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Maxine Hong Kingston
born 1940
Born Stockton, California
Maxine Hong Kingston's parents immigrated to the United States from China shortly before she was born. As a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she has consistently turned to experiences of immigration and conveyed a sense of living between two distinct worlds.
In The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), she observes: "Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America." Responding to this idea, the book weaves folk tales through the lives of several generations of women in a Chinese American family. The Woman Warrior won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction as Kingston relied heavily on autobiographical elements. Shortly thereafter, she won the National Book Award for China Men(1980), a collection of vignettes focused on her male family members, whom she also featured in The Woman Warrior.
Anthony Barboza (born 1944)
Chromogenic print, 1989 |