Maxine Hong Kingston: Talking Story

This program was made possible by viewers like you. Night after night my mother would talk story until we fell asleep. I couldn't tell where the stories left off and the dreams began. Her voice the voice of heroines in my sleep. She said I would grow up a wife and a snail but she taught me the song of the world you wanna. Fall in love. I would have to cry what. Would you want. Now this swordsman and I are not so dissimilar. I mean my people understand the resemblance soon so that I can return to them. What we have in common. Are the words that our band. And I have. And one roots. Yeah you got me a little anything

from her mother's stories and her father's silence came Maxine Hong Kingston has words. Words born in California's Central Valley bearing the memory of a past in China fiercely imagined words about her ancestors and her identity. Her bestselling memoir The woman warrior is already a classic of modern American literature. And her latest book trip master monkey has been called the Great American Novel of the 1960s. The way to really write about a person is to show not just on their dates and what they have to do with contemporary politics. I show what they. What their imaginations are like. I tell you I know what their dreams are. Kingston's dreams rise and swirl like fog on the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. As a child she played in the slews and thick reeds of the Delta

watching the fishermen on the red winged black birds finding hobo campfires and secret hiding places. But the real mysteries were inside the hong family house where her parents still live. Crazy. Could you place in your neighborhood. Kingston grew up immersed in the paradoxes and secrets of her Chinese immigrant parents and her first two books. The woman warrior and Chinamen try to come to terms with that experience. She found her father the hardest to fathom a man she describes as stoic and hardworking but who often screamed at night in his sleep. Only if I can see him not you and you want to believe you. You know when you get it you know long time you're trying to turn me on a plane like you can and. Cannot get one yet.

Her mother a compulsive talker is a powerful storyteller who does Oldham but will get her daughter with legends tales of China and family history. In the woman warrior Kingston uses the same mix of fantasy and fact the same magical realism to describe her complicated relationship with her mother and her own struggle to lead an independent life. Published in 1976 the woman warrior established Kingston as a daring original writer. I wrote a review but. But. More to the point I called up everybody I could think of. You know you won't believe this but we you know we got some we got some genius on our hands and don't. Don't miss this book. I think like a lot of Chinese American women or any person who has had a Chinese background reading this you just felt amazed and proud that somebody could have this. I really felt once I read it that I who had aspired to write plays for a

while and was trying to figure out a way to do it had finally found a model by which I could begin to discover my own voice. OK. And Kingston's memoir is The Woman Warrior and the Chinamen and members of her family are the central characters and no one looms larger than her mother. Brave orchid. He was now in her 80s Kingston's mother still presides over family gatherings like a proud and I think there's only one thing I really want to enjoy. I want you here not wandering like a ghost from Romany. I want every one of you living here together when you're all home. All six of you with your children and husbands and wives. There are 20 or 30 people in this house. Then I'm happy. And your

father is happy. Whichever one I walked into overflows with my relatives grandsons. So. I can't turn around without touching somebody. That's the way our house should. But Kingston was not satisfied merely to be surrounded by her family and the woman warrior and the Chinamen. She tries to sort out who she is and what it means to be Chinese and to marry her. Did you get your 20. Min. I am getting and. You got the minuses Chinese-Americans. When you try to understand what things in you are Chang 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 China. What is Chinese tradition and what is the mood in the 1940s and 50s. The Hong family house was filled with six children. Maxine the oldest The House also contained the shadowy presence of eccentric ancestors who later appeared as characters in her books. Grandfather crazy ever since he was bayoneted by Japanese invaders. He used to shock the family by exposing himself at the dinner table. My great uncle. A riverboat pirate who murdered a man in Cuba and became a professional burglar in New York. I never adjusted to life in America.

And eventually died in a mental hospital. And there were ghosts. I mean one of the extraordinary things why it seems to me that somehow it at some level books by Maxine Hong Kingston books by. By Toni Morrison. Sometimes don't get the awards they deserve in our literary culture. And I've heard this said by people who are on the panels that give out the awards. Is that is that. The white American literary establishment doesn't believe in ghosts. Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston believe in ghosts. Kingston subtitled The woman warrior Memoirs of a girlhood among the ghosts. Some of the ghosts she writes about are white demons with round eyes. Others are ghosts who flew out of China seeking revenge. And won. The no name woman is the ghost of her father's sister. Who drowned herself in the family well. When I heard this story it came with a taboo.

