In 1973, Maxine Hong Kingston and her husband, Earll, took a vacation to Lāna’i, a small Hawaiian island about eighty miles southeast of O’ahu, where they lived. There was little to do. Lāna’i was essentially a pineapple plantation, and they were awakened each morning at five, when a siren called workers to the fields. The Kingstons stayed at the only hotel on the island, which was largely empty. The bulb for the movie projector was broken. The bowling alley was closed for repairs. Maxine turned her desk to face the wall, and began writing.
The Kingstons had moved to O’ahu after getting burned out on life in Berkeley, where they met as college students, in the early sixties. They got caught up in the era’s celebration of free expression and consciousness-seeking excess, and the movements for civil rights and peace. But by 1967 they had taken one too many friends to the hospital after bad acid trips. Some people left for communes, never to return. Every peace demonstration seemed to end in a riot. The period surrounding the Vietnam War, Kingston recalled, felt like one during which “good and evil became distinct,” yin and yang going separate ways.
They had a son, Joseph, and set off for Japan, which Earll remembered fondly from his days as a serviceman. But, during a stopover in Hawaii, they saw a “For Rent” sign above a grocery store in Kahalu’u, along Kāne’ohe Bay, and decided to stay. They tried to live as they had in Berkeley, in an improvisational community, their doors open to anyone. But things started to go missing, and it was unclear whether their neighbors also believed in communal sharing or if they were taking advantage of the Kingstons. Kahalu’u is on the island’s windward side, and Maxine, like many Chinese people who believe that wind disturbs one’s qi, or life-force equilibrium, found the constant gusts distressing. She couldn’t think. More pressing, they hadn’t realized that across the beautiful turquoise bay was a military base. They had left California to escape the war. But each day they looked out the window and saw huge cargo planes delivering young Americans, like Maxine’s brothers, to fight in Vietnam.
By the time they went to Lāna’i, Maxine and Earll were looking to overcome the sense of drift that had lingered after the sixties. Earll studied acting at the University of Hawai’i, and Maxine taught high school, writing in her spare time. There was only one other guest at the hotel: Frederick Exley, whose début novel, “A Fan’s Notes,” had been a finalist for the National Book Awards in 1969. Maxine would see him at the bar each morning, though they never spoke. This is a place where writers come, she thought. This is where people find inspiration. She went back to her room and continued writing down stories and memories.
“The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts,” the resulting book, was published three years later, when Kingston was thirty-five. In the seventies, publishers had begun responding to America’s social realities by offering challenging, textured depictions of what it meant to be part of a minority. “The Woman Warrior,” which was marketed as a memoir based on Kingston’s upbringing, seemed to adhere to typical preconceptions—the cascading effects of patriarchal traditions, the stern and unaffectionate immigrant parents, the children caught between duty and dreaming. But, unlike most ethnic coming-of-age tales of the time, it seeded doubt about its own authenticity. The characters tell one another stories drawn from Chinese lore and Chinatown gossip, imagining alternative time lines. The book is complex and captivating, a constant toggling between the mundane grit of the family’s laundry business and epic, surreal dreamscapes. By the end, you don’t know which, if any, of these stories are true, or whether they constitute a reliable depiction of Chinese-American life.
“The Woman Warrior” changed American culture. For those who understood where Kingston was coming from, it was encouragement that they could tell stories, too. For those who didn’t, “The Woman Warrior” became the definitive telling of the Asian immigrant experience, at a time when there weren’t many to choose from. Younger Asian-American writers would later complain of receiving “a generic Maxine Hong Kingston rejection letter” from publishers who regarded “The Woman Warrior” as monolithic.
“The Woman Warrior” won the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and in the eighties and nineties Kingston was one of the most frequently taught living authors at American colleges and universities. “As an account of growing up female and Chinese-American in California, in a laundry of course, it is anti-nostalgic. It burns the fat right out of the mind,” John Leonard wrote, in the Times. “As a dream—of the ‘female avenger’—it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.” When Barack Obama presented Kingston with the National Medal of Arts, in 2014, he said that, while writing his first book, “Dreams from My Father,” he had turned to “The Woman Warrior” for inspiration.
Kingston and Earll used the proceeds from the novel to put down a deposit on a house in the Mānoa Valley, a lush, quiet neighborhood just east of downtown Honolulu. They lived there until 1984, when they returned to California.
