Chicago Tribune (Sunday)

Maxine Hong Kingston writes about real people

- By Christophe­r Borrelli cborrelli@chicagotri­bune.com

Maxine Hong Kingston, appearing virtually at the American Writers Festival in Chicago on May 15 (in conversati­on with celebrated fiction writer Viet Thanh Nguyen), has never done many interviews. But now at 81, with a handsome new Library of America edition of her earliest stories for posterity, and a cemented role as not only an Asian American literary pioneer but a canonized chronicler of the American Experience, she has less to explain. She is, in a sense, everywhere. A 2020 New Yorker profile described her as, for a while, “one of the most frequently taught living authors” in American schools. But Kingston was almost too influentia­l, her blend of memoir and imaginatio­n now a default for generation­s of younger writers. We spoke on the phone from her home in Hawaii:

Q: I was reading your essay ‘The Coming Book,’ about a book not yet written ... A:

I don’t even remember! What did I say?

Q: Well, lines like “If I could finish it, I would never have to write again” ... And lines like “the book would exclude me as first-person narrator and the Chinese American

heroines who have interested me may disappear” ...

A: I don’t remember! But I am always saying this is it — I will not do more. I have done that with every book. In my last couple books, I have even announced that. I recently wrote (for The New York Times) that, at 81, there is no drive to write, it’s done, and I am done.

Q: You’re really done. A:

Actually, no. I’m working on the next draft of a work, a thousand single spaces-long, a diary I kept 10 years ago and had in mind I would not publish, so I could write anything. It was when that Mark Twain autobiogra­phy came out. It was not to be published for 100 years. So, posthumous. I thought I could do that! I would call it “Posthumous­ly Yours” and let it sit for 100 years. But then I started reading and thought, this is not bad! Maybe I should publish. And then I thought of the privacy of the people I wrote about, so I have to contact them. I don’t own their stories. I adopted a code of ethics after writing (her classic first book) “The Woman Warrior.” I had written all kinds of private things about real people. It didn’t occur to me until years later those people owned their stories. It had felt like they belonged to me because they were part of my life, so it felt like they were mine.

Q: So when you wrote about your parents, who entered the country illegally from China, how cautious were you?

A: Cautious. They were worried about being deported. So I changed the form of what I wrote. I would write what happened then say This couldn’t be what happened, let me tell you what really happened. The story of my father being a stowaway is so adventurou­s it sounds like fiction, so I would write a story like ‘The Legal Father,’ which would make the real story seem like fiction. I would imagine someone from immigratio­n reading my books, so I wrote in a way to fool them. At the same time, I got at what really happened.

Q: Were you OK then that you were writing a memoir yet it was considered fiction? A:

Yes! But publishers, critics, librarians had a hard time. There is an edition of “The Woman Warrior” that says “nonfiction” on the cover, and on the back cover, “fiction”!

 ?? LOS ANGELES TIMES ?? Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of several novels.
LOS ANGELES TIMES Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of several novels.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States