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Concept
Maxine Hong Kingston
Summary
Maxine Hong Kingston (; born Maxine Ting Ting Hong; October 27, 1940) is an American novelist. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese Americans.
Kingston has contributed to the feminist movement with such works as her memoir The Woman Warrior, which discusses gender and ethnicity and how these concepts affect the lives of women. She has received several awards for her contributions to Chinese American literature, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1981 for China Men.
Kingston has received significant criticism for reinforcing racist stereotypes in her work and for fictionalizing traditional Chinese stories in order to appeal to Western perceptions of Chinese people. She has also garnered criticism from female Asian scholars for her "over-exaggeration of Asian American female oppression".
Kingston was born Maxine Ting Ting Hong on October 27, 1940, in Stockton, California, to first-generation Chinese immigrants, Tom (d. 1991) and Ying Lan Hong. She was the third of eight children and the eldest of the six children born in the United States.
In China, Tom Hong worked as a professional scholar and teacher in his home village of Sun Woi, near Canton. In 1925, Tom left China for the United States in search of better prospects. However, the U.S. in the early twentieth century was plagued with racist employment legislation and had little desire for a well-educated Chinese immigrant, and Tom was thus relegated to working menial jobs. He saved his earnings and became the manager of an illegal gambling house, which led him to get arrested numerous times. Tom "was canny about his arrests, never giving his real name and—because he apparently sensed that quite a few people thought that all Chinese looked alike—inventing a different name for each arrest. Consequently, he never acquired a police record in his own name.
Official source
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