Earlier this year, Kingston, who is seventy-nine, was back in Honolulu. Joseph, a musician, now lives in their old house with his wife, Saki, and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Hana Mĕi. Saki was due to give birth to their second child in mid-February, and Maxine and Earll had come to help out.
I walked up a path lined with modest, well-kept homes bearing historic-registry plaques. The Kingston house stood out. A covered, two-story deck seemed to grow haphazardly out of the house’s side, and it was decorated with a Bob Marley shirt and a sign for a local council meeting about invasive pigs. A wetsuit and a swing hung from the ceiling, while a small statue of a cat stood guard. Kingston called my name and waved from a second-floor window. I wasn’t sure where the front door was.
She met me on the deck, holding a manila envelope, which held manuscript pages. Kingston hasn’t published anything substantial since her 2011 memoir, “I Love a Broad Margin to My Life.” Late last year, I asked if she was working on anything new. She laughed. I had a vision, she told me over the phone, that my last book would be a posthumous one.
Maxine Hong was born on October 27, 1940, in Stockton, California, to Tom Hong and Chew Ying Lan. Her father had left for America in the twenties in search of work. But the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a xenophobic response to the nineteenth-century influx of Chinese workers, was still law, and Tom Hong couldn’t enter America legally. He tried to sneak in from Cuba twice before finally succeeding, in 1927.
Hong had been a scholar in his home village of Sun Woi, near Canton, but in America he could find only menial jobs—washing windows, doing laundry. Like many Chinese-American men, he sent money home to his family, promising to bring them over when the opportunity arose.
Hong was a skilled gambler. One night, in Manhattan’s Chinatown, he won six hundred dollars from a man also named Hong. The other Hong was unable to pay the debt. Instead, he agreed to give Maxine’s father his visa papers, which Hong used to bring Chew to America, in 1939. Hong and Chew headed west, to Stockton, a busy port town in central California.
During their fifteen years apart, Chew had studied Western medicine and become a doctor. But in Stockton she was just another immigrant. They ran a laundry and a gambling house. Chew foraged for herbs and vegetables in empty lots. Maxine was named for a blond woman who frequented her father’s predominantly Chinese gambling tables. (“She was probably such a floozy,” Kingston told me. “Who hangs out at a Chinese gambling parlor? What white woman would do this?”)
Kingston was a quiet child, and she didn’t learn to speak English until she was five. She says that her I.Q. was once recorded as zero. When asked to paint a picture for class, she produced a sheet of paper that was completely black. (It was meant to be a depiction of curtains on a stage before a show.) Her earliest memories are of the Second World War—cousins in uniform going overseas, illustrations in Chinese newspapers portraying torture by the Japanese. She became fascinated with warfare and soldiers. Her mother narrated the history of China as one long string of conquest and conflict. “We were always losers. We were always on the run,” Kingston told me.
When she was a teen-ager, she wrote an essay about being American that was published in the magazine American Girl. But it was hard to see a path as a writer. She remembers reading Louisa May Alcott’s “Eight Cousins,” in which a white character marries “a highly satisfactory Chinaman” named Fun See. This struck Kingston as a meaningful, vaguely sympathetic gesture. But Fun See was still exotically “other,” with his long fingernails and queue, his yellow skin and peculiar manners. That’s me, Kingston thought. She realized that she would never be a March sister. “I felt like I was popped out of her writing,” she said. “Out of American literature.”
Hong went to Berkeley in 1958, to study engineering, but she fell in with the emerging counterculture and became an English major instead. She had grown up in a traditional household beholden to Confucian values. When she began reading Beat poetry, she was finally able to “put a word” to her maelstrom of feelings. “I’m always struggling with being in the present, always resolving to be here, be here, be here,” she said. She met Earll, a fellow English major who was a couple of years older. They married in 1962, the year she graduated. The next year, she gave birth to Joseph.
As Maxine and I left the house for a nearby café, she pointed to the second-floor window—the office where she wrote much of her second book, “China Men,” a collection of stories about the lives of Chinese immigrant men. Hawaii is a good place to write about Asians, she said, because there are so many of us here. And the notion of the “talk story,” the improvisational, oral tradition that drives “The Woman Warrior,” is central to Hawaiian culture. (“Talk story” is also the translation of the Chinese expression for “storytelling.”)
