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Authors
Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940)
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The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980) were first received as autobiography, though Kingston scholars now recognize important fictive elements. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) is more obviously a novel. Essays Kingston wrote in 1978 appear as Hawai’i One Summer (1999). The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) incorporates remembered pages of a lost novel with sections of conventional memoir. Shirley Geok-Lim edited Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior” (1991); also helpful is Sidonie Smith’s A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (1987). More cognizant of fiction’s role in Kingston’s writing is Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Joy Kogawa (1993) by King-Kok Cheung and Writing Tricksters (1997) by Jeanne Rosier Smith. Cultural identity features in Martha J. Cutter’s Lost and Found in Translation (2005).
Maxine Hong Kingston's parents were Chinese immigrants to California. Although in China her father had been a teacher and her mother a doctor, in America they worked in a laundry and raised six children. Kingston, the eldest child, graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and won acclaim when she published her semi-autobiographical work The Woman Warrior (1976). In this National Book Critics' Circle Award-winning book, Kingston explores the cultural problems faced by Chinese Americans, a topic she revisits in China Men (1980), a National Book Award winner. In 1989 Kingston published the novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Kingston is engaged in the struggle to create a distinct voice, and a coherent identity, out of the vast array of experiences in modern American culture. She recognizes that the contemporary artist, whatever his or her ethnicity and cultural preferences, constantly engages with high art and pop, the classic and the transient, the subtle and the banal. The title "Trippers and Askers," the first chapter of Tripmaster Monkey, comes from Walt Whitman -- and like the author of Leaves of Grass, Kingston's protagonist is trying to find his way as an artist and to weave an art out of everything he encounters.
1. Wittman is Chinese American; in addition, he lives in a vibrant city whose changefulness, color, and life appeal to him deeply. Choose several moments in the story where you see contemporary and pop culture influencing the way that Wittman thinks and responds to the world. Where is he energized, and where is he impeded or confused by such associations and experiences?
2. Wittman is trying to create himself not only as an artist but also as a lover. How does his wide-ranging vernacular help or hinder his self-expression as a lover -- and his ability to love as a coherent self?
