2 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
in 1962, she married Earll Kingston, an actor; their only child, Joseph Lawrence
Chung Mei, was born in 1964. Kingston began her teaching career in 1966 at
Sunset High School in California. In 1967 she and her family relocated to Hawaii
where she taught English and writing at several schools, including Mid-Pacific
Institute and the University of Hawaii. While in Hawaii, she published her first
book, The Woman Warrior, inspired by the experiences of women in her family.
This was followed by a companion work, China Men (1980), which recounts the
lives of her male relatives who left behind their homeland. These first two works
weave together elements of fiction, myth, biography, and history; however, despite
their fictive elements both works were initially received as nonfiction. Both books
continue the theme of her first publication, “I Am an American,” in their depic-
tion of Chinese immigrant experience.
Kingston’s third book and first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989),
also weaves together Chinese immigrant and mainstream American experience.
The name of her fifth-generation Chinese American protagonist, Wittman Ah
Sing, pays obvious tribute to Walt Whitman. The double narrative threads reflect
Kingston’s interests in cultural fusion. Interspersed with descriptions of Wittman’s
struggles as a playwright after graduating from Berkeley during the radical heyday
of the 1960s is the story of the Monkey King, a legendary figure who brought Bud-
dhist scriptures to China from India. In his attempt to merge East and West and to
create a Chinese American language in his work, Wittman is like the Monkey King
who brought “foreign” rhythms westward from India. Kingston planned to continue
Wittman’s story in her next book, but the manuscript was destroyed by the 1991
fires that ravaged the Oakland-Berkeley hills in California and destroyed her home.
But she does finally “make [him] grow up” in The Fifth Book of Peace (2003), which
features “his life as a husband and as a responsible father” (Alegre). Like her previ-
ous works, it combines biographical and imaginative aspects while describing the
reconstruction of her lost novel-in-progress alongside the process of recovery from
the loss of her home and possessions.
The Fifth Book of Peace describes Kingston’s participation in writing workshops
for war veterans. Having focused on thematic issues related to speaking out in her
writing, Kingston turned to helping others find voice in order to translate their
experiences into poems, novels, and essays. Since 1993 Kingston has worked with
more than five hundred veterans of every American war since World War II (though
Vietnam veterans represent the largest number). Some of the works by workshop
participants have been collected and edited by Kingston in Veterans Of War, Veterans
Of Peace (2006). As Bill Moyers has noted, “For many of them it has been a life-
changing, even life-saving experience.” Her project moves beyond individual needs
and reflects her enduring activism as, along with veterans, she seeks to create “a
literature of peace.” Her activism moves beyond the written page and workshop
setting. In March 2003 she was arrested while participating in a Washington, D.C.,
protest against the war in Iraq; her cellmate was fellow writer Alice Walker.
Kingston has published two volumes of essays. The earliest, Hawai’i One
Summer (1987; republished in 1998), includes essays she wrote in 1978 for The
New York Times and offers insights into her life in Hawaii and her teaching. Those
collected in To Be the Poet (2002) are based on her William E. Massey Lectures