We cut across a neighbor’s driveway, following a set of stone steps shaded by large trees. She was wearing leggings and a loose-fitting striped shirt, clutching a bag with berries on it and the manila envelope. Her hair is white and frayed, like a penumbra.
At the café, she told me about a dream she had the night before. I was coming to interview her, but I was Tyra Banks, the host of “America’s Next Top Model.” I suggested that the dream might have to do with questions of changing fashions, or enduring relevance. Her work has paved many paths for later generations, from the unvarnished immigrant coming-of-age stories of Amy Tan to the knowing way in which writers like Viet Thanh Nguyen and Junot Díaz have complicated that experience. But Kingston has kept a low profile in the past decade, and her books are no longer as pervasive in trendy bookstores or on college syllabuses.
When Maxine and Earll realized that they had somehow moved closer to the Vietnam War, they began working at a local church, which provided sanctuary to soldiers who had gone AWOL. “They built the most beautiful community,” she remembered. “The extremes were happening all the time.” There was “pure hell,” and then the attempt to overcome it by imagining new ways of living together. “The times were so desperate that people resorted to magic,” she said, recalling moments, like the yippies’ attempt to levitate the Pentagon, in 1967, when young people tried to will peace and utopia into being. But the church was raided, and parents tried tricking their children into returning to the base. Other times, soldiers would get tired of life as deserters and ask to be driven back. Initially, Kingston blurred the line between nonfiction and fiction, in part to maintain a kind of plausible deniability, should she ever run into troubles of her own while writing about family secrets or her antiwar work.
She titled her first book “Gold Mountain Stories,” and quickly sold it to Knopf. Charles Elliott, her editor, told me in an e-mail, “What was clear to me from the start was the distinctive hard authority of her writing.” He made only two major suggestions: renaming the book “The Woman Warrior,” to emphasize that it was a single work and not a collection, and categorizing it as nonfiction, because it “was essentially a kind of memoir, and far more interesting as such.” Bookstores labelled it fiction, nonfiction, sociology, anthropology, biography, women’s literature, Chinese literature, and Asian literature. In a letter to the Chinese-American writer Shawn Wong, in 1976, Kingston wrote, “This confusion really makes me feel good.”
The book opens with a warning from mother to daughter: “You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you.” To read “The Woman Warrior” is to conspire with its narrator, who is never named but is referred to by other characters as Little Dog. Her mother tells her the story of her aunt, the “no-name woman,” who killed herself and her newborn child by jumping into the family well. Her village had turned against her, knowing that the child’s father could not be her husband, since he had left for America. It’s a mother’s warning to her daughter as she approaches puberty. But Little Dog studies what her mother is doing, telling a story, denying its central protagonist the dignity of a name, and recognizes a kind of power. She begins retelling the story herself, imagining different versions of it. Maybe her aunt was a victim of rape. Or maybe she was in control of her own passion. The truth of it matters less than the apparatus itself—why she is forgotten, and how she can be remembered.
When I first read Kingston, in my late teens, I was drawn to the familiarity of it all: the immigrant enclave where anyone non-Chinese was called a “ghost,” the cautionary folktales with the moral punch lines often lost in translation, the misunderstood silences. But what stayed with me was the realization that her characters weren’t merely trying to survive in this harsh, difficult world but to remake it through their fantasies and dreams. These characters emerged from their realist settings aching for impossible things, like peace, or world-changing art, or having all the friends in your lifetime in the same room at once, or Chinese parents and their American kids simply seeing eye to eye. At the time, it felt impossible to me that such grandiose, almost flamboyantly hopeful visions could emanate from characters who otherwise seemed so relatable to me. Her books open in darkness and trauma. But they always suggest the possibility of greater light.
Kingston has a hoarse, gently animated way of speaking, retaining the measured cadence of her days as a teacher. (She has referred to her voice as that of a “pressed duck.”) Often, her unassuming, offbeat nature leads people to underestimate her. John Leonard wrote that the author remained a cipher: “Who is Maxine Hong Kingston? Nobody at Knopf seems to know. They have never laid eyes on her.” After Leonard’s glowing review, someone at Knopf explained to her that the Times was a very important newspaper. Elliott didn’t meet Kingston until she came to New York to accept the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. “I was mostly struck by how small she was,” he recalled. “When she stood behind the podium, she disappeared, and had to stand beside it.”
