The largest and most comprehensive edition of our foremost Asian
American writer: three classic books and additional writings, many rare,
that together offer a vivid and searching portrait of immigrant
experience and American dreams.
Maxine Hong Kingston made a stunning entrance on the American literary
scene with The Woman Warrior (1976), her "memoirs of a childhood
among ghosts. Not only an account of growing up poor and Chinese
American in the San Joaquin Valley, it was also an audacious feat of
imaginative transformation and pathbreaking work of feminist
autobiography, drawing on ancient myths and the family stories her
mother brought over from China to make sense of a transformed life in
America.
A companion to The Woman Warrior, which she called her "mother-book,"
Kingston's "father-book" China Men (1980) spreads out across a
large geographical and historical canvas to envision the lives of her
male relatives who immigrated to America. Taken together, The Woman
Warrior and China Men offer a profound, kaleidoscopic, genre-defying
narrative of the American experience.
Kingston's third book, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), is
the wildly inventive story of Wittman Ah Sing, a Berkeley graduate
student whose experience of the San Francisco Beat scene transforms his
understanding of his own Chinese heritage.
Rounding out the volume are a series of essays from 1978 reflecting on
her life in Hawaii, later collected as Hawai'i One Summer,
personal musings whose subjects range from the contentions of a
conference of Asian American writers to home-buying, surfing, and the
work of the Beat poet Lew Welch.
Also included are hard-to-find essays about the creative process and
Kingston's exasperated, insightful account of how most of the reviewers
of The Woman Warrior fell prey to lazy stereotypes about the "exotic"
and "inscrutable" East.
