Maxine Hong Kingston's books and conversation are filled with stories she
has beard and those she's imagined. Yet her involvement with people
doesn't end here: She's also a committed activist who has moved from
anti-war protests of the Vietnam era and union organizing activities during
her schoolteaching days in Hawaii to finding "a language of peace" to use
in her next novel. Her creativity, her humanitarianism, her commitment to
pacifism are reasons why a Honolulu Buddhist sect honored her as a
Living Treasure of Hawaii for her first book, The Woman Warrior:
Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts ( Knopf, 1976).

Readers of The Woman Warriorknow some facts about Kingston's life:
Her parents, Chinese immigrants, settled in Stockton, California. The
oldest of six children, she worked in her parents' laundry, then at odd jobs
to put herself through the University of California at Berkeley, from which
she graduated in 1962. As a child Kingston felt silenced by racism-
unable first to speak the language of the dominant culture, then to fit in
with her white classmates; finally, as an adult, she found voice for her
anger in writing. From her earliest childhood she rebelled against both her
own culture's sexist assumptions about female inferiority and her mother's
attempts to control her life. She wanted to be like the legendary Fa Mu
Lan, the Chinese female avenger whose story is woven into the text as it
was woven into her young life.

Photo: Copyright © Franco Salmoiraghi

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