Considers The Bean Trees through the lens of the tradition of loners in American
literature, typically male and moving away from community.
Maureen Ryan, “Barbara Kingsolver’s Lowfat Fiction,” Journal of American Cul-
ture, 18 (Winter 1995): 77–82.
Accuses Kingsolver of offering endings that are too “easy” in both The Bean Trees
and Pigs in Heaven, of offering “political correctness” rather than deep political
analysis.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Barbara Kingsolver (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004).
A critical overview of Kingsolver’s writing with biography woven throughout.
The chapter on The Bean Trees emphasizes the role of women’s communities and
the parallels between individual personal circumstances and national issues in
such acts as providing sanctuary to political refugees.
—Kathryn Westh
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior:
Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts
(New York: Knopf, 1976)Maxine Hong Kingston’s best-known work, The Woman Warrior, opens with an
injunction to silence: “You must not tell anyone.” The narrator, however, proceeds
to reveal her family’s history and secrets but in a way that combines historical
reality and fantasy inspired by imagination and stories told to her about China.
Kingston cites her parents’ status as illegal immigrants as the reason for her obfus-
cation of fact. “I was thinking,” she admits, “that if immigration authorities read
my books they could not find evidence to deport my parents” (Alegre). Kingston’s
parents both emigrated from China but at different times. Her father, Thom
Hong, arrived in New York City in 1924; her mother, Ying Lan Hong, arrived
about fifteen years later. Maxine Ting Ting Hong was born on 27 October 1940
in Stockton, California, the eldest of her parents’ six American-born children; two
had died in China. The Hongs supported their family with a laundry business,
but Kingston’s father also sometimes ran a gambling operation, while her mother,
who had practiced medicine in China, found seasonal work as a field hand.
Kingston’s love of literature and storytelling was inspired by her father’s edu-
cational background—he had trained to be a poet and scholar—and her mother’s
storytelling. She learned about Chinese culture and her family’s history through
her mother’s “talkstory”; what she heard became inspiration for the written works
she eventually published. Kingston’s first writing success came early. When still a
teenager, she won a $5 prize for the essay “I Am an American,” published in The
American Girl, a magazine for the Girl Scout organization. Although her inter-
est in writing persisted, a facility with math led her to major first in engineering
at the University of California; she switched later to English. After graduating