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Knopf
January 2011
On Sale: January 18, 2011
240 pages
ISBN: 030727019X
EAN: 9780307270191
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In her singular voiceβhumble, elegiac, practicalβMaxine Hong Kingston sets out to reflect on aging as she turns sixty-five. Kingstonβs swift, effortlessly flowing verse lines feel instantly natural in this fresh approach to the art of memoir, as she circles from present to past and back, from lunch with a writer friend to the funeral of a Vietnam veteran, from her long marriage (βcanβt divorce until we get it right. / Love, that is. Get love rightβ) to her arrest at a peace march in Washington, where she and her "sisters" protested the Iraq war in the George W. Bush years. Kingston embraces Thoreauβs notion of a βbroad margin,β hoping to expand her vista: βIβm standing on top of a hill; / I can see everywhichwayβ / the long way that I came, and the few / places I have yet to go. Treat / my whole life as if it were a day.β On her journeys as writer, peace activist, teacher, and mother, Kingston revisits her most beloved characters: she learns the final fate of her Woman Warrior, and she takes her Tripmaster Monkey, a hip Chinese American, on a journey through China, where he has never beenβa trip that becomes a beautiful meditation on the country then and now, on a culture where rice farmers still work in the age-old way, even as a new era is dawning. βAll over China,β she writes, βand places where Chinese are, populations / are on the move, going home. That home / where Mother and Father are buried. Doors / between heaven and earth open wide.β Such is the spirit of this wonderful bookβa sense of doors opening wide onto an American life of great purpose and joy, and the tonic wisdom of a writer we have come to cherish.
 Media BuzzTalk of the Nation - January 20, 2011
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