“The Woman Warrior” conveys the sense of being told a story, and recognizing it as such. To many readers, the dark, psychological tales offer an authentic account of what it was like to grow up in an immigrant household. But Kingston plants seeds of doubt that this experience can be generalized. “Chinese Americans,” 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?”
By the end of “The Woman Warrior,” Little Dog has taken the scraps of her family’s story, passed down from her mother, and added to it: “The beginning is hers, the ending, mine.” The poet and novelist Ocean Vuong told me that his life was both “mirrored and altered” by “The Woman Warrior”: “I found Maxine’s audacious centering of Chinese-American life, its idiosyncrasies, political inflections, its refusal to sugarcoat or cast the façade of an elegant surface over immigrants, startlingly life affirming.” In his novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” from 2019, the narrator is named Little Dog, partly as a nod to Kingston.
“The Woman Warrior” initially created divisions among Asian-American writers and readers. In 1974, Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong had published a galvanizing collection titled “Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers.” They shared Kingston’s interest in the psychological entanglements of being Asian-American. Chin also studied literature at Berkeley, though he and Kingston never met. But the “Aiiieeeee!” authors were invested in a kind of brash realism that clashed with the hallucinatory play of “The Woman Warrior.” After Chin read the book, he wrote Kingston the first of many letters accusing her of purposely misrepresenting Chinese culture. Other Asian-American male critics dismissed her as someone who aired the community’s dirty laundry and capitalized on the trendiness of American feminism. The rift between Chin and Kingston continues to this day, standing in for different versions of authenticity—whether the concept is something stirring and immovable or is more contingent and intimate, perhaps even ugly. Chin once wrote her a heated letter saying that the only reason for meeting would be for “a public fight, but I’m not anxious for that.”
Kingston pulled out a sheet of handwritten notes detailing various translations of my Chinese name. (Joseph and Saki have named their son Malu Hua, which shares a Chinese character with mine.) The café had closed, and we sat outside, on the patio. The only sounds were from chirping birds, clucking chickens, the occasional snort of a distant pig. She pointed out a shack a few yards away, where Robert Louis Stevenson had once worked. When she moved to Mānoa, she took comfort in knowing that a fellow-writer had found inspiration looking out at this valley.
“I write something that I wish for,” Kingston said. “In ‘China Men,’ there’s the story of my grandfather who traded his son for a daughter. Actually, that happened, and the son was my father. My grandmother got really mad and they traded back.” In the book, this man seems kind, even charming, in his obsession with bringing some feminine energy into their home. “The way I wrote it was to show how he loved her, how he just wanted to hold her, and he wanted to sing to her. But I wrote it to give myself a grandfather who would love me as a girl.” Growing up, she said, she’d always heard people in her family say that they didn’t want girls. “So I wrote it for myself.”
When she completed “China Men,” she and Earll flew to New York. After reading the manuscript, Elliott told her that she had failed. “You don’t understand men,” she remembers him saying. “They’re lonelier than this.”
Devastated, Kingston got on a bus uptown to her friend Lilah Kan’s apartment, where she and Earll were staying. “I just felt terrible,” she said. She was met by Kan, Earll, and about ten friends, who greeted her with champagne and pot to celebrate her big meeting. They went ahead with the party, as she retreated into the corner with her Selectric typewriter and wrote a scene based on her father’s time in New York. So much of the immigrant story is joyless hard work. America is so free that you are even free to work through the holidays, Kingston wrote. She wanted to give the immigrant workers a day off. Her father enjoys a night out on the town, ending up at a tearoom, where Chinese men could buy dances with white women. Her father fox-trots with as many blondes as he desires, then returns home alone, wondering if his wife will ever make it to America.
“I give the narrative to all these men, but there’s still this voice that’s me,” Kingston told me. “My father is dancing with this blonde—I described the cascading blond hair, the beautiful blue eyes. And I hope that the reader understands that I am very lonely, ’cause that’s the opposite description of me. That’s not me. Maybe indirectly you can feel my being left out of this scene.” Usually a slow and methodical writer, she finished the scene in an hour. Then she read what she had written aloud to the party. “Is this lonely enough?” she asked.