My mother said don't tell the story. Don't ever repeat it. I'm going to tell it to you but don't you ever repeat it. And. And it was. It's a story that has so much of woman suffering. I mean it's about rape. It's about infidelity. It's about how to keep the marriage going or how to break out of it. It's a ballad suicide and death and illegitimate birth and the death of Baby and death of a mother I mean all kinds of horrible taboo subjects. It is a story of patriarchy of an old Chinese culture that the feet of young girls. Women fear. While. In the fields near her village

while her husband is far away and. When she becomes pregnant. She delivers her baby alone in the pool. And then out of shame. Kills the child and herself. And what I'm doing as an artist and a writer and a human being is saying. I'm going to give her back her life. I'm going to bring her to life and I'm going to make all of us face her we're going to find meaning for her life. We're going to rescue her. And she has no name. But I'm good. I'm going to give her her life and her immortality by writing it down and. Making it a story that will live forever. My aunt haunts me. Her ghost are drawn to me because now after 50. Pages of paper to her.

I do not think I am telling on her that she was a spy. Drowning herself in the drinking water. The Chinese are almost there. He is weeping. Silently by the water to cool down a substitute. China is not the only source for the drama and violence in Kingston stories. She was born and raised in Stockton. A fight. In a tough and gritty racially mixed neighborhood made famous by another local writer Leonard gardener. His novel The movie Fat City captured the pain and lost dreams of hometown boxers. Kingston is only four feet nine inches tall. She spoke no English until she went to

school. To survive in Stockton. She had to be street wise. Another notable artist to emerge from Stockton is Rupert Garcia and she Connell painter whose work is filled with the bold colors and powerful images of rebellion and war. Garcia and Kingston are friends who went to high school together in the 1950s on Stockton south side living on the south side it was.

Horrific because it was drugs. Back then the heroin gang fights. Beating up people. Robbie was one aspect of of life there. But even within the context of all that. Many of us overcame that situation which was very frightening and still is very frightening. If the two of us had come from like a middle class suburban background maybe the struggle would have been harder because maybe we wouldn't have to learn what the hard edges were and and what the drama. The drama was like here and we got drama of it right away. Oh it's about hope in my work is also about hope. I have no sense of despair at all. I've had despair I would not be an artist. And I think Maxine similarly has a great sense of hope.

Hope was what brought Kingston's great grandfathers to America fleeing warlords and landlords in China. They dreamed of prosperity on the Gold Mountain. Their sons and grandsons would make the same journey. But immigration was hard. Arriving in San Francisco Bay My father was detained for an indefinite time at the immigration station on Angel Island. Almost within swimming distance of San Francisco. You know wooden house a white demon physically examined him. Poked him in the ass and genitals looked in his mouth pulled his eyelids with a hook. This was not the way a father ought to have been greeted. But her father was tough. He knew how to survive. He made his way to New York where he washed windows and saved his money until he had enough to open a laundry with three partners.

They worked until midnight and slept on the ironing tables. In China. He had been a village teacher. Now he began to prosper. He bought $200 suits smokes Lucky Strikes and went to the movies to see Clark Gable one of his friends bought a motorcycle. On Sundays they took the ferry to Coney Island and look for blondes in swimsuits. It was like pennies from heaven. His wife was still in China where she was studying to be a doctor and a midwife. Now he wrote to her. It is time to join me in America. My mother left China in the winter of 1939 and arrived in New York Harbor in January 1940. She carried the same suitcase she had taken to Cannes time. This time. On Ellis Island the officials asked her. What year did your husband cut off.

And it terrified her when she could not remember. She had not seen her husband for 15 years. You look like a foreigner she told him. I can barely recognize you. He bought her new clothes and introduced her to the wonders of New York. See the Statue of Liberty. They climbed the ladder in high heels up the arm to the torch to the crown from the windows of the crown. They also went to the top of the Empire State took the second elevator to the very top. The top of the. They put money in the telescopes and looked for the laundry and their apartment. So I have been on the TARDIS she said. I have seen everything everything is possible on the go.

