I Love a Broad Margin To My Life

(Paperback)

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Description

An imaginative autobiography from one America's most important female writers; along with Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston defines a generation. Maxine Hong Kingston, author of such seminal works as The Woman Warrior and China Men, is one of the most important American writers of her generation. In this remarkable memoir, she writes from the point of view of being sixty-five, looking back on a rich and complex life of literature and political activism, always against the background of what it is like to have a mixed Chinese-American identity.Passages of autobiography, in which she describes such events in her life as being imprisoned with Alice Walker for demonstrating against the Iraq war, meld with a ficitonal journey in which she sends her avatar Wittman Ah Sing on a trip to modern China. She also evokes her own poignant journey, without a guide, back to the Chinese villages her father and mother left in order to come to America.

Reviews

This will delight Hong Kingston's admirers. It may test the uninitiated, but the author's verbal and linguistic mastery makes handsome amends * Times Literary Supplement *
A splendid raconteur, who shares with us the myths and stories that emerge from the lode of a culture's deepest realities * Chicago Tribune *
A meditation on form and formlessness, on meaning and identity, and [on] how the most essential truths often exist outside the boundaries * Los Angeles Times *

Author Bio

Maxine Hong Kingston was born in California in 1940, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She studied engineering at Berkeley before switching to English literature. After her marriage to actor Earll Kingston, she moved to Hawai'i where she worked as a teacher and continued to write her highly acclaimed books. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including, in 2008, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.