With an introduction by Xiaolu Guo A classic memoir set during the Chinese revolution of the 1940s and inspired by folklore, providing a unique insight into the life of an immigrant in America. When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talking-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Throughout her childhood, Maxine Hong Kingston listened to her mother's mesmerizing tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upwards. Growing up in a changing America, surrounded by Chinese myth and memory, this is her story of two cultures and one trenchant, lyrical journey into womanhood. Complex and beautiful, angry and adoring, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is a seminal piece of writing about emigration and identity. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 and is widely hailed as a feminist classic.

The author chronicles the lives of three generations of Chinese men in America, woven from memory, myth and fact. Here's a storyteller's tale of what they endured in a strange new land.

"I have almost finished my longbook," Maxine Hong Kingston declares. "Let my life as Poet begin...I won't be a workhorse anymore; I'll be a skylark." "To Be the Poet" is Kingston's manifesto, the avowal and declaration of a writer who has devoted a good part of her sixty years to writing prose, and who, over the course of this spirited and inspiring book, works out what the rest of her life will be, in poetry. Taking readers along with her, this celebrated writer gathers advice from her gifted contemporaries and from sages, critics, and writers whom she takes as ancestors. She consults her past, her conscience, her time--and puts together a volume at once irreverent and deeply serious, playful and practical, partaking of poetry throughout as it pursues the meaning, the possibility, and the power of the life of the poet.

A manual on inviting poetry, on conjuring the elusive muse, "To Be the Poet" is also a harvest of poems, from charms recollected out of childhood to bursts of eloquence, wonder, and waggish wit along the way to discovering what it is to be a poet.

A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity.

"An utterly extraordinary collection, and I have nothing but admiration and highest praise for the selection of the material, its depth and arrangement. It is comprehensive, lively, done with great zest, imagination, and a sense of responsibility toward the state and its literary heritage."--Malcolm Margolin, publisher of Heyday Books

"This first volume is a big, generous, and inclusive collection that shows me a host of things that I hadn't read before."--Thom Gunn

"This long-awaited volume captures the vast panorama of thought, emotion, and eloquent musings inspired by the landscapes and crossroads culture of the Golden State. The energy and promise and adrenaline of the California dream are richly sampled here, along with its paradoxes and tragic shortcomings. This is a knock-out anthology: indispensable for anyone who cares about American literature and the place of California in the national imagination." --Michael Kowalewski, editor, "Gold Rush: A Literary Exploration, and former president of the Western Literature Association

"This marvelous collection of literature creates a sense of time and place like no other in the world. California starts in native origin stories; the songs of many cultures and mighty landscapes rightly open this literary treasury. The literature of exploration, conquest, and separation is followed by the rise of romance, irony, adventure and, in the last section, a return to the stories of cultural diversity. Earthmaker, in the opening Maidu creation myth, said 'there will always be songs, and all of you will have them.' That sentiment has endured in "The Literature of California." --Gerald Vizenor, University of California, Berkeley

"Thisfirst volume of "The Literature of California is a brilliant and almost impossible achievement. For the first time, the amazing richness of California's literary heritage, from the intricate and beautiful stories of the first Natives to the hard-boiled fiction of Los Angeles, is illuminated here amply and unmistakably and, above all, respectfully. I am awed by these four editors' stunning labor, love for place and word, and finally, profound knowledge of their home region. Superlatives come quickly to mind--extraordinary, monumental, invaluable. I can't wait for volume two." --Louis Owens, University of New Mexico

"This anthology comes in the nick of time to re-open our minds to the radically enthusiastic, naiively critical, poems, stories and tales that are giving shape to one of the most exciting new cultures on the globe. Volume One curves from the Maidu story that tells of 'Turtle Island' through Clarence King's ringing hammer and Muir's mountain devotionalism, through Jeffers' astute and cranky foresight. We get Dame Shirley's gold country letters and then the freshly appreciated Jaime de Angulo; Josephine Miles together with James F. Cain and Nathanael West! Ending this volume with the tough, acerbic prose of Chester Hymes. Finally- a book to match the land." --Gary Snyder

"The publication of this anthology--so comprehensive, so vital in its content, so illustrative of high literary experience--is in and of itself an important milestone in the evolution of California as a foundational component of American civilization. "The Literature of California is more than an anthology. It suggests as well a vast public work, a Golden Gate Bridge of intellectual and imaginativematerials. Here in this anthology, to paraphrase Joan Didion on UC Berkeley, can now be found one of California's best ideas on itself." --Dr. Kevin Starr, State Librarian of California

"An extraordinary volume, at once imaginative, academically sound and meticulously comprehensive."--Carolyn See, author of "Golden Days

In her singular voice--both humble and brave, touching and humorous--Maxine Hong Kingston gives us a poignant and beautiful memoir-in-verse that captures the wisdom that comes with age. As she reflects on her sixty-five years, she circles from present to past and back, from lunch with a writer friend to the funeral of a Vietnam veteran, from her long marriage to her arrest at a peace march in Washington. On her journeys as writer, peace activist, teacher, and mother, she revisits her most beloved characters--Wittman Ah-Sing, the Tripmaster Monkey, and Fa Mook Lan, the Woman Warrior--and presents us with a beautiful meditation on China then and now. The result is a marvelous account of an American life of great purpose and joy, and the tonic wisdom of a writer we have come to cherish.

The Fifth Book of Peace opens as Maxine Hong Kingston, driving home from her father's funeral in the early 1990s, discovers that her neighborhood in the Oakland-Berkeley hills is engulfed in flames. Her home burns to the ground, and with it, all her earthly possessions, including her novel-in-progress. Kingston, who at the time was deeply disturbed by the Persian Gulf War, decides that she must understand her own loss of all she possessed as a kind of shadow-experience of war: a lesson about what it would be like to experience up close its utter devastation. Thus she embarks on a mission to re-create her novel from scratch, to rebuild her life, and to reach out to veterans of war and share with them her views as a lover of peace.
In the middle section of this remarkable book, Kingston reconstructs for us her lost novel, the lush and compelling story of the Chinese-American Wittman Ah Sing and his wife, Tana-California artists who flee to Hawaii to evade the draft during the Vietnam War. Wittman and Tana help to create an official Sanctuary for deserters and GIs who've returned devastated by their experiences in Vietnam-not unlike, as it turns out, the metaphorical sanctuary Maxine creates, back in her real world, by inviting war veterans to participate in writing workshops. As the vets share their stories, she teaches them both the value of writing-the accurate transcription of what is in the heart-and the value of community.
Paradoxically, the stories of war and its terrors become for her and the vets a literature of peace-words that enable them to achieve peace, at least within themselves. Moving among the vets with her Buddhist-inflected wisdom and at times humorousself-doubts, weaving their stories together with her own struggle to reorient herself after the fire, Maxine Hong Kingston is at times a kind of sprite, an almost weightless spirit, who guides others toward a better place, and at times a challenging teacher, who will not let us turn from the spectacle of a world so often at war.

"From the Hardcover edition.