Maxine Hong Kingston

When The Woman Warrior appeared in the U.S. in 1976, it sent an electrifying buzz across the Pacific. I was a young, aspiring novelist in Hong Kong then, and what I felt was: Finally. A book by someone more or less like me. About time.

Though billed as a memoir, Maxine Hong Kingston’s first book was, in fact, a novel about being more or less Chinese in the world. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and became a literary classic. But in Asia, the initial reception to Kingston was muted — even negative. The most damning criticism from some Asian critics could be summed up as, “How dare an inauthentic Chinese write this!” The book wasn’t even available in Hong Kong — probably because no one thought it would sell — so I acquired a pirated copy from Taipei. Reading it changed my life. Kingston inspired me to persist as a writer, despite a Hong Kong society that dismissed such endeavors (especially those of a “maybe-Chinese” writing in English). I kept writing and continue to do so. When I finally met Kingston years later, I thanked her for gifting me my writer’s life.

As well as being praised for her rich literary oeuvre, Kingston must also be noted for her vision of the kind of borderless world we could create if we try — a timely message now that we are all more or less world citizens, regardless of our origins. In The Woman Warrior, she writes: “When you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” Many Chinese — not just Chinese Americans — would do well to ask themselves the same questions these days.

But more than that, if you substitute the word “Chinese” with “human” in Kingston’s passage, you have a question to pose the whole world. Kingston’s is a moral vision, one to guide not only writers, but all who challenge tradition, history and old-fashioned notions of identity.