Kingston, now 60, returned three times: First as an undergraduate in English literature, graduating in 1962; then to obtain her teaching credential in 1964-65; and most recently as a senior lecturer in the English department, a position she’s held since 1990.

“When I got an invitation from my alma mater to teach, I just couldn’t turn it down,” says Kingston in her tremulous, treble-toned voice. It’s the same voice the narrator despairs of in Kingston’s award-winning, autobiographical novel The Woman Warrior, describing it as “broken,” a voice that “cracks…in two.” What strikes the listener today about that voice, however, is the earnestness and a barely contained wonder in its pitch, complementing the sprite-like impression of Kingston’s four-foot-nine-inch frame, half shrouded by a curtain of thick, white hair.

However it’s described, Maxine Hong Kingston’s voice has resonated deeply within American literature, winning her a National Book Critics Circle Award for The Woman Warrior (1976), an account of growing up Chinese American; and a National Book Award for China Men (1980), a history of Kingston’s forebears in America. Her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey, won the 1989 PEN West award in fiction. She also has written Hawai’i One Summer (1987), a collection of personal essays originally written for The New York Times in 1978, midway during the Kingstons’ 17-year stay in Hawaii; and she is just completing another novel, “The Fifth Book of Peace,” due out next fall.

The eldest of six children born to Chinese immigrant parents, Kingston grew up listening to the village stories of her mother and other Chinese who worked in her parents’ laundry in Stockton. Most of Stockton’s Chinese immigrants were from the same region and spoke a Cantonese dialect, Say Yup, Kingston’s first language. Kingston and her brothers and sisters often made up stories in Say Yup as children. When Kingston learned English in school and realized she could play with phonetic sounds, which was not possible with Chinese word-symbols, she began to write poetry—which “just seemed to come to me out of the sky,” she says. Beginning at the age of eight, she scribbled down rhymes in her notebook. She also started writing stories.

The Chinese legends she heard as a girl, often retold in an American context, form the background against which her struggle to join her Chinese and American identities plays out in Woman Warrior. Those stories also inspired Kingston to fuse Chinese imagery and American rhythms into her own literary idiom, an accomplishment that impressed critics and inspired other minority writers to meld their ethnic cultures with an American consciousness.

Although her father was scholarly and her mother had gone to medical school in China, both parents were apprehensive about their daughter attending college and pursuing a subject that would not land her a job immediately after graduation. They pushed her to find a more vocational subject than the creative writing Kingston wanted to study. So, at Berkeley in 1958, the young Maxine Hong studied in a department she had felt compelled to join after passing its rigorous entrance exam: engineering.

But she switched to English literature as a sophomore. (Kingston says she still gets flashbacks of misery whenever she passes by Hearst Mining Circle.) Berkeley then became “just like heaven,” she recalls. She fed her love for words with books and literary discussion while soaking up the atmosphere of a campus she remembers as quiet and “romantic.” Telegraph Avenue, she says, was a homey place, stuck in a “twilight” era that would be dispelled by the raucous 1960s. During this time she met and married a fellow student and English major from Oakland, Earll Kingston, now an actor.


Although she loved studying books, there was no instruction in creative writing at Berkeley and she wasn’t sure if a university education was for her. “I kept thinking, ‘I don’t belong here,’” she says. Stockton, Kingston adds, with its hardscrabble, agriculturally based way of life, seemed further away than the few hundred miles that separated it from the Berkeley campus. A university education based on “thought and abstractions” didn’t feel practical enough to her.“I remember saying to my husband that we were getting the education of aristocrats when we’re really peasants.”

After graduating, Kingston worked at various clerical jobs, as her parents had originally encouraged her to do. Deciding that teaching could support her and her writing, she returned to Berkeley in 1964, to a campus simmering with political fervor. She became active in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, pushing her new baby, Joseph, in a carriage during a “Mothers for Peace” march. The euphoria of the time, with its ideals of togetherness and community, has inspired her life as well as her art.

“There was a feeling of energy, the belief that we were going to redefine what it means to be a human being and to be an American, and we were making up these wonderful new values. I was really moved by the new language that was coming forth,” Kingston remembers. “There was new slang and new words for psychological and spiritual states that hadn’t been examined or defined before. There were love-ins and be-ins and changes in perception and in language. I wanted to use that language to write a story.” Psychedelic metaphors and hippie slang became the language of Tripmaster Monkey, which takes place in San Francisco during the ’60s and features a young Cal grad, playwright and poet Wittman Ah Sing, as its protagonist.