Everything including getting swindled his partners cheated him out of his share in the laundry with nothing left to lose. He and his wife took a train to California in Stockton. A man they called their benefactor put him to work managing an illegal gambling house. The Stockton gambling eponymous long gone but a similar one up the river in LA is now a museum. Police and paddy wagons used to raid her father's place. Part of his job was getting arrested taking the blame for the real thing that they don't like

during World War 2 me. The police crackdown on gambling stopped and went straight and so did Mr Hong. He opened a laundry and the whole family went to work. One that their monitor in our the laundry reached 100 and 11 degrees on summer afternoons. Either my mother or my father would say that it was time to tell another ghost story so that we could get some good chills up our back. My parents my brothers sisters and great uncle kept the presses crashing and hissing and shouted out the stories. Those were our successful days when so much laundry came in. My mother did not have to pick tomatoes. For brides to change from pressing to sorting.

Inspired by her family. Kingston would talk story in Chinese but when she learned English in school she began to write. Maybe I was born a writer. And I've thought about. People who have callings and vocations that I must have been called when I was very young and. Even before I'd learned to write. I told the story talk story. And so I think of that impulse as going it's pretty writing because maybe I would've told the stories in a different kind of culture. So. To preserve their Chinese culture and language the hong family sent Maxine and her brothers and sisters to a Chinese school. After American school. We picked up our cigar boxes in which we had arranged

brushes and and a box neatly and went to Chinese school. From 5 o'clock to 7:30 p.m.. There we chanted together our voices rise on the soft. Some boys shouting. Everybody reading together reciting together I'm not alone with one voice. So. During recess the teachers locked themselves up in their office with the shelves of books copy books from China. They wanted their hands on the stove. There was no place supervision. The boys who were so well behaved in the American School played tricks on the teachers and talked back to them. The girls were not me rt who screamed and yelled during recess when there were no

rules. At recess we are the school to ourselves. Early on. Kingston fell in love with books among her favorites were the Louisa May Alcott stories. Until she saw portrayed a Chinese man. They described him and they called him little Chinaman and he said. He was fat and he had a he had a little these little eyes and he had a long pig tail and he talked really funny. And the description of him was grotesque. When I read this the impact on me was I felt terrible. I felt really like I was. Pushed out of literature in the sense that I had been identifying with the little women. I mean that's me. You know Jo March that's me and all of a sudden it's not me. I'm this little Chinaman. And he's not beautiful. The book that restored her self-esteem and her faith in literature was fifth Chinese daughter by

Jade wall. But then you know as a 10 11 year old to have I mean that that saved my life. And it's you find Jade so long. Raised in San Francisco's Chinatown in the confines of a strict insular family jades no one struggle to make her own life in the world outside. Her autobiography published in 1950. Now seems old fashioned and stilted but it's easy to see why it inspired Kingston. Here was a popular book by a Chinese-American writer. A woman. Who described family life her neighborhood and her determination to overcome racial prejudice. I was the only Chinese girl in the school through new reason called me thinking thinking Chinaman could understand it. I thought the Chinese were civilized before your ancestors were. I think that kind of thing kept me from feeling inferior I never feel inferior or discriminated

against. Racism was not the only kind of discrimination experienced in her own family. Boys were prized girls neglected. There was an old saying in Chinatown. There is no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls. The Chinese can't understand because they haven't been made to suffer. I mean I was just talking about it. Here's a nice chicken. We didn't have chicken that often. It's all chopped up. Here you know. Maxine says she always got the wing I always got the feet in the boy. If they like dark meat they got the darbies of my life. You know they get all the ME they have a they don't know what it's like to eat the wing in the. Room. When Kingston wrote the woman warrior she condemned the oppression of women in China and she exposed to sexism in Chinese American culture. She became a feminist heroine. But she also attacked racism and her second book China

men angrily denounced the racial abuse Chinese males have suffered in America. In her own life. Kingston refused to accept the racial and sexual limitations others tried to impose on her. She earned a scholarship to Berkeley. I met another student there Earl Kingston and married him. Kingston became an actor working mainly in the theatre. Their marriage has survived for more than 25 years. He thinks not learning Chinese helps. And I just really went out of my way to have to learn Chinese and people you know Berkeley types that you don't know Chinese. How long you been in the family have learned Chinese. It is really great to be in a family where you don't have to bother with what they're saying hold on Moses going next what they say what do they say what they say about me getting fat. Getting gold is going bald is getting bald. Maxine and Earl took part in the anti-war protests that galvanized Berkeley in the