“China Men” won the 1981 National Book Award for nonfiction. Kingston attended the award ceremony in New York wearing leis from her Hawaiian friends. She donated her papers to Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. At the ceremony, Kingston pulled her father aside and showed him a display featuring some of his notes written as poetry in the margins of her books. “My writing, my writing!” her father, a shy man, cried out.
In 1984, Kingston visited China for the first time, touring the country as part of a delegation of writers sponsored by U.C.L.A. and the Chinese Writers Association. She spent time with Leslie Marmon Silko and Toni Morrison. In an e-mail, Silko recalled the three of them visiting an old storytellers’ hall in southern China. “The Woman Warrior,” she wrote, “is storytelling at its highest level, where webs of narrative conjure the ghosts that stand up and reveal all.”
One day, they were on a boat going down the Li River, and Morrison saw a young woman doing laundry along the shore. Morrison waved to her and said, “Goodbye, Maxine.” She gets it, Kingston thought. If immigration hadn’t brought her to the U.S., “that could have been me,” she said. “Were you my possible other life?”
In the summer of 1991, Kingston’s father died. She and Earll had moved to Oakland; she was teaching at Berkeley and writing her next book. That fall, she was driving home from Stockton, where her family had gathered to mark the hundredth day since her father’s death, when she heard on the radio that a fire was sweeping through the East Bay. She began driving faster, hoping to reach their house in the hills of northern Oakland before the fire did. Firefighters had set up barricades along the main roads, so she sneaked up the side of the hill on foot. Her house had burned to the ground. She saw the pages of the manuscript for her next book, but they disintegrated into ashes when she touched them. It was her only copy.
Kingston had been a hundred and fifty-six “excellent” pages into the sequel to “Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book” (1989), a novel about a brooding dreamer named Wittman Ah Sing, who aspires to write a play that will feature everyone he has ever met, and in the process end the Vietnam War. Ecstatic and overwhelming, it occasionally reads like a trippy handbook for how to be a good friend.
As we sat on the patio, Kingston said, “I remember standing there in the fire and facing loss. And one of the feelings that really strongly came to me was this community is gone and, you know, people kept talking about rebuilding, and there’s no rebuilding. The community that was here, which was formed at random, it’s gone.”
Kingston realized that her life as a writer had begun to exacerbate a sense of loneliness. She couldn’t reconstruct the missing book, nor did she want to. After the fire, she began asking people at her readings to bring things for her—talismans, other objects, maybe even their own stories. She wanted to write with other people.
At a reading at San José State University, she invited a man named Bob Golling to a writing workshop that she was organizing at Berkeley for veterans. Golling had been trying for years to write a story about an experience he had before going to Vietnam. In June, 1993, he went to the first meeting, and listened to everyone else’s “hair-raising” stories from the war. There was a brief writing exercise, but he couldn’t produce anything. Afterward, he said, he drove home, feeling that he had been “singularly unsuccessful,” and thought that he would never go back. But Kingston arranged another meeting the following month, and Golling kept writing. The workshop for veterans has continued ever since, and Golling now helps plan and organize the meetings. Eventually, he published his story, about his job escorting the bodies of deceased servicemen, in “Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace,” a collection edited by Kingston, from 2006.
The workshop meets quarterly, and the members were supposed to assemble at a senior citizens’ center, in Santa Rosa, on March 21st. But the group decided to cancel, in advance of California’s shelter-in-place orders, for fear of infecting the facility’s elderly tenants. The participants resolved to keep the date free and write by themselves. I talked to Golling that morning. He was at his home, near Auburn, California, coördinating the “virtual wordshop” by e-mail.
“I always tell people, ‘We’re not a therapy group,’ ” he said. “But therapy happens.” He remembers everything about the first meeting at Berkeley—where he parked his car, whom he sat next to, Kingston’s “warm, sensible” clothes and gently assertive manner. He describes her as a “big sister.” When someone talked for too long, she would bang together two sticks, to comedic effect. “She always goes, ‘Pay attention to what people are saying, not just with your ears but with your heart,’ ” he said. When you do that, “we can share those few minutes of reading and writing together and become another person. It’s magic.”
In the nineties, Kingston would bring some of the veterans to her public events and readings, inviting them to share their work alongside her. They felt that they were ambushing audiences who had come to hear Kingston. But their hesitation quickly disappeared. “She always greets us with a hug that says we are here together,” Golling told me.
