991, Kingston was polishing another novel, which she had titled The Fourth Book of Peace. The fire not only obliterated all copies of her manuscript and her computers, but she also lost her home, her community, and her desire to write fiction. "I seemed to have lost my imagination," she told Poets & Writers.

The process of healing from the trauma of the fire took more than ten years, but with the help of a community of war veteran writers, Kingston was able to complete what she has called "my last big book," entitled The Fifth Book of Peace. Over the course of two interviews last fall, Kingston discussed the book, her writing process, her critics, and her efforts to cultivate peace in times of war.

Q: You and Alice Walker shared a jail cell last year. What happened?

Maxine Hong Kingston: On International Women's Day, we were standing in front of the White House as part of an anti-war protest organized by Code Pink. We sang our songs, and we wore pink, and then the police said get off the street, and we decided not to. And though we were jailed and taken away, it was the most incredible experience. Alice and I shared a jail cell, and it was so great to be in the spirit of that woman. Terry Tempest Williams was there, too. We had this spirit of peace and love, which communicated to everyone, even the police. There was a black policeman who escorted Alice to her cell and he just kept saying to her, "My wife is going to kill me."

Q: How long has war been a central concern of yours?

Hong Kingston: From my first star that appeared in the sky, I remember looking up and using my wishes to wish against war. I was born into World War II, and I was aware from first consciousness about the bombing in Japan and the death camps in Europe. I used every single birthday candle to wish for peace. And somewhere in there I realized that wishes are made with words and so I kept writing. I think I started The Fifth Book of Peace as a child and constantly worked on how are we going to bring peace to this world. One of my realizations is that war seems to be like the weather. It's like, "Here comes a firestorm." We also hurt one another and shoot and kill one another because there seems to be some storm that happens in human consciousness.

Q: Have you gotten to the point where you feel like we can't change the weather, we can't avoid war?

Hong Kingston: Well, we may be able to change human consciousness. We may be able to pacify ourselves and our souls, and maybe we can also communicate with one another. If we keep talking to one another, writing to each other, and listening to one another, we can stop these wars one person to one person and then maybe one community to the next community.

Q: You began writing this book before the 1991 fire in Berkeley and Oakland. That fire destroyed your home and your manuscript. Much of what you write in The Fifth Book of Peace is about the loss you experienced and the reconstruction of the book. How does it feel to finally have it in printed form?

Hong Kingston: Oh, I feel very free. It's been about fourteen years since I started, so I'm ready to retire.

Q: The table of contents is beautifully written and divides the book into four main sections: fire, paper, water, and earth. Explain those divisions.

Hong Kingston: I thought of fire, paper, water, and earth as elements. The book begins with fire, and I write about the fire of 1991 in the Oakland-Berkeley Hills, where I lost my neighbors and neighborhood and forests and the book. My father had just died, so the fire section is about this elemental loss. Fire is also an image that we have of wars: We have firefights. There are explosions, bombs going off, and all of that in the fire section.

Q: How were you able to recall all the details of that fire, even down to the differing reports that you were hearing on the radio?

Hong Kingston: Whatever was happening at the time was so powerful it was imprinted in my body and in my mind. There's no looking back and trying to remember, it's so etched into my consciousness. In fact, I remember closing my eyes trying not to see it and I had the sensation that I was able to see through my eyelids. I saw fire through my eyelids! Now how is that possible? But I know it happened, and it was unforgettable. I think this may be what war veterans call PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder] because there's no problem trying to remember. One tries to forget it, and you can't forget it.

Q: Did you find the book in the fire?

Hong Kingston: I did find something. It was a white block of ash. It was like white feathers. I put my hand in it, and my hand sunk through, and then these feathery hairs just sort of floated into the air, and then the book became airy nothing.

Q: The water section is the reconstruction of the book you lost, right?

Hong Kingston: Yes. I wrote the water section as an antidote. After surviving that fire, I needed water imagery, and so I wrote a story about draft evaders going to Hawaii. That gave me a chance to describe the Pacific Ocean and the rivers, the waterfalls. Hawaiians have many words for rain and saltwater and fresh water. I wrote water imagery for years in order to heal myself from the fire images.

