One of the most outspoken contemporary feminist writers, Maxine Hong Kingston states in her autobiographical book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), "The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. . . . What we have in common...

One of the most outspoken contemporary feminist writers, Maxine Hong Kingston states in her autobiographical book The Woman Warrior (1976), "The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar.... What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms...

Maxine Hong Kingston easily is the most influential Asian American author of the twentieth century. Kingston's first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976), was an instant commercial and critical triumph. Since its first...

Novelist Maxine Hong Kingston was born in the United States to Chinese immigrant parents. Her writing centers on the experience of Chinese-American culture and is part of a multiculturalist critique that challenges images which represent the culture of...

Ahighly acclaimed memoirist, Kingston integrates autobiographical elements with Asian legend and fictionalized history to delineate cultural conflicts confronting Americans of Chinese descent, particularly issues of female identity. Frequently studied...

Maxine Hong Kingston (湯婷婷; born October 27 1940) is an American Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. She is also a prolific academic and...

Maxine Hong Kingston illuminates the experience of everyone who has ever felt the terror of being an emotional outsider. It seems to me that the best records of the immigrant experience and the bittersweet legacy it bestows upon the next generation fascinate us because of the insights they provide into the life of the family, that mystified arena where we first learn, truly or falsely, our own identities. It should therefore not be very startling—as it was to me—that this dazzling mixture of p...

China Joe is the white man's scapegoat, but he is also Kingston's collective hero [in China Men]. The great-grandfather indentured to clear the Hawaiian jungle is a proud, determined man, a leader among the other Chinese there. His work in the canefields and the lashings he receives are rendered in sharp detail. But in Kingston's account his individuality seems to fall away, and we are left with a story more like a folk tale or an epic legend than an account of one man's life. It...

In the title [China Men] Hong Kingston uses the pejorative, the patronizing "Chinamen," but she separates the words, perhaps to indicate that this designation is different. These men will not be dealt with pejoratively but heroically as the "binders and builders" of Hawaii and the States. This is a book of men, of male ancestry, a counterpart to The Woman Warrior, which was the search for self through the untold and told tales of the Chinese family, through the naming and exorcis...