Contemporary World Writersis an innovative series of authoritative introductions to a range of culturally diverse contemporary writers from outside Britain and the United States or from ‘minority’ backgrounds within Britain or the United States. In addition to providing comprehensive general introductions, books in the series also argue stimulating original theses, often but not always related to contemporary debates in post-colonial studies.

The series locates individual writers within their specific cultural contexts, while recognising that such contexts are themselves invariably a complex mixture of hybridised influences. It aims to counter tendencies to appropriate the writers discussed into the canon of...

In 1989, Maxine Hong Kingston expressed her pleasure at the blossoming of Asian American literature: ‘Something wonderful is happening right at this moment ... Amy Tan publishedThe Joy Luck Club, and Hisaye Yamamoto publishedSeventeen Syllables, Frank Chin has a collection of short stories, and I think maybe Ruth-Anne Lumm McKunn just came out with her book on Chinese families. Jessica Hagedorn’s in the spring, and Bharati Mukherjee is in the fall. She won the National Book Circle Critics Award. Something great must be going on’.¹ In 1990 she acknowledged that ‘I do think I probably helped to inspire...

Maureen Sabine’s innovative 2004 study ofThe Woman WarriorandChina Men,Maxine Hong Kingston’s Broken Book of Life: An Intertextual Study, explores the disproportionate strength of the feminist perspective inThe Woman Warriorand suggests that this has obscured Kingston’s other political and thematic concerns. Sabine argues that both books should be read together as a diptych, since as a whole they constitute a conversation between her male and female forbears, a ‘broken book’ of and about life: hers, her relatives’ and, expanding out, the contemporary life of Chinese Americans in the United States.² Sabine’s concept of the ‘broken...

The original title of Maxine Hong Kingston’s second book was not ‘China Men’ but ‘Gold Mountain Heroes’. Kingston’s decision to call her first draft by this name was linked to her desire to tell her male and female ancestors’ stories separately, because ‘The Woman Warriorseemed to break itself away naturally from the rest of the chapters probably because of its strong feminist viewpoint. Some of the “hero” chapters undermined this viewpoint’.³ This might suggest that the material that comprised China Men constituted the leftovers from the mythic-psychic feast that wasThe Woman Warrior; yet as Kingston has explained, her...

After the critical clamour that followed the publication of Kingston’s first two books, the quiet bemusement of critics which was the predominant response toTripmaster Monkey: His Fake Bookcame as quite a change. To be sure, many of the earliest reviews of the book were reacting to the aggressive marketing of ‘ her first novel’ by Kingston’s publishers. Critics also reacted badly to the frenetic pace and insistent – perhaps also incessant – narrative monologue of the central character, Wittman Ah Sing. A brief survey of some of the responses finds a mixed bag of comments: in a review entitled ‘Manic...

Published in the wake of her first literary success, but reissued in 1988,Hawai‘i One Summerreminds us of Kingston’s strong attachment to place: here the Hawai‘i of her early married years, where she worked as a teacher, raised her son and wrote her first fiction. A series of occasional pieces, the writing inHawai‘i One Summeris at times elegiac, nostalgic, and pensive, but often also exuberant and a sincere celebration of what Kingston regards as the timelessness of a landscape and culture too often regarded as little more than an American holiday resort, or rural Pacific idyll. Together...

This chapter examines Maxine Hong Kingston’s latest novel,The Fifth Book of Peace(2003), and suggests that in addition to her popularity as a feminist writer, she deserves recognition as a pacifist writer and activist, and that we need to reconceive of her work as part of an on-going pacifist project. I make the claim that Kingston can be considered alongside other Asian American authors, notably Le-Ly Hayslip, as contributing towards the evolution of an Asian American women’s peace literature.

‘I have almost finished my longbook,’ says Maxine Hong Kingston inTo Be the Poet(2002). ‘Let my life as...

Asian American literature by women is increasingly attracting critical attention as an important sub genre of American literature. Current debates over the literary canon, the changing profile of literary and cultural studies, the increasing presence of women’s and ethnic writing both within and beyond the canon may all explain the increasing popularity of Asian American women’s writing both within the US and beyond its geographical borders. Yet, the critical debate on Asian American women’s writing has barely begun when compared with resources available for readers of African American, say, or Native American writing. In the context of the canon of...