Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston
89 pages
English

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89 pages
English

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Description

The first book-length work to examine the entirety of Kingston's unique literary career

Maxine Hong Kingston is known for using a distinctive blend of autobiography, fantasy, and folklore to explore the history, experience, and identity of Chinese Americans. This is exemplified in her first book, The Woman Warrior, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, a bestseller, and a staple on college and university syllabi. Although The Woman Warrior is by far her most celebrated book, Kingston has penned a wide range of essays, fiction, and poetry, including China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, Hawai'i One Summer, To Be a Poet, The Fifth Book of Peace, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, and the edited volume Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace.

Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston is the first book-length work to examine the entirety of Kingston's literary career, from The Woman Warrior to her most recent volume of poetry. Julia H. Lee weaves together scholarly assessments, interviews, biographical information, and her own critical analysis to provide a complete and complex picture of Kingston's works and its impact on memoir, feminist fiction, Asian American literature, and postmodern literature.

Lee examines the influence that previous generations of Asian American authors, feminism, and antiwar activism have had on Kingston's work. Offering important contextual information about Kingston's life, Lee shows how it has so often served as a starting point for Kingston's writing. Also studied are her complex attitudes toward genre, and her ever-evolving identity as a novelist, essayist, memoirist, and poet. A comprehensive bibliography of critical secondary sources will be an invaluable resource for readers and critics of Kingston's works.


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Publié par
Date de parution 28 février 2018
Nombre de lectures 0
EAN13 9781611178548
Langue English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,2100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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UNDERSTANDING
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
UNDERSTANDING
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
Julia H. Lee

The University of South Carolina Press
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-853-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-61117-854-8 (ebook)
Front cover photograph Andy Freeberg, andyfreeberg.com
For Philip, Eleanor, and Silas
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston
Chapter 2
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Chapter 3
China Men
Chapter 4
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
Chapter 5
Hawai i One Summer, The Fifth Book of Peace , and Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace
Chapter 6
To Be the Poet and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest thanks to Linda Wagner-Martin, who recognized the need for a volume on Maxine Hong Kingston and was as supportive an editor as one could wish for. She has been a mentor to me since my first days in graduate school, and I m delighted to have this chance to thank her for the counsel and support she has provided to me and other women of color academics over the years. I also thank Jennifer Ho at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for making me aware of this opportunity and providing useful advice on the process; she is a valued colleague and friend. Jim Denton and his colleagues at the University of South Carolina Press have shepherded this text through various stages with a good humor and patience. Over the past fifteen years, my students at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of California at Irvine have made reading Maxine Hong Kingston a joyful, maddening, and thought-provoking experience. I thank them for the enthusiasm, cynicism, confusion, and wonder with which they have approached her words.
CHAPTER 1
Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston once stated that her contribution to literature was showing how to get from the oral to the written. 1 Her career has been defined by her attempts to write down the huge inheritance of talk story that her ancestors have passed down from one family member to the next, from one generation to another, over the years. 2 Committing these stories to the page has been no easy task, for as she reveals in her works, these talk-stories change-sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically-with each retelling, and Kingston s own memory of these stories and her re-imagining of them impact the form the textual versions take. And yet, she is deeply attentive to keeping alive in her own text the dissent between the oral versions: the contradictions, inconsistencies, and idiosyncrasies that make it impossible to authenticate the stories or impose a unified logic to them. This is what Kingston means when she talks of getting from the oral to the written -the process of writing for her is not about codifying any one version of a story so much as acknowledging the multiplicity of stories that make up the history of her family s experiences.
The story of Maxine Hong Kingston s own life will sound familiar to those who have read The Woman Warrior, China Men , or her other works, for she revisits scenes from her past frequently in her writing. Her childhood in Stockton, her complicated relationship with her parents, the Chinatown in which she grew up, and the histories-both national and familial-that brought her parents as well as thousands of others from China to Chinatown proved to be fertile ground for generating the narratives that form the backbone of her literary career. After the publication of China Men in 1980, Kingston claimed that she had told all my childhood stories, and at first glance, this statement seems to be an accurate one, since her subsequent works do not seem to mine her own childhood for source materials in the same way that The Woman Warrior and China Men do. And yet, the experiences of her family and the Chinese American community-its politics, histories, losses, and triumphs-are a deeply essential part of all of Kingston s writing, even as she has experimented with genres, forms, and language.
Life and Career
Maxine Ting Ting Hong was born in Stockton, California, on October 27, 1940. Her parents were Tom and Ying Lan Hong. Before coming to the United States, Kingston s father was a teacher and scholar in his home village of Sun Woi (New Society Village) in Guangzhou. Like thousands of other Chinese men before him, he left his home and young family in 1924 in order to seek out the wealth and prosperity that Gold Mountain promised. In China Men , the narrator suggests that her father left China for the United States as much out of boredom and disappointment with teaching as for the financial incentives working in the United States offered. Kingston s father would have had plenty of advice on how to travel to the United States as a paper son, since he was from a family in which the men often went abroad to work before returning to China. Kingston s own grandfather, father, great-uncles, and uncles, often journeyed to the United States in search of employment. Much later in her life, Kingston s mother told her that Tom attempted to enter the United States three times via Cuba; the first two times he was caught and shipped back before he ultimately succeeded on his third attempt. Perhaps this explains why Tom never attempted to return to China once he made it into America-the chances of being turned away again were simply too high. Thus, while most of his family members traveled back and forth between Sun Woi and Gold Mountain, Tom did not.
Once in the United States, Tom Hong worked multiple jobs in order to survive: washing windows, waiting tables, and working at a laundry. These activities did not stop him from enjoying himself and all the opportunities that his new home had to offer: he socialized with other Chinese men, danced at nightclubs, flirted with white women, and toured New York like a tourist, sending back to his wife pictures of himself in his sharp and stylish Western clothes. After a number of years, he invested in a laundry with three other Chinese immigrants. At that point, Tom sent for his wife Ying Lan in China, and she joined him in 1939.
Like her husband, Ying Lan Chew, Kington s mother, was a well-educated professional in China. She and Tom had had two children in China before he decided to give up his scholarly career and try his luck on Gold Mountain. These two children-a boy and a girl-passed away some time after his departure. 3 Casting about for something to do, Ying Lan decided to follow her husband s suggestion to learn a vocation; using the money he sent her every month, she enrolled at the To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton to train to be a doctor and midwife. She worked for a number of years in this capacity before leaving for the United States to rejoin her husband. She arrived in the United States via Angel Island in California and then traveled by train across the country to meet her husband in New York City. (Kingston only learned that her mother entered the United States via Angel Island well after the publication of both The Woman Warrior and China Men . 4 In an interview with Paul Mandelbaum, Kingston states that for most of her life, she had always thought [my mother] came through Ellis Island because all her stories about America start with New York. 5 ) When Ying Lan arrived in New York she was forty-five, and she and her husband had been separated for fifteen years.
After being cheated by his fellow business partners out of the laundry that they had all started,

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