Kuo, Alex (1939– )
Alex Kuo was born in Boston, where his father
taught psychology at Harvard University, but grew
up in wartime Chongqing and Shanghai between
1942 and 1947. When he turned eight, his family
moved to the British colony of Hong Kong, where
Kuo attended primary and secondary schools. In
1955 the family came back to the United States
and settled in Windsor, Connecticut. Two years
later, Kuo entered Knox College at Galesburg, Il-
linois, where, as a second-year student majoring in
math and biology, he discovered his love for writ-
ing while taking a creative writing course. That ex-
perience led him to change his major to English
and get a B.A. in creative writing in 1961. He then
received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in
- Soon afterward, he taught creative writing
and literature first at South Dakota State Univer-
sity and then at the University of Wisconsin at
Oshkosh, but he resigned his position in 1969 to
protest against the expulsion of African-American
students from the university. In the following 10
years he continued teaching in several U.S. univer-
sities, but mainly at Central Washington University,
where he directed the Ethnic Studies Program.
In 1971 The Window Tree, a collection of
poems, was published in the United States, but it
was paid scant attention by critics and audiences.
Three years later, another collection of poetry en-
titled New Letters from Hiroshima and Other Poems
came out but fared no better than the first. After
interrupting his teaching career in 1979 to spend
half a year working for the U.S. Forest Service, he
resumed teaching at Washington State University
in Pullman, Washington, where he founded the
Comparative American Studies program in 1984.
During this period some of his short stories were
published in journals such as the Journal of Eth-
nic Studies and The Literary Review. Since the late
1980s he has taught in China occasionally.
In 1998 a Hong Kong publisher released Chi-
nese Opera, his first novel. The story is set in China
just before and during the Tiananmen Square
massacre of 1989. Sissy George, a Native Ameri-
can jazz singer, flies to Beijing to meet her boy-
friend, Sonny Ling, a Chinese-American musician
temporarily teaching at the Central Conservatory.
Both give extraordinary performances on the Chi-
nese stage: Sissy playing Bizet’s Carmen and Sonny
playing Schumann, Liszt, and Beethoven in his
piano recital. Written in crystalline prose, the book
highlights the role of art and artists as well as intel-
lectuals in any repressive setting, emphasizing the
importance of individual artistic freedom against
totalitarian regimes.
Following another volume of poetry, This Fierce
Geography (1999), Kuo published a short-story col-
lection Lipstick and Other Stories (2001). Awarded
the American Book Award in 2002, this collection
of 31 short stories, mostly written between 1988
and 2000, partly draws upon the author’s experi-
ences in China as a child during World War II as
well as in his later life. Sometimes humorous or
intensely ironic, often blurring the border between
dreams, imagination, and reality, Kuo’s stories
focus on memory and disappearance, the horror
of repression and censorship, and the complex re-
lationships between ideology, dissidence, and ev-
eryday life.
In 2004 Kuo won a Rockfeller Foundation
grant, which allowed him to travel to Italy and
enter the Bellagio Program. He is currently profes-
sor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and English at
Washington State University.
Manuela Vastolo156 Kuo, Alex