ABSTRACT
This interview with the prominent Chinese American writer Maxine
Hong Kingston provides insights into the personal influences and the polit-
ical inspiration for her work; it also explores the debate amongst Chinese
Americans regarding cultural authenticity and approaches to cross-
culturalism. Born in 1940 in Stockton, California’s Chinatown, Kingston
first spoke Chinese and learnt to speak and write English around the age of
five. Since the publication in 1976 of her seminal semi-autobiographical
work The Woman Warrior: memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts,
Kingston has been the focus of intense critical debate. For many Chinese
immigrants of Kingston’s generation, access to the United States could only
be gained by suppressing facts and constructing an identity and history
acceptable to the immigration officials. It was only as recently as 1948 that
Chinese Americans were able to become United States citizens. The result
of this authorized racism was a feeling amongst Chinese Americans of
anger and misrepresentation. Her second novel, China Men (1980), is
both a history and a memoir of the first Chinese immigrant men who came
to America and includes autobiographical details and stories passed down
through Hong Kingston’s family. The third novel, Tripmaster Monkey:
his fake book (1990), concerns a new generation of Chinese Americans
and is her most stylistically postmodern novel, playing with concepts of the
reliability of the narrator and magic realism. Her fourth novel, The Fifth
Book of Peace, was published in 2003 following the loss of the first draft
when her house was burnt in the forest fires of 1994.
