Dear Book Explorers:
I can’t remember exactly when I first read The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. But I know it was a long time ago and I must have been young enough so that the genres of multicultural and immigrant-experience literature weren’t as mainstream and highly awarded as they are today. (Yes, yes, yes, I know there are all sorts of examples of those genres throughout history but now they are on the front table of bookstores rather than on the anthropology or social-science shelves -- and on best-seller lists.)
And I must have been young enough so that the idea of a “woman warrior” seemed alluring. In any case, this is the big build-up to telling you how thrilled I am that the National Book Foundation, those folks who bring you the very prestigious National Book Awards, is honoring Maxine Hong Kingston with the 2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which will be presented at the 2008 National Book Awards ceremony next month.
For those of you who haven’t had the extreme pleasure of reading her work, here’s a brief bio:
Maxine Hong Kingston was born to Chinese immigrant parents in Stockton, California in 1940 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. A long-time member of the Berkeley faculty, she is currently Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing.Her nonfiction books include The Woman Warrior, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, China Men, which was awarded the National Book Award in 1981, Hawaii One Summer, Through the Black Curtain, To Be the Poet, and The Fifth Book of Peace. She has written one novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. Kingston is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the title of “Living Treasure of Hawaii.”
Our reading life would be much poorer without books Like The Woman Warrior and China Men and voices like Maxine Hong Kingston’s (though she set the bar so high that other Chinese-American and Asian-American authors seem to me at least, well, not Maxine Hong Kingston -- sorry, Amy Tan fans). While her experiences may seem unique to her culture anyone with parents or relatives from the old-country will recognize them and feel the connection. And maybe you don’t even need to have close contact with someone from the old country to feel a universal bond.
From your many posts I know there are lovers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Diaz -- and many other authors who bring the immigrant experience to life -- among you.
So tell us:
Which books of the immigrant-literature genre have floated your boat? Which authors of the genre have you felt a kinship with? And why?
And if you have not read anything by Maxine Hong Kingston you’ll want to correct that asap.
Thanks,
Ande
Message Edited by ande on 10-06-2008 05:03 PM
