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A documentary produced by Gayle K. Yamada, Maxine Hong Kingston: Talking Story, was released in 1990. Featuring notable Asian American authors such as Amy Tan and David Henry Hwang, it explored Kingston's life, paying particular attention to her commentary on cultural heritage and both sexual and racial oppression. The production was awarded the CINE Golden Eagle in 1990. Kingston also participated in the production of Bill Moyers' PBS historical documentary, Becoming American: The Chinese Experience.

Selected works

• Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, 2006
• The Fifth Book of Peace, 2003
• To Be the Poet, 2002
• Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, 1989
• Through the Black Curtain, 1987
• Hawai'i One Summer, 1987
• China Men, Knopf, 1980
• The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, 1976
• No Name Woman (essay), 1975

Maxine Hong Kingston (Chinese: 湯婷婷; born October 27 1940) is a Chinese American author and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962.

Criticism and Debate

Though Kingston's work is highly acclaimed, it has also received a great deal of criticism, especially from the Chinese American community. American playwright and novelist Frank Chin has severely criticized Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, claiming that she had tainted the purity of Chinese tradition in reinterpreting stories and myths. Chin has accused Kingston of "liberally adapting [traditional stories] to collude with white racist stereotypes and to invent a 'fake' Chinese-American culture that is more palatable to the mainstream." Kingston subtly commented on her critics' opinions in a 1990 interview, in which she stated that men believe that minority women writers have "achieved success by collaborating with the white racist establishment," by "pander[ing] to the white taste for feminist writing... It's a one-sided argument because the women don't answer. We let them say those things because we don't want to be divisive."

Biography

Maxine Hong Kingston was born to Tom (a laundry worker and gambling house owner) and Ying Lan (a practitioner of both medicine and midwifery) Hong in Stockton, California. She was the third of six children, and the first among them born in the United States. Her mother trained as a midwife at the To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton. Her father had been brought up a scholar and taught in his village of Sun Woi, near Canton. Tom left China for America in 1924 and entered the laundry industry; he was able to bring his wife overseas in 1939. Kingston's parents had two children prior to Tom's departure for the United States; they passed away after he emigrated.

Kingston attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she originally pursued engineering but changed her major to English literature. She earned her B.A. in 1962 and her teaching certificate in 1965.

Kingston was arrested on International Women's Day (March 8) of 2003. Participating in an anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. coordinated by women-initiated organization Code Pink, Kingston refused to leave the street after being instructed to do so by local police forces. She shared a jail cell with author Alice Walker; renowned writer Terry Tempest Williams was also a participant in the demonstration. Kingston's anti-war stance has significantly trickled into her work; she has stated that writing The Fifth Book of Peace was initiated and inspired by growing up during World War II.