School of Arts and Sciences 1999 Dean's Forum
Maxine Hong Kingston
Author of the 1998-99 Penn Reading Project text,
The Woman Warrior
The Woman Warrior
Maxine Hong Kingston burst upon the literary scene in 1976 with a best-selling memoir that defied traditional categorization. An autobiography that ignores chronology, The Woman Warrior weaves together old tales and contemporary experience, Chinese myths and American popular culture to create a new genre that dissolves the line between fiction and non-fiction. It is a book about being Chinese. It is also a book about being a woman and the conflicting cultural messages she received as the daughter of immigrants growing up in America in the 1950s. The New York Times Book Review said, "It is an investigation of soul, not landscape. Its sources are dream and memory, myth and desire. Its crises are the crises of a heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it."
Today, Maxine Hong Kingston is a highly acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. One of the first Asian Americans to achieve literary prominence, Ms. Kingston has also written China Men (1980), Through the Black Curtain (1987), Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) and Hawai'i One Summer (1998). Ms. Kingston was born in 1940 in Stockton, California, and received a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, where she is currently senior lecturer in English.
"I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes." - Maxine Hong Kingston
Click here for past Dean's Forums.