Bay Area Legends: Maxine Hong Kingston Changed What It Means to Tell an American Story
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Maxine Hong Kingston grew up in Stockton, the child of Chinese immigrants, before she became a part of that mythical land known as Berkeley in the 1960s. The publication of her groundbreaking book, The Woman Warrior: A Memoir with Mythological Elements, made her an immediate literary star.

Hong Kingston's work and mentorship have influenced countless other writers, some of whom join us in this latest edition of our Bay Area Legends series to talk about her genre-defying or perhaps genre-creating work. They're all coming up next, right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

There are so, so many debut books published each and every year, and nearly all of them fall alone in the forest, or if they're lucky, they find some small circle of readers. But every once in a while, a debut book startles and enchants the literary world. People recognize that something genuinely new has been published.

In 1976, The Woman Warrior was one of those books. The narrator of the book, more or less Maxine Hong Kingston herself, is an incredible creation. She blends retellings of retellings of Chinese mythology with life in Stockton's small and since bulldozed Chinatown and the yearnings of a young woman pushing towards the American counterculture.

Despite so vividly capturing a time and a place, the memoir holds up beautifully, as does so much of Hong Kingston's work. We'll talk with Maxine Hong Kingston a bit later in the show, but because this is part of our Bay Area Legends series, we are joined first by two writers who were influenced by her work. Vanessa Waugh is author of Forbidden City. Waugh's previous books include A River of Stars, and she's a former columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle. Welcome.

Excited to be here. Chitra Deva Karuni is a novelist, short story writer, and poet. Her most recent novel, Independence, won the American Book Award in 2024. Welcome, Chitra. Pleasure to be here. Vanessa, let's start with you. How would you describe Maxine Hong Kingston's work? She is a force of nature, a

She's sitting right beside me and smiling. She is so amazing and inspiring. I think she really opened the way for so many of us in that, as you said, retelling of myths, adapting and adopting. And I think most importantly, going beyond the official record, because if your stories are erased or suppressed or never recorded at all, you can take that

imaginative leap of empathy and reclaim those histories, those women otherwise lost to history. Tritha, one thing we realized doing this show is that Maxine Hong Kingston's work is so meaningful to so many different types of writers in many different cultures. What do you think it is that really extended her influence so widely?

Well, speaking for myself, when I first read The Woman Warrior, which was when I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the early 1980s, I was just stunned. I did not know you could write books like this. I was studying literature, you know, the Renaissance, and this was quite different. And it gave me so much permission. I think that's what's great about The Woman Warrior. It

embraces you and your history and what you might want to say, all the unsaid stories, the untold, the forbidden stories. That's what it did for me. It gave me permission. And it really changed my career from being someone who was studying to become a professor of literature to someone who wanted to become a writer and tell the stories of my people. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Vanessa, it seems like that book in particular, as well as the rest of Maxine's work, gave people permission to write different kinds of things, to put different things down on paper.

Definitely. And then I think there is both this sense of, you know, imagining into being what was not could not be spoken or wasn't recorded. But there's also an amazing sense of mischief in humor. I think about in Woman Warrior, there's a moment where right at the beginning where she's retelling the Faumulan myth story.

And it's grand and she's like about to go off to war, but then there's blank space. And then suddenly she's back to being a kid in Stockton. And it sort of really gets at the immigrant experience or the experience of anyone who feels like an outsider or has been marginalized and has like a

a rich imagination that goes beyond sort of their present circumstances. It's very empowering. Yeah, I think that mischief, too, is one reason the book holds up so well. Like, it doesn't feel enthralled to the sort of pieties of any particular time and place. It feels like one person's experiencing and imagining into this world. Let's, throughout the show, we have some cuts from other writers who were influenced by Maxine Hahn Kingston.

We have Ingrid Rojas Contreras, who is going to read a little bit from The Woman Warrior. She did not know whether she had fallen asleep or not when she heard a rushing coming out from under the bed. Cringes of fear seized her souls as something alive, rumbling, climbed at the foot of the bed.