1960s. And those experiences would later provide the backdrop for her novel The Master Monkey See. But as the violence increased she decided to leave Berkeley. The demonstrations were getting really violent. Because so many of our friends were strung out on drugs and our house was like a crash pad and it was like we lost control of living there. And and then we thought we would leave the country maybe we should leave the country because we just didn't want to participate in the war or Vietnam. They took off for Japan. But stopped in Hawaii and stayed for 17 years. Why it was beautiful but it was no escape from the Vietnam War. In fact

it was a major military staging area. Kingston joined a small group of Quaker protesters who provided sanctuary for runaway soldiers. On Constantine they feel that there are secrets here. That you're not supposed to know. I mean there this is this is the land where the word copper comes from. There are hidden Plains there's the military there's He had bases here there's training camps. Moving to Hawaii did not allow her to forget the war but it offered something else. It took her far away from Northern California and gave her perspective on her life. She began to sort through her childhood memories to wrestle with the question of her own identity. And she began to write the woman warrior. I kept struggling with. Who I Am why it wasn't just a matter of how can I

sell a. Literature but it was a struggle of who am I and what made me this way. And. Who are. Who are my people. The heart of her book is an old Chinese legend the story of a peasant girl who transforms herself into FAMU man. The warrior woman. It was a story Kingston's mother sang to her. A story reenacted countless times in Chinese opera and dance from Oman is a sword's woman a female Avenger. She trains for years in the mountains of the white tigers preparing to save her village and liberate her country. For Kingston. The story was part of the double message she received from adults. Women are nothing but wives and slaves. But they are also warriors with magical

powers. In the end. Family leads an army of vengeance killing all the tyrants who have oppressed her family and her people. When Kingston finished writing the woman warrior she wasn't sure what to do with it. And I just got a list of agents to close my eyes I picked one and. Sent it. To. Three different agents who. Said the package came back saying they were out of business and I don't think they're really bad for everyone. She feared the readers would find her version of the woman warrior legend too strange and

disorienting and in fact one publisher rejected the book saying it was a pig in a poke. But the come off publishing company took a chance on this on known writer and a New York Times critic just happened to review her book. Well it was an axe and was serendipity. It was just it was wonderful I was told that I had to get a book review in the following day because it was a whole in the Friday book page of The Times. And I looked around at the books that were in the house and I picked one that was short not my usual habit but I needed to read something quickly and and also here was this beautiful picture of this of this young woman on the jacket and I took it out the back of the house on the on the porch. And about three pages into it I said Well where does this come from. Well I had a view of myself from the from the New York perspective and if I felt that they thought that I was working in a West shack is somewhere and I was a

primitive and damn it that everything possible to be right if you weren't a New York woman warrior won a National Book Critics Circle Award she came to New York. It's wonderful in the literary world when you when you have a sort of matinee idol I mean that was that was the hot ticket we wanted to see who this person was that these words would come from that this poetry had come from. And and there she was when she accepted the prize. This girl we had to mover out around the lectern because otherwise no one could could could see her and this and this this. This this incredible beauty of this soft voice. And out of this it come these fiery points. Back in Hawaii I think some conjured up for magical images and fiery words in the Hawaiian Kingfield. She discovered her own roots

when plantation owners introduced sugarcane in Hawaii. They recruited Chinese immigrants to do the work. Two of the recruits were Kingston's great grandfathers who hated the miserable working conditions. So the men were not even allowed to talk while they worked. In her book Chinamen Kingston imagines her great grandfather Bach's gong plotting revenge against the white bosses. If I knew I had to take a vow of silence he said I would have shaved off my hair and become a monk. It wasn't right that Bach only had to see talking until afterwards when stories would have made the work easier. He tacked that the cane while coughing. Take that white demon take that fall to the ground demon cut you into pieces chop off your leg

snake. Finally back home leads a rebellion but Chinamen win the right to talk in the fields while researching the book. Kingston immersed herself in the land her ancestors worked. I have gone to mist. That is west as far as Hawaii. Where I have stood alongside the highway. At the edge of the sugarcane and listened for the voice. Of the great man from things. I have heard the last I heard from the bright blue streaks of spirits through the air. I search for my American ancestors. By the Nifty in the can. She also heard the siren song of a small island known as China man's hacked. She wrote about these voices in the wind and other mysteries of Hawaii in a series of New

