Chinese American literary pioneer Maxine Hong Kingston revolutionized storytelling with her groundbreaking 1976 book ‘The Woman Warrior,’ which blended reality and myth to capture the immigrant experience. As part of our Bay Area Legends series, we talk with Kingston – who grew up working in her parent’s Stockton laundry business and was an integral part of Berkeley’s counterculture movement – about her genre-defying work. And we check in with contemporary authors about Kingston’s lasting influence on their craft and the evolution of immigrant narratives in American literature.
Bay Area Legends: Maxine Hong Kingston Changed What It Means to Tell an American Story
Author Maxine Hong Kingston, May 6, 1981 (Eric Luse/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Guests:
Vanessa Hua, author, "Forbidden City"; Hua's previous books include “A River of Stars”; former columnist, San Francisco Chronicle
Aimee Phan, author; her most recent book is "The Lost Queen," which explores Vietnamese mythology; professor of writing and literature, California College of the Arts in San Francisco
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, novelist, short story writer and poet; her most recent novel "Independence" won the American Book Award in 2024 - she is also a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston
Maxine Hong-Kingston, author of “The Woman Warrior”, “China Men”, “Tripmaster Monkey” and the memoir “I Love a Broad Margin to My Life”
Andrew Lam, author, his most recent book "Stories from the Edge of the Sea" is about Vietnamese Americans in the Bay Area
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