The anxieties of the sixties were returning. In 2003, as the United States prepared to invade Iraq, Kingston was arrested during a protest in front of the White House. Her writing charted new extremes—she briefly wrote poetry that was searching and jagged, skeptical of fiction’s capacity for imagining a way out of the world’s problems. She no longer wrote about the “Chinese past,” she said. Now she was focussed on the “American present.” Just as long-lost friends from the sixties occasionally showed up on her doorstep, older characters started resurfacing in her work. Fa Mu Lan, from “The Woman Warrior,” returns at the end of her memoir, and Wittman and Taña, the couple at the center of “Tripmaster Monkey,” show up in “The Fifth Book of Peace,” from 2003.
The last chapter of “The Fifth Book of Peace” recounts a version of her work with veterans. It feels like a thematic riff on “The Woman Warrior”; the beginning was hers, and the ending is theirs, together. Before publication, she gave a draft to Golling to read. “I had no edits,” he told me coolly, then laughed.
In the book, Kingston describes seeing Golling at that initial meeting, in June, 1993, the first veteran to arrive: his fading sailor’s tattoo, his description of himself “not as a writer but as a househusband, father of six sons.” Kingston wrote, “He asks large questions, and has come here for answers.”
One morning, Maxine, Earll, and Joseph took Hana Mĕi to the Honolulu Zoo, which sits at the far eastern end of Waikīkī’s tourist district. It was early, and the sounds of gibbons, hooting and snorting, filled the air. I chatted with Earll about the kitschy, old Waikīkī hotels where Joseph occasionally gigs. I was standing next to Kingston, but she didn’t notice me until she had carefully nestled her granddaughter back in her stroller.
When I spoke to Kingston before going to Honolulu, she’d mentioned that being a grandmother had sapped her of the intense drive to work. When you’re younger, she told me, you have a vague desire to do something great. When she was bringing up Joseph, she would give him a bag of marshmallows and disappear to write for twenty minutes. “My son said we never had food in the house, only alfalfa sprouts,” she told a reporter in 2011. “I suppose it looked like we were spending a lot of time together, as he was here and I was working at home. But I was emotionally not there. From the beginning of my life, I have always been making up fantasies and stories and characters of the other world. People around me were not as interesting.”
Now she could be with her grandchildren and do absolutely nothing. Writers, she told me, are interested in understanding the past, or projecting into the future. None of this makes sense to a child. “They are in the present, and then we are in the present with them,” she said.
Later that day, I again met Kingston on the deck of her family’s home. She appeared from inside the house with two glasses of iced tea and her manila envelope. From the deck, you could see past the valley toward Waikīkī. Some young men installing a solar panel across the street chatted and listened to Travis Scott at a respectable volume. Kingston opened the envelope and showed me some of her novel, which she has tentatively titled “Posthumously, Maxine.” It was formatted in dense blocks of text, like a script. “I know I could die at any moment,” she said. “So I was writing a work which could end at any moment. And it’ll be O.K., because I’m not working for this heading toward a climax and then a reconciliation and ending.”
Joseph came out to give me a CD of his latest album, “Love Doll,” before leaving for work. “There’s something in there to offend anybody and everybody,” he said, chuckling. Kingston pointed to a laid-back, ukulele-driven pop tune called “Bonging Along,” which she had posted on her Facebook page. “Robert Pinsky said that he loved the recitative from that song,” she told me proudly. “The poet laureate of the United States!”
The idea for publishing a novel posthumously came to Kingston after learning of Mark Twain’s autobiography, which wasn’t released in uncensored form until 2010, a hundred years after his death. If Kingston knew that she wouldn’t have to answer for her work, perhaps she would be able to write more freely. At first, her notes represented an attempt to capture each day’s “intensity,” she said. In time, she realized that she had written about twelve hundred single-spaced pages. She continued writing. She told her agent, Sandy Dijkstra, that the book would remain unpublished for a hundred years. “I was stunned, shocked, and more,” Dijkstra said in an e-mail, “and told her that I could not promise to be a living and functioning agent a century from now.” Kingston has not shown her any of it. “Maybe you can persuade Maxine to show it to us MUCH SOONER,” she said. “Magical thinking works on the page, but not so well in real life.”