The paper section is about the books of peace. A long time ago there probably did exist three books of peace in China, and they were burned in library fires. Whenever there was a change in regime the new king would burn the books and kill the historians and the writers. I write about those books being lost throughout the history of China.

Q: What about the earth section?

Hong Kingston: I call it earth because it is so easy to be utopian and too idealistic when writing a book about how to end war. I thought I must be down to earth when I write about peace. I must be realistic and write about actual wars. How do we ever come home from them? How do we be at peace as nations and as peoples but also at peace each of us individually?

Q: Was the final version of your book like the manuscript you lost in the fire?

Hong Kingston: When you can write again, and you figure out how creativity is going to come back, it comes back in a different form. When I was writing The Fifth Book of Peace, Ralph Ellison died and I thought about him a lot. When he lost his work, he didn't write for a long time. He would have false starts, and he collected a lot of material, but it never cohered again. And I thought yes, I understand that. That could happen to me, I know the condition of having your work destroyed. I was writing in segments and not coherently, the same thing that Ralph Ellison was doing, and I worked hard to see if I could get things to cohere and integrate, and I think I did pretty well there. But I decided to be true to the experience of work and life getting destroyed and being wounded with scars, so I decided to let the seams show. I showed the cracks, and I did it on purpose!

Q: Some critics have written negative reviews about the book.

Hong Kingston: I was traveling on the book tour when this negative trashing review came in from The New York Times, the newspaper that we all look at for the news. This person totally did not understand what I was doing, didn't get my sense of humor, had zero understanding of what Buddhism is all about, no sympathy whatsoever. My first reaction was OK, I quit! I'm just going to go home. I'm not going to finish this book tour. What's the use? I did my best and I'm not able to communicate, and who told me I had to do this anyway? I just got really down, but it didn't last very long--maybe twenty minutes.

Q: How did your parents influence you as a writer?

Hong Kingston: I was inspired by my mother and father from the very beginning. I think when I was in utero they'd be chanting and singing poems. Every night there were bedtime stories and the long telling of sagas and history and myth. My mother actually comes from a tradition of public storytellers. My grandfather would sit in the plaza in the town square, and he would talk or read a story every night. My mother inherited that, and she brought me and my brothers and sisters up that way. My father had memorized classical Chinese poetry and Confucius, and he would go around reciting that.

Q: Writing about family can be tricky. Were you concerned about that?

Hong Kingston: Oh, it is a big concern, and it influences my writing. When I wrote The Woman Warrior and China Men, my parents were still alive, and they were both illegal aliens, but I wanted to tell the story of their immigration. My father was a stowaway from Cuba, and I did want to tell these really interesting stories. But I was afraid that the immigration service would read my stories and deport them. And my parents would scare me, saying, "They deport the kids and everything." And so what I did was to write fiction/nonfiction so that I could fool immigration into thinking, did these people really immigrate in these adventurous ways or is she just telling us a story? I found a form where I could protect their identity but at the same time tell the story.

But now that they've died, I find myself writing very differently. I make clear what is nonfiction and what is fiction. There's no confusing the two.

Q: When you look back on your early success and look at where you are now, was this what you hoped for?

Hong Kingston: Oh, yeah. Every young writer needs to have hope and the faith that someday the work will be published, and it will get out to readers. I have done that, and I have a lot of readers, and that feels amazing.

Q: When The Woman Warrior came out there weren't a lot of ethnic studies classes or departments. Now we're at a time when it feels like identity politics--and ethnic studies being an offshoot of that has gotten a bad name. The common criticism is that identity politics has fragmented the left. How much have you connected to, or disconnected from, identity politics?

Hong Kingston: I must say that I get very disturbed when I see how my books are being taught in ethnic studies. I was really upset one day when a student who was taking an ethnic studies class came into my office and asked me if I was an assimilationist writer, and I thought, what are they teaching him over there? That question comes from the fear that if we make it in white society then we have to give up our old-country traditions and even give up our ethnic community to fit in or do well. Richard Rodriguez writes really well about that. He talks about the sacrifice of the private family and the home language in order to get out there and learn the cash language.