York Times columns now collected in a limited edition art book called Hawaii one summer. Another story in the book is called See worry. At the time she wrote it. Kingston was teaching at a private school and her song Joseph was obsessed with surfing. This summer our son body serves. He says it's his job. And rises each morning at 5:30 to catch the bus to sandy beach. I hope that by September he will have had enough of the ocean. Tollways throw servers against the shallow bottom. Undertows have snatched them away. Sharks prowl Sandys. Joseph told me that once he got out of the water because he saw an enormous shark. Did you tell the lifeguard I asked. No. Why not. I didn't want to spoil the surfing. The ocean pools at the boys who turn

into surfing Addicks. At sunset. You can see surfers waiting for the last golden wave. Why do you go surfing so often. I asked my students. It feels so good they say inside the tube. I can't describe it. There are no words for it. You can describe it as cold and I am very angry. Everything can be described. Find the words for it you lazy boy. Why don't you stay home and read. I am afraid that the boys give themselves up to the oceans mindlessness. My way. Oh my God. Kingston son Joseph is no longer addicted to surfing. But he's still never far from the ocean. He has become a musician performing Hawaiian music on a cruise ship that tours the islands. Maybe this is just the right place to raise a son who who looks like our son.

I mean he he's so he looks like the other people here and he's hopping Hollyhock Well that's what he calls himself. And I'm so happy that he's found his identity as a Hawaiian. Maybe that makes me feel more Hawaiian to like a guy. I've. Donated a son Kingston still owns a house in Managua Valley not far from downtown Honolulu and a local Buddhist temple even proclaimed her a living treasure of Hawaii. But unlike her son she never felt entirely at home here. I always. Identified with a stranger here. And even though I look a local which might I know made it easy for me. And I looked like the other people here and I can be taken for a hit and then when I internalize those I do use of the stranger very much. I thought a lot too about I mean people here say they're in paradise

but what does that mean at first I thought a lot about Odysseus and this was the land of the lotus eaters and the whole of the point of that story was that you're not supposed to stay and you're supposed to get out of there and get on with that. The real business of life so blue there was always a sense of being temporary here and this self always vacation and a vacation lasted for 17 units. Not exactly a vacation since she wrote the woman warrior and Chinamen while living in Hawaii. But she was less concerned with her physical surroundings and she was with her search for her ancestors. She dreamed of her grandfather and the other Chinese workers who built the railroad through California's Sierra Mountains in the 1860s. And Chinamen Kingston resurrects the neglected history of these men. How they

clawed and blasted their way through sheer granite. How they dared to organize a strike for an eight hour day. How they laid claim to America. With their labor and their lives. One day came out of the tunnel to find the balance while. The Evergreens of the birch trees decorated white tree sculptures and the lace bushes everywhere. The man from snow country all the icicles ice chopsticks. He sat in his basket and slid down the slopes. The snow covered the gouged line and the broken trees. The tracks the mud the campfire ashes the unbury dead streams were still petrified that winter he thought it was the task of the human race to quicken the world. The first. Fiery. Red in it with blood. Who had to change the.

Moments. Of one sunrise. And. One sunset. Per day. He had to enliven the silent world with. The rod. He tried to tell the others the. Time. Her grandfather disappeared after the railroad was finished. Driven out scattered like the other Chinamen. But Kingston inherited his legacy. Grandfather left a railroad for his message. We had to go somewhere difficult ride a train go somewhere important in case of danger. The train was to be ready for us. When she finished writing Chinamen in 1080. It won the National Book Award and Kingston decided it was time to travel. Twice she toured China as part of a delegation of American writers including novelist Toni Morrison

poet Gary Snyder and journalist Harrison Salzburg. She visited the great wall with her husband and her son and she made special pilgrimages to her parents villages. What. Was. Was. Kingston was appalled by the government massacre of pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square. She had come to know many Chinese writers and artists and she was horrified to see their dreams of Liberty crushed. She began to write and speak out against the repression. She sung to hear your balls sing that in German and more

