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Maxine Hong Kingston |
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Called "the most influential Asian American author of the twentieth century," by Keith Lawrence and John Dye, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Maxine Hong Kingston has made the Chinese experience available to a large and diverse reading public. Her popular nonfiction and fiction titles blend "myth, legend, history, and autobiography into a genre of her own invention," wrote Susan Currier in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980. Kingston's books The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts and China Men are classified as nonfiction, but, according to Anne Tyler in the New Republic, "in a deeper sense, they are fiction at its best--novels, fairytales, epic poems." Both books are based on the history and myth imparted to Kingston by members of her family and other Chinese-American "story-talkers" who lived in her childhood community in Stockton, California. "The result," noted Contemporary Novelists contributor Sanford Pinsker, "is a species of magical realism, one that continually hovers between fact and the imagination, between what was and what might have been."
Kingston is also the author of the novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, a mixture of magical realism and social realism featuring the Asian American protagonist Wittman Ah Sing, a recent graduate who is attempting to write an epic based on an old Chinese novel.
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