But you know, I also think that to have African American Studies and Asian American Studies and Native American Studies is really good. When I walk around at Berkeley I always have my eye out for whether people of one ethnic group take the courses that are about another ethnic group. That's when it really makes educational sense. It doesn't make so much sense when we go into those courses and segregate ourselves into all these little groups.

Q: The Woman Warrior has meant a lot to so many women across those racial lines. I know all sorts of women who relate to the stories told in the book, even though their cultural experiences may be very different.

Hong Kingston: When The Woman Warrior came out it was at the height of the feminist movement, and I did not feel good about that because I wanted my book to be read as a book about human beings. I didn't want to be just a feminist writer or just a Chinese American writer. I wanted to be a writer.

I was afraid of seeing my book categorized. You go into a bookstore, and it'll be pigeonholed as a feminist book or an Asian book. One time I saw my book on a shelf of Black Studies and that made me feel so good because it can't be strictly pigeonholed. They put it in anthropology and sociology and history and so on, and it is also in American and English literature. So as long as there are lots of categories, we're OK.

Q: What are your thoughts on the current state of book publishing?

Hong Kingston: I hear about losses in independent bookstores and bookstores in general, big losses from last year and the year before, and so my sense at the moment is that things are really hard. I was talking to an agent, who said that for many people today, reading is not their primary source of entertainment, learning, or solace. It doesn't seem to be the main way to contemplate existence in our lives. Reading has to compete hard with television and movies.

I am alarmed at the short attention span, the inability to sit quietly. That's what one has to do to read or write: to be able to sit calmly and quietly in silence alone for hours at a time.

Q: How did you find confidence as a writer?

Hong Kingston: I don't know that I had confidence. I guess that I was able to risk and put it out there and keep risking. And by risking, I mean spending years on something that could come to nothing. Risk the hours and days and years of writing, and then risk rejection.

Q: So just that belief in your work was enough to take the risk.

Hong Kingston: Yes. I was thinking, well, I could forgo money and fame in my lifetime, but this book will communicate to its readers in the future. As long as I have it recorded on paper it has its own immortality already. The one solace that I had was that I could always make copies. I make lots of copies, and I save them, and someday after I'm gone somebody will discover this, and maybe my readers will be our children or grandchildren.

Q: What do you tell writers about finding their voice? Can everyone be a writer?

Hong Kingston: Everyone can be a writer, and everyone needs to find his or her voice. This doesn't mean that everyone needs to be a professional and publish and all that, but all of us need to find our way to communicate and express ourselves out in the world. Writing, thinking, communicating, it all goes together.

A technique that I use constantly is to read aloud everything that I write. When you read it aloud you can feel the rhythm and the sound and the taste of the words in your mouth and from your lungs. You can feel whether the words are strong or bitter or sweet or whether they are pleasant or unpleasant. And when you read aloud you're also tuning your ear. When you first write, you're processing this noisy world into the silence of writing. When you read it aloud, you can fix the clumsiness. And even an intellectual form like the essay benefits from this reading aloud. So I read aloud, and I rewrite at least a dozen drafts, and each one I read aloud.

Q: I once asked the writer Louise Erdrich about the kind of relationship she has with her books once they come out, and she told me, "I don't read them. I don't even open them because if I do I see all these things that I wish I was able to fix." Do you open yours again?

Hong Kingston: I do open them, and I do find mistakes. The publishers try to give you a chance to fix them when the next printing comes out. I get obsessed with trying to find as many mistakes as possible and trying to fix them.

Q: And when you say mistakes, are you talking about punctuation errors and typos or things you wish you had written differently?

Hong Kingston: Both! Punctuation errors, spelling errors, things that I would have written differently, things that I left out. When I find those early editions in the bookstores, I sneak up on them and I take my pen and I correct them.

Q: So if you see Maxine Hong Kingston in a bookstore near you, she's not defacing property, she's just making some corrections.

Hong Kingston: That's right. I've been caught by bookstore people who don't recognize me and they try to stop me.

Andrea Lewis is a San Francisco-based writer and co-host of KPFA Radio's "Morning Show" in Berkeley.

COPYRIGHT 2004 The Progressive, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group