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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 voice—humble, elegiac, practical—Maxine Hong
Kingston sets out to reflect on aging as she turns sixty-five. Kingston’s 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 (“can’t divorce until we get
it right. / Love, that is. Get love right”) 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 Thoreau’s notion of a “broad margin,” hoping to
expand her vista: “I’m standing on top of a hill; / I can
see everywhichway— / 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.” 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 been—a 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. “All over China,” she writes,
“and 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.” Such is the spirit of this wonderful book—a 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.
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