It rolled over her and landed bodily on her chest. There it sat. It breathed, airlessly, pressing her, sapping her. "Oh no, a sitting ghost," she thought. She pushed against the creature to lever herself out from underneath it, but it absorbed this energy and got heavier. Her fingers and palms became damp, shrinking at the ghost's thick, short hair like an animal's coat.

which slides against warm solidity as human flesh slides against muscles and bones. She grabbed clutches of fur and pulled. She pinched the skin the hair grew out of and gouged into it with her fingernails. She forced her hands to hunt out eyes, furtive somewhere in the hair, but could not find any.

She lifted her head to bite, but fell back exhausted. The mass thickened.

That was Ingrid Rojas Contreras reading from Maxine Hong Kingston's book, The Woman Warrior. And in that scene, Maxine's mother is being attacked by a ghost at her medical school in China. There's just so much going on. It's embedded in this deep mother-daughter story. There's a kind of clanging of Western scientific practice and this kind of rich, tactile, supernatural world. There's the sort of surprise of an early 20th century Chinese mother who was also a doctor.

rubbing against this sort of patriarchy and misogyny that women encounter in a lot of the rest of the book. It's really an astonishing sequence. It has all these valences. I want to bring in Maxine Hong Kingston now, listening back to Ingrid reading your work, thinking about that first book. Like, what do you hear in that scene now that maybe you didn't when you first wrote it? I hear...

a story that I am now saying to my granddaughter. Since having the grandchildren,

And they ask me for stories. And I've been writing some of it down, drawing the pictures. And my grandson will say, write, write, write. I'm doing something else. And he bugs me. Write. And it's...

I mean, that's something that I say to myself all my life, but now I have a kid telling me. And the stories that he likes have to do with

and outer space and all that. But what she wants is, tell me your mother's stories. And so I have told that story that Ingrid just read. And when I tell it, it's different from when I write it because there is that...

emotion or that uh the the the the the sounds coming out of a human body going into uh into this child's ears um and uh and and when i listen to it i can hear the um

Oh, the sophisticated language. But when I tell it again to my granddaughter, I am using the language of a seven-year-old, that a seven-year-old can understand. And in some ways, it's even scarier. And there's more feeling. And...

And also I'm very careful because I know that she will take it in and she will see that ghost. The...

She lives in a house in Hawaii where people have seen ghosts, and her parents will not tell her about those ghosts because she will then be afraid of them or she'll see them. So I'm...

Careful that I don't implant something whole in her. I wonder, do you... You know, first line of The Woman Warrior, one of the most famous lines in contemporary literature, you must not tell anyone, my mother said, what I'm about to tell you. Do you tell her that? Or do you say, please, share freely of this cultural heritage that I'm delivering to you? No. When I...

I heard her say that, and then when I want to write those stories, I start thinking like a lawyer. I have to write them, and so the first thought is, okay, I can write it, but I don't have to show it to anybody. I don't have to publish it.

Okay, so I finished writing it and it's so good and I want to publish. And then I think, I'm not telling it the way she told it. It's in English for one thing and everything that my mother did and

And the way she spoke was so dynamic, so large, so chaotic. And what I've done is write in a very orderly way. And I gave it shape and form. And I'm not telling it. I'm just writing it. And people are not hearing it. They're reading it.

And so I did it. That is very lawyerly. You found the loophole there.

We are talking about the pioneering art and writing of Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, Chinamen, Tripmaster Monkey, and the poetry memoir, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. We're also joined by people who have been influenced by Maxine's work. Vanessa Waugh, author of Forbidden City. Chitra Divakaruni, who is a novelist, short story writer, and poet. Her most recent novel is Indepedence.

You also heard in this segment Ingrid Rojas Contreras reading from The Woman Warrior. We'll be back with more right after the break.

But as he arrives safely to shore, his relief transforms into horror when the first person he lays eyes upon is his own son.

