The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, Other Writings

The child of Chinese immigrants, Maxine Hong Kingston grew up in California and was an unknown writer living in Hawaii when she made her stunning entrance on the American literary scene with The Woman Warrior (1976). Her “memoirs of a childhood among ghosts” was not only an account of growing up poor and Chinese American in the San Joaquin Valley but also an audacious feat of imaginative transformation, drawing on ancient myths and the family stories her mother brought over from China. A companion to The Woman Warrior, which she called her “mother-book,” Kingston’s “father-book,” China Men (1980), spreads out across a broad geographical and historical canvas to envision the lives of her male relatives who immigrated to America. Taken together, The Woman Warrior and China Men offer a profound, kaleidoscopic, genre-defying narrative of the American experience. Kingston’s third book, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1990), is the wildly inventive story of Wittman Ah Sing, a Berkeley graduate student whose experience of the San Francisco Beat scene transforms his understanding of his own Chinese heritage. Rounding out the volume are a series of essays from 1978 reflecting on Kingston’s life in Hawaii and hard-to-find pieces about the creative process and Kingston’s account of how most of the reviewers of The Woman Warrior fell prey to lazy stereotypes about the “exotic” and “inscrutable” East. Library of America’s Kingston volume is edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his debut novel The Sympathizer and a former student of Kingston’s.