Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston was born in California in 1940 to Chinese immigrants. The third of eight children, Hong Kingston became a passionate and prolific writer at an early age. She eventually majored in English at UC, Berkeley--the university at which she taught for many years after the publication of The Woman Warrior and various other novels and works of criticism.

Maxine Hong Kingston published The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts in 1976. Hong Kingston's book introduced American readers to a never-before-witnessed topic: Chinese-American girlhood, and the unique marriage of gender and ethnicity present in growing up as a Chinese woman in America. Hong Kingston's book blends memoir, fiction, and biography together to create an unique document of the era and ethnic background in which she grew up. It also introduces a topic central to both her own literary project and that of Morrison in Beloved--that of haunting. Are we all haunted by often silent and silenced familial pasts? Is the American story a narrative of erasures and the ghosts these erasures create?

Hong Kingston's work will allow us to ask many questions central, too, to our own project in Topics in Ethnic American Literature. Using her book, we will discuss the ethics of representation. Does Hong Kingston have the right to represent her ancestors' stories? Is her hybrid text a response to the difficulties of representation? Is there something unethical or, rather, heroic about telling the stories that many think would be better off not told? The Woman Warrior will also help us to look at the place of the immigrant story in America and American mythology. How is the immigrant experience in America the ultimate American narrative, told over and over again in the many novels we will read this quarter?