Maxine Hong Kingston first became aware of the importance of language when she went to kindergarten in Stockton, Calif., where she grew up the child of Chinese immigrants.
“I spoke Chinese only until I started school,” Kingston says by phone from her home in Oakland, Calif. “I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. I couldn’t communicate.”
That first experience of seeking words to communicate with teachers and other pupils has “reverberated” throughout Kingston’s life, and her career as one of America’s most important living writers.
“I pay very close attention to what I am able to say and what I am able to hear,” says Kingston, author of seven award-winning, genre-bending books. “And to what connections are made and not made.”
Language will be the topic of Kingston’s lecture, “Open Borders of the American Language,” at the University of Miami on Friday. She plans to read a selection from I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, her most recent book, and discuss the way immigrants and loan words invigorate American English and society.
“I will talk about immigration, too,” says Kingston, whose parents came from China as illegal immigrants. “That’s a very important concern right now. Our borders are closing.”
Kingston will also sit down for an on-stage Q&A with M. Evelina Galang, a novelist, short story writer, and editor of the award-winning anthology, Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian-American Images.
The director of UM’s creative writing program, Galang extols Kingston significance as a pioneer of modern American immigrant writing, lending inspiration to two generations of minority and immigrant writers — a role Kingston embraces.
“I am a pioneer in the sense of getting the writing of minority people accepted as part of American literature,” Kingston says.
Kingston emerged forcefully onto the American literary scene with her first book, a blend of memoir and fiction titled The Warrior Woman. Published in 1976, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her second book, China Men, won the 1981 National Book Award. In 2008 she was given a lifetime achievement award by the National Book Foundation.
Galang, who grew up in a Filipino-American family in Milwaukee, is among those who view Kingston as a liberating example. She was already in graduate school, the only minority writer in her MFA program, when she read The Woman Warrior in an Asian-American literature course.
“Reading ‘The Woman Warrior’ gave me permission to write, made me realize if I don’t write my stories, who will?” Galang says.
Years later, after Galang’s first book, the acclaimed short-story collection Her Wild American Self, she met Kingston. She was surprised to learn the older writer had already read her work. “In this way we began a long-distance mentoring,” Galang says. “Or I should say we continued the mentoring already began when I read ‘The Woman Warrior.’”
Now 72, Kingston has hinted that I Love a Broad Margin to My Life may be her last book. A graceful, highly readable narrative, characteristically that revisits her family, her fictional characters, and sometimes touching magical realism, it also happens to be a book-length poem.
“I started this as prose, and then somehow it wasn’t satisfying,” Kingston says. “Then it came to me how long it takes me to write prose. The last few took 10 years each. I was in my mid-60s. I didn’t have time. With poetry I didn’t have to pull in all the narrative furniture. It only took four years.”
Kingston says she originally mixed genres as a way of writing about her family’s immigrant experience while protecting them from deportation. Her father arrived in the United States as a stowaway on a ship sailing from Cuba. Her mother came 15 years later on a bogus visa her father won at a gambling house.
“Everybody was illegal,” Kingston says. “I wanted to write their really interesting stories, so I did it in a way that you could not pin us down. I made up a whole story of legal immigration, then I wrote an adventure story of illegal immigration that could not be true. But it was the true story.”
When Kingston later taught The Warrior Woman to college students, she asked which version really happened. “They always voted for the legal version,” she says.
Storytelling came naturally to Kingston. In China her father was a professional storyteller who had much of classical Chinese poetry committed to memory. She grew up surrounded by stories and singing.
“I’m very interested in how storytelling changes,” Kingston says. “Every time you tell a story it changes. But how do you get that down in words? How do you get the levels in spoken language into the written language? That’s something I’ve always worked on.”
Despite Kingston’s literary status, she has at time been controversial. Novelist and playwright Frank Chin has accused her “of colluding with racist white stereotypes” in the way she has reinterpreted Chinese myths and stories. In part, he’s attacking the feminist aspect of Kingston’s work.
“I mainly feel sorry for him, which I think would infuriate him,” Kingston says. “He wasted his energy in anger at other people. In his own writing there is energy only when there is anger. He doesn’t get to the resolution and realization and recognition that should be the beauty and the payoff of a story.
“I haven’t heard about him for a long time. Maybe he ran out of anger, and ran out of words.”
For more than 20 years Kingston has worked with returning American veterans at a weeklong retreat in Hawaii, helping them find resolution and healing through meditation, art, and the telling of their own stories. She began with Vietnam veterans, and now she’s working with soldiers, men and women, returning from Afghanistan.
“There’s a Navajo technique for coming home from war called ‘the beauty way,’ or ‘the way of beauty,’” Kingston says. “People who are wounded close up. Learning to open up again by taking in beauty, and by making beauty through music or painting or writing, that’s the kind of things we’ve been doing with veterans. Hawaii is very beautiful.”
Galang says Kingston continues to set an example for “all young writers, especially writers from the margins, whether women, people of color, gay or lesbian.” But, she adds, it’s also important for other readers to know her work.
“Once you read someone’s story you see them as a person,” Galang says. “You no longer see them as Asian-American, or African-American, but as the people they are. In the particulars of a story you see the humanity that connects one person to another.”
Maxine Hong Kingston will speak at 6:15 p.m. Friday at Storer Auditorium, 5250 University Drive, on UM’s Coral Gables campus. The evening is part of UM’s “Year of the Humanities and the Arts,” which will bring other artists and writers to South Florida, including Chris Abani, Temple Grandin, Richard Dawkins and Amitav Ghosh. Kingston’s appearance is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. For reservations, go to as.miami.edu/kingston.