This story is taken from Sacbee / Lifestyle/Scene.

A woman of conscience

Maxine Hong Kingston's passion for peace shows in her writing - and her life

By Allen O. Pierleoni -
Published 12:00 am PDT Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Maxine Hong Kingston was recalling the story of her last arrest.

It was in March 2003 in Washington, D.C., on International Women's Day. Seems she and 23 other women (novelist Alice Walker included) were protesting the imminent war in Iraq. They'd led a group of 5,000 demonstrators from Malcolm X Park to the White House, where Kingston's small group -- Women for Peace -- got carried away and decided to sing on the sidewalk in front of the Bush residence. They had to cross a police line to do it. That's when they got busted.

Which wasn't shocking to her, really, as she and her husband, Earll Kingston, were active in the anti-war movement in the early '60s at the University of California, Berkeley. Cops naturally went with the territory.

The D.C. arrest was ironic, though, seeing as how Kingston was honored by another president in 1997 when Bill Clinton awarded her the National Humanities Medal.

Anyway, let her tell it: "They put us in a paddy wagon and took us to jail, and when they let us out they gave us citations saying we were supposed to come back. My citation says, 'Demonstrating in a forbidden zone.' In parentheses it says, 'White House sidewalk.'

"Isn't that a terrible thing, that it's officially called a forbidden zone?" she said in wonderment. "We can't have forbidden zones in our country! Isn't this a free country? Forbidden zone! That's the kind of language they use in China. It sounds like science fiction."

Kingston, 65 -- who will appear for The Bee Book Club on Thursday night -- has two main roles in life, she said: As a teacher and a writer, she has served as a conscience to her students and readers, sharing her accumulated wisdom, railing against the machine, persisting in her message that it is better to live in harmony than to struggle in conflict.

"The responsibility of the teacher is to teach people to be awake and aware, teach them to express their thoughts and feelings in writing and speaking," she said. "You have to open up the curiosity in people, make them want to know more.

"(For teachers) it's not just being conscious in the moment; teachers have to be conscious of all of history, beyond human history to the history of the universe. The more one knows of history, the larger our lives become.

"Many of our young people don't know anything about their own histories. My brother, who was in Vietnam, walked into a bank (recently) and was dealing with a Vietnamese teller. She was asking him a few questions and he said, 'Oh, I was in the war,' and she said, 'What war?' "

Kingston will expound on those thoughts and more at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Tsakopoulos Library Galleria, 828 I St. She is the guest at a special edition of The Bee Book Club for "California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century," an anthology of 25 California authors (Heyday, $15.95, 379 pages).

"I think of this appearance as me representing all the writers in the anthology," said the memoirist.

Kingston's contribution to the anthology is "The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains," an excerpt from her book "China Men" (1980), a folkloric and factual account of three generations of Chinese immigrants.

Her appearance will kick off the Sacramento Public Library's second annual One Book Sacramento: Connecting Our Communities program.

Kingston was born and raised in Stockton, where her first- generation Chinese immigrant parents operated a laundry. She and her five younger siblings grew up poor and spent a lot of time running around town ("We were urchins").

After graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in English (she abandoned her original plan to major in engineering), she married classmate Earll Kingston, had a son and found a job teaching high school English and math. But she and Earll fled Berkeley in 1967 to get away from the drug abuse and violence that had come to permeate the peace movement. The plan was to relocate to Japan, but they got only as far as Hawaii, where they lived and taught school for the next 17 years.

While there, Kingston published the autobiographical "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts" in 1976. It's a conflicted memoir about growing up Chinese American and female. It won a National Book Critics Circle Award (she was only 36). That was followed by "China Men," which landed a National Book Award. Both of those titles are still part of many college curricula.

The Kingstons finally returned to California, where Maxine taught creative writing at UC Berkeley and still found time to publish another award-winning title, "Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book."

Then something even more remarkable happened: In October 1991, driving from her father's funeral, Kingston saw the Oakland hills burning. Ultimately, her home was destroyed -- along with more than 2,400 others -- in the conflagration known as the Oakland Firestorm. Inside the house was one particular pile of ash -- a novel-in-progress to be titled "The Fourth Book of Peace."

Kingston was devastated by the loss, but found strength to start over and reshape the manuscript into something entirely different from what it had been. It literally came out of the ashes, reborn, phoenix-like with a new name. The act of that creation served her well in the healing process. A review in Publisher's Weekly magazine said, " 'The Fifth Book of Peace' illumines (her) experience of remembrance while elevating a personal search to a cosmic quest for truth."

Kingston retired from teaching at UC Berkeley three years ago (she and Earll live in the gentrified Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland), but she hastily added, "I'm never out of the classroom. I'm always a visiting teacher or volunteer teacher somewhere. It really doesn't feel like I've retired."

Though Kingston's works are known for blending the mythical with the real, and dwell on the issues of ethnicity and bi- culturalism, dear to her heart is a project she has fostered for the past 15 years: a writing and meditation workshop attended by about 500 war veterans.

That experience led to a new book. "Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace" (Koa, $20, 614 pages) is a compilation of 80 pieces of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by veterans whose military service spanned five wars.

"My idea was that through writing, we can understand and make art out of our most traumatic experiences," Kingston explained. "By telling war's story, we inform ourselves about the worst conditions we can have in this world, and then figure out a way to come home.

"The veterans who came to the writing workshops were amazing," she said. "All these people carrying these stories came forth. As they wrote, they confronted the horrors and came to understanding and resolution. My model was Odysseus going to the Trojan War and then coming home after so many years."

(For upcoming readings and book-signings, visit www.vetsofwarvetsofpeace. org/readings_events.php).

The new book will add to Kingston's national acclaim, this time as an editor rather than as a writer. Which brings the question: What else does she herself have to say in print?

"Every time I write anything, I put everything I know into it," she said. "When I get through, I think, 'I don't have anything more to say.' But then more stuff starts to come and I find that I do have more to say. I suppose I live a little longer and observe more of the world and find there's more to write about. It seems endless. What interests me a lot right now is aging. What does it feel like to go into your 60s and face mortality? I want to write about that.

"I am writing something now that seems to be in verse form. I picture a novel-length poem. I can just hear my editors and agent saying, 'Don't do that! America does not want to buy a novel-length poem.' But that's another thing about being over 60 -- you can do what you want."

How does Kingston view her remarkable career?

"What comes to mind is it's not a 30-year career; it's more like a 60-year career, because I was writing and talking stories as a child," she said. "I've always been a storyteller, well before I had any notion of publishing. If there are previous lifetimes, I was doing that work then.

"It's a real miracle to me that I have books that stay so vividly alive for new generations of readers," she said. "So often, people come up and say, 'My grandmother gave me this book.' "

Kingston has visited China "seven or eight times," she said. What has she found there?

"There is a global city over there," she said. "Before, it was like San Francisco in a way. Then, all of a sudden, there were gigantic high-rises.

"I'm getting ready to go to China again, to my parents' villages. That area has been called an Economic Zone. You hear about a big boom there, and eminent domain taking over farmland and building great public projects. I want to see if I can face the terribleness of witnessing that brave new world.

"(On one visit) I saw a village with a little plaza, with people sitting there in the evening, talking and braiding one another's hair. And then the next time I visited, there were a hotel and office buildings, with no vestige of a village.

"But it sort of happened that way in Stockton, too," she said. "Our laundry was right across the street from the Port of Stockton, and now the river doesn't come into town anymore.

"The nature of California is ceaseless change. I suppose it's those same kinds of forces changing it that are changing China. We're all emigrating into the future. The title of Thomas Wolfe's novel was right -- you can't go home again."

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