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Welcome back to Forum. This is our latest Bay Area Legends edition. The legend, of course, is Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, as well as many other books. We're also joined by people who've been influenced by Maxine's work. We've got Vanessa Wah, author of Forbidden City. We've also got Chithra Divakaruni, who is a novelist, short story writer, and poet. Her most recent novel is Independence, and she teaches creative writing at the University of Houston. And we've also got Maxine Hong Kingston,

Maxine, we're obviously talking about your legacy and going through your life. But you said in your poetry book, I love a broad margin to my life that I have a superstition that as long as I, any writer, have things to write, I keep living. Obviously, here you are. So what are you working on now?

I am working on a diary which is now 2,000 pages long. And in order to endure this length, I'm also writing haiku. And...

And, oh, my haiku has been published in Poetry Magazine in Poetry Month, which is April. And so I am now a poet, which is the highest of the writers. And so...

Oh, I am going to read that poetry on Sunday at the Bay Area Book Festival. Oh, that's great. In Berkeley, for those who don't know, you can find that there. You told Washu for New Yorker Story that you're going to only publish this last work, this diary, posthumously after you die. Is that still the plan?

And I think it was a hundred years after it, right? Something like that? Well, I read it and it's so good. I would really like other people to be able to enjoy it. And so I am thinking, I've been thinking about a title. And one title is posthumously yours, Maxine.

And another title is just yours, Maxine. And I'm thinking of an afterword which says that if this gets published after I die, we'll entitle it posthumously yours. And if I'm still alive...

I'll call it yours. I have to come to a point where I think it's the end, and I don't know when I'm going to die or what point of the book I'll be at at that time. Right.

I'm rooting for yours, I have to say. I would like to read it now and not in 2125. So I'm rooting for it. We, of course, know that many people in the Bay Area have met, heard from, know Maxine Hahn Kingston, or maybe you see your own stories in

in her stories, you can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. You can email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org. And you can find us on all the social media things as well. Blue Sky, Instagram, we're kqedforum as well.

I want to hear another person who was influenced by you, Alexander Chee, and he's going to be reading from the book Chinamen. On summer nights when we picked new routes home from the laundry through the Stockton streets, crickets covered the sidewalks and the lighted windows. Bats flew between the buildings and some got hit by cars. We examined them, spread their wings, looked at their teeth and furry countenances.

The bats wafted like burned paper in the searchlights, which lit up tightrope walkers who had strung wires from the tallest rooftops and walked with no nets to and from the courthouse dome. On garbage nights, we children ran ahead and rummaged the department store bins for treasures. In trade, you left our garbage a bag here and a bag on the next block. But usually we didn't walk the long way on Main Street. We went through Chinatown, Tang People's Street,

That was Alexander Chee reading from the book Chinamen, in the section The Father from China Men.

I mean, Stockton, the richness of the Stockton description. I feel like I'm dripping with sweat just walking through the Stockton summer there. I wonder if growing up, though, did you hate Stockton like many people, creative people hate their hometowns? No. You loved it. Well, it was reality. And, you know, listening to...

That passage, I still dream of that walk. I used to think that if you have an obsession or a dream...

or a nightmare, if you could just express it and write it out, it will go away. But it doesn't go away. Because as I heard Alexander's voice, I was back there again. And I don't think Stockton is like that anymore. I mean, it's not...

It's more of a city, so you don't get the bats and the crickets and the animals. Oh, but also as I was listening, I hear that I called it the Tang people. What we called it was Hong Yungai, and I didn't know. What is Hong? Is it Tang?

Tang? Is that the word for Han? The Han people? I didn't know how to translate it. And I didn't know enough to get the character so that I would know. And I know that in our dialect, the T's and the H's are inter... Yeah.

They're mixed. And so now I think if I were to write it again, I would put Han people. But I'm not sure. You know, I mean, one reason Stockton is so different, right, is that the very blocks where your family had this laundry were destroyed by urban renewal, by the city's machinations and the construction of the Crosstown Freeway. Right.

So what, you know, you would have once walked kind of from north to south from the laundry to where you lived at 219 East Hazleton in Stockton. Now you'd be passing underneath the freeway and by, you know, banks and leveled blocks. These when you when you imagine these places that are gone now and you go back.