Kingston leaned across the table and asked me if I remembered that, at the beginning of “Tripmaster Monkey,” Wittman imagines leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge. She pointed out that, at the end of “Broad Margin,” Fa Mu Lan returns and takes her own life. In that book, Kingston goes on to list the people in her life who have died in the past four years. “Each one who dies, I want to go with you,” she writes, before wondering, on the next page, “Why continue to live?”
“In all of these books, I’m preparing the reader and myself to deal with suicide,” she said. “You know how when you go to the doctor you fill out a questionnaire and they ask you, ‘Do you have any suicidal thoughts?’ ” she asked. “I always put ‘No.’ But the truth is that I have suicidal thoughts every day and I don’t tell anybody. I’ve been through therapy and everything, but I don’t even tell my therapist. I don’t want to upset them. Isn’t that a dumb reason?”
When she was a child, she remembers asking God to strike her dead, just to see if it would happen. “I pretty much know that I’m not going to do it,” she said. But the writer’s privilege is to explore where this darkness comes from. “I don’t want my family to think that I think about killing myself every day, you know?” she said. “And, so, this word ‘posthumously,’ I can delve into it and see what’s going on.”
She reached into the manila envelope and took out a few sheets of paper. She put on a pair of glasses and read a vignette in which Maxine and Earll are flying home, worried that they will miss their connecting flight. They try to enlist the help of various flight attendants, but nobody seems to care. They make their way to the front of the plane, hugging their bags to their bodies as the door opens and they run to the next gate. Maxine sees a young Asian-American soldier, who smiles at her, and then another. She wonders if they will help their “aunty” and offer to carry her luggage. But they don’t. Earll eventually reaches the gate and blocks the door so that the plane can’t leave until Maxine arrives.
When Kingston speaks, her sentences rise and fall, as if she were trying to tame her thoughts. But when she reads there’s a cool theatricality, an assertiveness that snaps everything into place. After she finished the scene, she removed her glasses and smiled. “I’m being self-indulgent,” she explained. The skies had turned gray and it began to pour, the water draining into a small tiled fountain that Joseph had built along the edge of the house. I assumed that the Asian-American soldier and the flight attendants held some deeper meaning. She demurred. “There’s nothing cosmic about trying to get the plane,” she said. “It’s just the present.” A way of expelling passing feelings of pettiness.
When the scholar Edward Said was nearing the end of his life, he explored the idea of “late style,” how artists’ work accommodates the awareness that their days are numbered. He describes them engaging in works full of formal complexity, experimentation, and contradiction, all of it meant as some kind of final statement of what art can be. What Kingston read to me—the story about the plane, another about going to Chinatown with Earll to buy a winter melon for the New Year’s dinner—had little to do with the status of the novel or the possibilities of art. She had rendered mundane moments in plain language. The Maxine in these pieces, she explained, is her “actual self”—how she hopes that Hana Mĕi will remember her. (The book will be available to her grandchildren during their lifetime.) I remarked on how different these vignettes were from her work from the seventies and eighties; they were bereft of drama or utopian longing, of attempts to “make my mind large, as the universe is large, so there is room for contradictions,” as she once wrote. The “best life,” she replied, is “where there isn’t great drama happening.”
I thought about what Kingston had said about the veterans’ group: A writer is always alone, even when she is collaborating, or giving herself over. These sketches of her life weren’t for anyone but her. They were not, as the mother in “The Woman Warrior” said, “a story to grow on,” outlining who we might be in the future. “It’s really enjoying my present life,” she said. “I am really enjoying going to buy that winter melon. I’m deeply into it.” They are moments that allow her to anchor in the serene here and now of everyday life. “I’m so sane in my work. That’s why it’s fiction.”
The rain had stopped, and it was time for me to leave. We planned to meet in the East Bay in late March. Maybe we could go for a walk at Berkeley, or go see “Mulan,” the latest Disney adaptation of the Chinese folktale that she refashioned for “The Woman Warrior.”
It was the week before everyone learned about social distancing. It had become harder to find baby formula and hand sanitizer on the island, though hoarding still seemed like a plot point in a dystopian novel. Downstairs, Earll was sitting at a table reading the newspaper. He had turned eighty-three a few days earlier, and I wished him a belated happy birthday. We chatted about Super Tuesday. Saki quietly shushed the newborn. I shook Earll’s hand, and Maxine jumped between us. “We’re not supposed to touch!” she exclaimed, laughing, and pulled the door shut. ♦