young. Take a surety pinking. And other students who fled the crackdown in China are now organizing in the United States. They hope to start their own magazine for exiled Chinese writers. For advice and help in fund raising. They turn to Nobel Prize winning poet Czeslaw and Maxine Hong Kingston poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti also showed his support at a recent benefit in San Francisco. Kingston read a protest letter signed by American writers who had been to China. We call on you the leaders of China to stop this carnage to come to your senses. Temporary power may indeed come from the barrel of a gun. But ultimate power comes from the heart and the mind from the witness of words that survive any darkness. As writers we commit ourselves to that witness and pledge our support of our friends and colleagues in the Chinese writers association and of all citizens in China who seek for

freedom of thought and expression. Thank you. Hope you like it. I will. I read your other book in Kingston's books art and politics mix freely. She is not one to hide her opinions and though her work is filled with a righteous anger nightmares and tragedy she also has a sharp sense of humor. Critics will usually not be daring enough to say that I'm funny or they don't get it or oh there was one critic at the beginning who said that I seem to have a quirky kind of humor but they couldn't figure it out. So I actually think that a good comic all along but only a few people get it. There's no mistaking the humor in energy Kingston's latest book trip master monkey.

It draws upon the old Chinese folk tale of the monkey god a mischievous superhero who crashes parties and having. The same. People who brought Buddhism to China. The star of Kingston's novel is a modern incarnation of the monkey god. A hip young playwright and director named Whitman. Whitman starts a theatrical troupe like this Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco. He's a 60s kid just out of Berkeley and he wants to stage a colossal play with all his friends that will bring together Chinese mythology and LeRoi Jones and change the world. That's good then we have to see the big you know we have to see these two disparate thoughts go Whitman is a talk addict high on words. He's named after Walt Whitman and he was baptized on stage in a vaudeville act with his mother Ruby long legs.

I got zapped all at once. That may account for why I'm uncommon. I saw all of the sudden. Curtains that. Rose in the room and on the other side of them lights. Footlights and overhead. And behind them the doors and. Rows of lights like. Uppers and lowers in the mouth wide open laughing and inside the MET where the many many strangers all looking at me. When he grows up to be a romantic Bohemian. Women can't wait to get his girlfriend Tanya into bed. So they got it on and they were graceful. Just so much foreplay just so much for her and abandon and sweat positions normal plastic move. Silently went at it. She didn't say much and he didn't say much against parts of the body. He did not make her out I love you. Well

it wasn't where they were hardly acquainted after all and one didn't want to turn off the other by seeming seeming overly weirded out. Don't grant grown repulsively be courtly be mannerly and honest although who's to know without having a randomly made it with a large cross-section of the population. What's abnormal passionate. The businesslike way that most people walk around publicly conducting themselves. You would think nobody does anything sexual. At all Kingston can relate to the outrageous scenes in trip master monkey he's used to living with a writer who sees the world in a quirky unpredictable way. The Chinese have this idea that she uses that in the book and is going to be in a fog and bumping into the walls. Rock. But. She does that a little bit and I think at the same time I think you know how can she just get lost driving just around the corner from where we've been living for the last 20 years how can she get lost around the corner she goes but

the other part of it is she's looking at something really great. There is so much going on in trip master monkey that it can overwhelm the reader. Many are worn out by Whitman speed rap in soliloquy as I'm mystified by all the allusions to Chinese literature. Some of Kingston's feminist readers are disappointed that her central character is a man. I've decided to try something very different and very ambitious. She's experimenting with the voices of a male protagonist and a female narrator and she's weaving together the monkey legend and other classic Chinese stories with a hip language and theater. Berkeley and San Francisco in the 1960s. And I look at that you know I you know there are parts when you just read as a reader and you're laughing and you're saying oh this is wonderful. There are times that I read as a writer and I say this is

amazing what she's done. You know this is got so much depth and here I was feel I think here that I'm missing half of the richness of the book. I mean anybody who's my age or even the next generation having been born in terms of school should read a book I mean there's so much stuff in there I mean some stuff you have to be a Can these Americans to really hear it. No one appreciates trip master monkey more than Victor Wong who starred in the movies eat a bowl of tea and in song you're ready for it. Victor Wang grew up in San Francisco's Chinatown a free spirit who became a beatnik. You know he turns up as a character in Trick master monkey and he identifies with a long haired Whitman Lossing you know.

