Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston in 2006
Born	Maxine Ting Ting Hong (1940-10-27) October 27, 1940 (age 76)
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	US
Notable works	The Woman Warrior, The Fifth Book of Peace, Tripmaster Monkey, China Men
Notable awards	National Book Critics Circle Award National Book Award National Humanities Medal National Medal of Arts
Spouse	Earll Kingston
Children	Joseph Lawrence Chung Mei

Maxine Hong Kingston (Chinese: 湯婷婷; pinyin: Tāng Tíngtíng; born October 27, 1940) is a Chinese American author and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese-Americans.

She has contributed to the feminist movement with such works as her memoir The Woman Warrior, which discusses gender and ethnicity and how these concepts affect the lives of women. Kingston has received several awards for her contributions to Chinese American Literature including the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1981 for China Men.

Kingston was born in , to first-generation Chinese immigrants, Tom and Ying Lan Hong. He was a laundry worker and gambling house owner and she was a practitioner of medicine. Kingston was the third of eight children and the eldest of the six children born in the United States. Her mother trained as a midwife at the To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton. Her father was brought up as a scholar and taught in his village of Sun Woi, near Canton. Tom left China for America in 1925. He was able to bring his wife over in 1940.

Kingston was drawn to writing at a young age and won a five-dollar prize from "Girl Scout Magazine" for an essay she wrote titled "I Am an American." She majored in engineering at Berkeley before switching to English. In 1962 Kingston married Earll Kingston, an actor, and began a high school teaching career. The two began a family the following year with the birth of their son Joseph Lawrence Chung Mei. In 1965–1967, Maxine taught English and mathematics at Sunset High School in Hayward, California. After relocating to Hawaii in 1967 Maxine began writing extensively, finally completing and publishing her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, in 1976. She began teaching English at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa that same year. By 1981 she had moved on to teach at Berkeley.