A Brief Biography Of Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston is a Chinese-American author, born on October 27th, 1940, in Stockton, California. As the child of immigrant parents, Kingston endured many difficulties such as discrimination, conforming to societal norms, and incorporating newly acquired American traditions with her ancestral Chinese ones. Kingston’s father, Tom, relocated to the United States in 1924, leaving Kingston’s mother, Yin Lang Hong, in Chin. She eventually joined him in 1939. Although, Maxine’s father was a well-educated professional in China, he took a job in a laundry in the US because he was unable to find a job in his profession. Kingston eventually attended the University of California at Berkeley on a scholarship. She obtained her bachelors degree in English in 1962.
Her first memoir The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among the Ghosts was published in 1976, and was well acclaimed by the Chinese-American community. It also received many awards such as the National Book Critics Circle Award, presented to the best books that are published in the English language. TIME’s magazine named the autobiography one of the most influential non-fiction books of the 1970’s. In the memoir, Kingston details growing up in the United States and the difficulties she faced adapting to a culture so distinct of her native Chinese one. The memoir uses Chinese traditional tales, such as that of Fa Mu Lan, to contrast Chinese values, such as family, the collective community, and the oppression of women to newly learned American ideals, which mostly focus on the