And then she comes of The Sacramento. To see his mother brings a girlfriend. And brings a white girl and Ruby's goes. Stood up and screamed and pointing an arm to Sadie's screamed and aunty my lazy Randy is my they eat him again. What's wrong the white girl. What we have done to you. You used to be says you the po boy the Marlies looking and tall much hears saidI don't much care if you go shave her mother shave it off. Jamie Love kidneys a lot you don't there. Ok I called you the quack quack quack quack you go to the Chinese in the year just wonderful. I wrote about him as a character and I love it that he can also jump out of the book and say Oh I'm I'm not just Victor wanting an Arthur ma. I'm also saying that.

Victor Wong is not the only person who thinks he's with Manasseh thing. Kingston says her character was inspired by a number of people including the young playwrights and directors of San Francisco's Asian American Theater Company. The founder of the company Frank Chen who has since left in a bitter dispute now claims that Kingston ripped off his personality. Well I think that it's a composite. I mean Frank when girls and there's just interesting but I don't think Frank was that jumpy I think that was more the jumpy character would be more like theirs for at least three other people plus my husband who feel that they are with us. The Secret says Kingston is that Whitman is the man she would like to have been. Or at least dated. Like the monkey god Kingston is a just around a subversive. She wants

to change the world with tricks and laughter. Crack up the audience. Crack up the establishment. Dare to be a draft dodger she tells women don't go to Vietnam. Dear American monkey. Don't be afraid. I mean all of. You. Monkeys in America. Don't be afraid. Does that mean tweak your ear. And which is a Chinese zone. Oh it's it's a ritual I guess it's a way of bringing your soul back to your body after you've been scary. Ladies and gentlemen the pride of Stockton California Maxine Hong Kingston. Thanks Jim is not a celebrity often. She does not crave the limelight but she uses the stage to project her cultural and political vision. I want to thank the California Arts Council for choosing me for this

award in the literary art. I also congratulate you for that choice. Because I write a vision of a multicultural multilingual California. It's typical of Kingston that she would make a pitch from multilingual as I'm in California while receiving an award from a governor who was a staunch supporter of English only. It's that monkey spirit again. Causing chaos in heaven and setting off sparks in her books by showing cultures colliding with each other. That kind of tension and rubbing. Is what makes for the most interesting interesting fiction. To my mind in the world today in this country that tension comes from from black and Asian writers just just right now and women writers. The best stuff is black Asian and women. So far as I'm concerned the fiction whether it's Mary Gordon and Cindy or cigarettes

Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison the stuff is brilliant is getting better all the time I mean you know the thing about you know getting old is it really is. It's amazing. I think it's really terrific is that this has not go into her head all this stuff. In the in the in. The deep way I really held my breath. Well you know they finally let me see. She does seem remarkably unaffected by awards and public recognition. She is essentially a private person most at home with her family and close friends. Yet her books have reached millions of readers and inspired a new generation of Asian-American writers. I mean I often think that fop for me was was my way of paying homage to the woman warrior. And my next play the dance in the railroad was my way of kind of playing paying homage to china man. So I think that Maxine has always been a big

influence in my work. And I think certainly looking back. That thought that maybe I could be a rider was there because of Maxine Hong Kingston. These days Kingston travels widely and writes about experiences far removed from Stockton. But in a way she has never really left. Her family is still her touchstone the source of her creativity. But I have a recurring dream where I fly and I always leave from the top steps of this house like a stand there and then I look up and then a fly. Thinks I'm still listens to her mother talking story still listens to the voices of our ancestors. I know most of the universe is silence. I mean most of it. Doesn't have a human voice. Its. Outer space is cold and quiet and one of the artists has to find the words for.

Kingston is always searching for the right one speaking the unspeakable shattering stereotypes invigorating our language. Readers of Kingston's books are transformed by her narrative magic by the power of a storyteller who can make us her dreams. The swords of women and I are not so to see. May my people understand the resemblance so that I can return to them. What we have in common. Are the words that are banned. And I have one. This program was made possible by viewers like you.

This is PBS.