What do you see in Stockton now? Can you still picture the old thing, or is it really just gone when you're there? I find it unbearable to walk those streets, and I don't do it. And I do not go back to 219 East Hazleton. The...

The laundry was at 40 North El Dorado, and the laundry was Newport Laundry. And I did not write Newport or El Dorado because I thought, that just sounds like fiction. It's too symbolic. But I now have, I don't go there in person, but I have a recurring dream

that there is a light coming from the laundry, from Newport Laundry. And I go in, and my parents are still alive, and they're young, and the laundry has become a beautiful store. And I also...

dream of going past the Filipino lodge and the trees are so old that the bark grows over the benches and the Filipino people are still there but that's in dream and I know and I have heard that the

The people who bought our old house cemented the front for a drive for a portico show. And the garden and the vegetable places are gone. And I do not go there. Yeah, it's almost like you can keep it alive in the dream. Yeah.

Let's bring in Andrew Lam, another one of our authors here who's been influenced by Maxine Hong Kingston, has a book out called Stories from the Edge of the Sea. It's about Vietnamese Americans in the Bay Area. Welcome, Andrew. Thank you.

So I'm curious about what specifically drew you to Maxine Hong Kingston's work and what you drew out of it. Well, I read all the books, of course, but of course, The Woman Warrior was the first. And I actually, because as a journalist and as a fiction writer, at the beginning of my career, I tried to separate the two. But what...

her book and what her writing does is it gave me permission to imagine. And so that such thing as literary nonfiction, there are spaces in which you can create in which you don't have to be historically bound, but that you can enter the mind to entertain what could have been, what can be as a way of

playing with language, playing with imagination in the world of nonfiction. Like William Maxwell, you know, who wrote that beautiful book where he didn't know what happened to this kid, but he imagined. And Maxine gave this space in which

where the facts end and then your own imagination begins. And it really helped open up that space for me. And it allowed me to say, okay, yeah, this is historical, but then this is also how I saw it. And this is how I can interpret it. And this is how I'm going to play with that moment of history. Vanessa, I feel like that might have been something that...

was influential for you too as someone who both worked for papers but also was writing fiction? Yeah, definitely. There's... We've heard of, you know, speculative fiction, imagined futures, but speculative nonfiction is our imagined past, right? What could be. And...

I think that's I think it was very, as Andrew said, very freeing for me again to I call it leaning into the conditional, the if the what the that not just what can be witnessed or recorded, but there's so much that happens now.

beyond that. And that's really where I mean, and I love how Maxine's fiction or books has been classified in all ways, right? Fiction, memoir, poetry, like, and I think that's the other thing. She's genre defying, right? She's not letting her work doesn't box her in. And we too, as writers,

have that ability to write at the margins, to sort of go beyond what the box. You know, I too started as a journalist.

And it just drove me crazy to do that pyramid style. I mean, that's my great ending, and you're going to cut it? And so there came it. I just couldn't do that, and I had to break away. Andrew, did you ever get the story of how our families were connected a thousand years ago? I would love to hear it again because you mentioned it once. No, wait. I want to hear this story. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. My family were the Song Dynasty kings. And Genghis Khan came and just tried to kill everybody. And so there were two princes, my ancestors, and they were running away. And they ran into this house.

And there was a woman named Mrs. Lamb. And the soldiers came in and she said, "Oh, this is little lamb and this is big lamb." And the soldiers went away.

And so the princes were alive, and they kept going, and they went to the south, and they started the southern song. And we have been told from the very beginning, when you meet a lamb...

You carry his shoes. And so this, so I owe you. Oh, this explains why she wrote blurb for all four of my books. That's right. That's right. Write more. Write more. And the latest is on top of the cover. Yes, that's right. Because I owe you. Oh, my God. Thank you. Oh, you know what?

You know, at first, I think, oh, this is a fiction. My parents are telling me this. And I never heard this from anybody else. And then I went to this restaurant, the Nan Yan Restaurant, which is not there anymore in Berkeley. And it's run by Philip Chu. And...