In her new book, “The Fifth Book of Peace,” Wittman has grown up and become a father. He promises his son that when he grows up “there will be no war.” In the novel, Kingston returns to her experiences at Berkeley in the ’60s, drawing on the student demonstrations as a successful experiment in non-violence and cooperation. The book was written to recreate three lost books of peace which, according to Chinese myth, were instructions on non-violent tactics to stop violence and war.

“My idea was to imagine what might have been in them and to write characters and situations where people used peace tactics and there are no violent action scenes,” Kingston says. “I was experimenting with that. There are warring scenes, but I tell them in a condensed way, to get them over with fast, so I can get to the peaceful part I describe at length. I’m looking for a new dramatic form in which the action doesn’t climax violently.” The images of war in the book came from a costly personal experience. Kingston lost her home, and her partly completed manuscript for “The Fourth Book of Peace,” in the 1991 Oakland hills fire. The book’s current title pays homage to the book that burned.

“I begin with the fire [in the new book] and write about going through the fire, trying to rescue the book, rescue my writing. I’m very lucky in a way because the fire gave me images for war,” she says, adding that in modern times, warfare has been dominated by bombings and what she calls firefights. “Vietnam was just fire,” she says. Kingston believes that the power of storytelling can change the human psyche. In The Woman Warrior, she recalls how her mother’s retellings of stories about Fa Mu Lan, the woman warrior of Chinese myth, spurred her to become more than a “slave or a wife.” With storytelling, she says, we can hear how one life plays out and decide to model ours after it, or choose to pursue another path. It’s the same for determining the fate of the world, she believes. If we are given an outline of what a peaceful world might be like, then it’s possible we can create it.

“Fiction can show you what might be possible. In fiction we can imagine a brave new world. Fiction can give us hope for what everybody tells you isn’t possible. If you can imagine it, and you can write it down, then maybe fiction can even be a blueprint for a wonderful, peaceful world.” Kingston believes that books and art are a force for good, and she insists that “writing, or some kind of art form” is necessary in everyone’s life; in fact, she ascribes most people’s unhappiness to “not bringing enough beauty into their lives.”

Another Kingston dictum is “create community.” Upon her return to Berkeley in 1990, she decided she would counter the anonymous, auditorium-sized classes of her student days with personalized writing instruction in her own courses, making herself available to the 85 students she teaches each semester for one-on-one meetings, and initiating “real communication” during class. “I made up my mind that I was going to learn people’s names and get to know them, no matter how big the class was,” Kingston says, smiling.

She also tries to make the “abstract” University education more useful with personal examples of her own creative process, from how many hours a day she writes (five to six) to how to produce a polished piece (revise, revise, revise.) In analyzing past writers’ works, she draws on her own experiences and gathers impressions of the writers’ lives to explain how they might have arrived at their individual styles. “I’m reacting to the literary criticism that says the writer is dead and what’s important is what the critics say about a work. I’m fortunate enough to be alive while my books are out there, so I can help people know where art comes from. Then I can also conjecture about where it comes from when it comes to Dickens or Henry James.”

After her new book comes out, she says she hopes to put fiction writing to rest and return to poetry, her first love. “I mean to retire from that workhorse labor that is prose. I want to live the easy, happy life of the poet. It’s a returning to a more childlike self,” Kingston says.

Named a “Living Treasure of Hawaii”—where she taught in high schools and at the University of Hawaii—in 1980 and honored by the United States with a National Humanities Medal in 1997, Kingston has now been given the California Alumni Association’s highest award for 2000. “I feel really happy and honored to be Alumna of the Year,” she says. “I have such an affection for Cal. She is truly my alma mater.”

With a tenured position at Cal, Kingston sees the entire campus requiring her care and attention. “I feel a responsibility for the welfare of Berkeley. I want to make sure it provides a good education. When I walk around campus, I feel responsible for everything that happens on it.” Therefore, says Kingston, her current task at Cal goes beyond teaching. She says it is her duty to encourage community in the classroom and to teach students to bring art into their lives. “It ought to be a school that educates everyone”—engineering and English majors alike—“to become artistic and humanitarian men and women,” she says.

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