And, oh, it comes down through my family, through my mother, who is also a Jew. And then I noticed that, and Philip is Burmese. So I just think, oh, he's Burmese. And then he started saying, well...

Their family was saved by the lambs. And he's talked about having a secret name and how we owe the lambs. And I thought, wow, this is a real story. So look up Philip. He owes the lambs.

He's a really good Burmese cook. I do love this because in The Woman Warrior, you say at one point, Chinese-American, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate out what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities? One family, your mother who marked your growing with stories from what is Chinese-American.

What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies? I feel like this is one of these things where you heard something from your mother and you weren't sure, is this something everyone knows? Is this just something that was just in my family? And I've always found that I think for almost all immigrant children, you're kind of sorting those two things out. It's like the most difficult thing. You know, Viet Nguyen really likes that quote. He's been quoting it. And the way he sees it is that...

This is a breakthrough in literature in that I am addressing the reader, and the reader is not the white person that the rest of literature is for. And he says that I am assuming or I am speaking to the reader who is a Chinese person

American or Chinese and he says other people are just looking in on this conversation among Chinese people. That's beautiful.

We are talking about the pioneering art of Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, Chinaman, Tripmaster Monkey, and the poem, memoir really, in poem form, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. We're also joined by Andrew Lam, author. His most recent book is Stories from the Edge of the Sea. We have Andrew Lam,

Chithra Divakaruni, novelist, short story writer, and poet. Most recent novels, Independence. We also have Vanessa Waugh, author of Forbidden City, among other books. Earlier in the segment, you heard from Alexander Qi reading from the book Chinamen. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.

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This summer, venture into the storm with Mozart's sublime opera, Idomeneo. June 14-25. Learn more at sfopera.com. Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go! That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together! ♪

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. Really a delight this morning. Latest edition of our Legends series. We've got Maxine Hong Kingston with us, as well as a circle of writers who have been influenced by her across the country and across cultures. I want to ask you, Maxine, about...

Berkeley and the East Bay and sort of the scene that you came out of in the 60s and 70s, you know, Woman Warriors published in 1976. How do you think that East Bay world shaped you? Oh, my. Coming to Berkeley, I just, like...

My people. Oh, my goodness. And was that true in the... Because you got there in 58, right? Was it still kind of the Berkeley of Berkeley 60s or... No. No. No. At the beginning, it was...

It was very quiet, but there was poetry happening. There's writing happening. The big writer at the time was Diane Wachowski, and she was publishing even as she was a student. But then things began to change, and there's that whole...

cross-cultural, psychedelic, telegraph avenue. And what I really loved was there was a new language. The slang was so good. And, you know, the avenue, the street, the trips. Yeah.

everybody was tripping out and oh and the freedom and and that means free stuff you can walk down telegraph avenue and somebody will give you for free a marijuana cookie and it was i just walked on telegraph and i just thought this was heaven yeah and and and

and we were going to change culture. You don't need a sofa. You can sit on the sidewalk. But the language, there was such a language, looking for a language of spirituality, looking for a language of hallucinations, of visions. And at that time,

Well, later, when I'm writing China Man and the Woman Warrior, I had heard so much Chinese or Chinese accent, and I was writing in that way. And after two books, which means after 20 years...

I wanted to break into that new language, which is the new American language. And that's how I got Trip Master Monkey. Let's hear a little bit of that, actually. We have Wah Shu, author of Stay True, reading this. A feeling went through Whitman that nothing wrong could ever happen again or had ever happened.

It's very good sitting here among friends, coffee cup warm in hands, cigarette. Together we fall silent as the sun shows its full face. The new day. Good show, gods. Why don't I, from now on, get up every dawn? My life would be different. I would no longer be effed up. I set out on more life's adventures with these companions, the people with whom I've seen dawn, my chosen family. We're about to change the world for the better.

It was Washu reading from Maxine Hong Kingston. Hey, I didn't write F. I know. We just, you know, broadcast. You've heard the George Carlin bit. We can only say certain words. I love that. I did feel bad we had to do that. You know, that feeling, though, a new dawn, a new day. We're about to change the world for the better. I

I mean, there's a part of me that feels like that 60s revolution did totally change the culture. I mean, almost every single person in this building right now is here in part because of what the generation did and the opportunities it did open up for so many people.

But then there's still, here we are in the nation and in the politics of the country. Like, are you surprised about what things did change and what things have maybe gone backwards? Well, I also went through that thinking where there was this faith that...

that we were changing the world. And then, but mind you, here comes the Vietnam War. And then there are the demonstrations, the riots, the protests against that war. And it went on and on and on, and the war was not ending. And then you...

your faith or my faith begins to be destroyed. That this non-violence that Martin Luther King, that we're using, it doesn't work. But now, as I look back,

It took a long time, but I think we can say that we ended the war. It just took a long time. And the ending really happened when the corporations fell, when even corporate business people were against the war. Mm-hmm.

Um, we've got some, uh, comments, uh, coming in here. Truett writes, I, I, I love this. Um, I had a life drawing class as an undergraduate in the late 1980s during long poses. Our teacher read to us from the woman warrior. It was pure dream time. And this is the best part. I've been trying to recapture that moment for most of my life.

I just love when a creative work can hit someone out of nowhere and then just stay with them for so long. Andrew, did you have a moment like that with Maxine's work? Maybe a particular scene that has just really stuck with you? Yeah, in China there was a scene where I can't remember the name of the character but in Hawaii in the sugar cane field this longing for China

And then leaning down onto the ground and try to hear the echo of China. It broke my heart because I was reading that at the time when I, as a Vietnamese refugee, didn't expect to ever come back to Vietnam because during the Cold War, there were no movement. And going to America is a one-way trip with no expectations.

of ever returning. And so Vietnam was an impossible place. So I identified with this lost world, right? Having left and never come back. And so when I got to that passage, it's just sort of like, but that's kind of me, you know? I'm not putting my ear on the ground, but I try to taste the Vietnamese fish sauce, trying to remember the taste of my homeland, thinking this is all I can have, you know? God, there's that incredible line in The Woman Warrior where she's

You say something like, you know, China must be a long way away if my grandmother gets here and all she is is some sweetness in my mouth, you know, a taste of this. You know, they were magic. And I wasn't the only one who could have that candy from China. My brothers and sisters, we would all say, what? It's grandma. Yeah, grandma just sent us candy. Yeah.

Let's bring in Amy Phan, who's author of The Re-Education of Cherry Trong. She's Associate Professor of Writing and Literature at CCA here in the city. Welcome, Amy. Hi. Thank you for having me. We wanted to bring you in because you teach this work to even, you know, the next generation, Gen Z. How do they respond to this work when you...

bring it to them? I teach at CCA and so a lot of our students are art students and they're also actually international students, many of them from Asia. And I think Maxine's essays and excerpts from her novels are always incredibly resonant pieces to give to our students that inspire them to think that their words are important. I think in art school we tend to get students who are more

Visual learners, you know, visual based, they're not necessarily very confident in their writing or, you know, English is their second or third language. And Maxine's essays, which, you know, address, you know, being having English as a second language, trying to grapple with learning English and language.

learning the customs and understanding America, it's really motivating for them. And it helps them realize that their stories are important. And so I think it does a lot to help them realize that writing isn't this lofty, faraway thing. It's actually something that they can do. And so when they read Maxine, they think, oh, you know, so we often use essays as a way to see like, you can do this too. And

her life, Maxine's life, I think, and the way she has held herself as a writer and as a community member is also incredibly inspiring to them to see how they can build artistic lives and be members of the community. You know, Chithra, I was wondering if, you know, in this sort of different multicultural stew in Houston where you teach, if this stuff also still kind of resonates with folks that you're teaching there at University of Houston.

Oh, definitely, because The Woman Warrior, which I have to say is my favorite among all of Maxine, all of your books. I love this the most. And the things that it's talking about, especially myth making or using the stories of our past to inform our present day lives and to feel and understand our present day lives. I'm always doing that with my students who, although we're in Houston, really, my students come from all over the world today.

to study in the creative writing program. And they are writing things similar to what I'm writing. They are analyzing the myths of their past to see how far do those fit into their lives today? How far do they inform what they're trying to do, their dreams? And also, you know, that mother-daughter connection or that mother-child connection with all its

I don't know, with all its trials and tribulations and joys. That's never going to go away. I think Maxine was really, you know, she really got that. And that still resonates. Maxine, your mother ended up eventually reading your work. What did she think? You know, I was...

One way that I could protect myself was to think it's in English and she doesn't read English. And then the Chinese translated it. And she got a copy and she said...

This is so accurate. And I thought, wow, wow. And she said, how did you know? And I understood it as, you know, what I was afraid of was that I had a lot of anger toward her in that book. And I did not want her to...

Have to take that on. Yeah. But the Chinese, when they translate, they were pirating the book. They translate as fast as they can so that they can sell it and make a lot of money. And so the translations...

are very mild. And they corrected my myths, the ones that, you know, I play with them because they change when they get to America, but they change them back to the way they were in China. And then, you know, I play around with form, but the form they use is just soap opera. And so the...

The anger did not come across. And I think what she found was accurate. You know, my pictures of the house or the way a farm would look and so on. Well, you do have in that book just the tenderest moment there where you're lying there with a fever and she's taking care of you and she's talking. And that moment would almost be in most books at the end of the memoir, like the healing has occurred there.

And in that book, in this fascinating decision that really works, it's like tucked into the center of the book, sort of. Well, it's still a problem. My mother was a doctor.

And what I felt was if I get sick, I get a lot of attention and I will get touched and I will get hugged and she will really pay attention to me. And so I was sick a lot when I was a kid.

So it's, so it's just, oh, the book tells me, tells about me being sick for a year. I was in bed for a year and I was well taken care of. She looked after me. And, you know, that's not such a good thing. Yeah.

One other story from a listener here. Ray writes to say,

Wow. Amen.

Wow. I love hearing the way that these stories went out into the community and just knocked certain people in a certain way. Wow. But, you know, it's not just my story. It's a human, what is it, archetype? Yeah.

A story. Yeah. So beautiful. One last quick question for you. You know, you once said in an interview, it was about 40 odd years ago, you're about 40 years old. You said, memory sorts out all the junk and keeps what matters for years and years and years. That's what I want to write about. What stays, the unforgettable. I was wondering, you still feel that way? I don't know. I kept a motto to myself that

You know, if I didn't have a piece of paper to write it down, it's so great that it will come back. But it doesn't.

And that's why you write. That's why we've got 2,000 pages of diary coming for us in yours, Maxine, I hope. We have been celebrating the art and writing of Maxine Hong Kingston, author of so many great books, including The Woman Warrior, Chinaman, Tripmaster Monkey, and I love A Broad Margin to My Life.

This has been the latest edition of our Bay Area Legends series. We've also been talking with writers influenced by Maxine's work. Vanessa Waugh, thank you so much. Oh, thank you. We've also been joined by Andrew Lamb. Thank you so much. Thank you. Amy Phan, thank you.

Thank you. Chitra, Diva Kavruni, thank you so much. My pleasure. Maxine, big hug to you from Houston. Oh, big hug to you back, Chitra. Yeah. Chitra, thank you so much again. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Meena Kim. Thank you so much, Maxine. Thank you, everybody. So interesting. Thank you.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Support for Forum comes from San Francisco Opera. Amidst a terrible storm, Ida Mineo promises the god Neptune that he will sacrifice the first person he sees if he and his crew survive the tempestuous waters.

But as he arrives safely to shore, his relief transforms into horror when the first person he lays eyes upon is his own son.

This summer, venture into the storm with Mozart's sublime opera, Idomeneo. June 14-25. Learn more at sfopera.com. Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go! That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together! ♪

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On the new season of The Divided Dial from On the Media, we're exploring shortwave radio, where prayer and propaganda coexist with news and conspiracy theories. And where an existential battle for the public airwaves is playing out right now. Listen to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.