Maxine Hong Kingston, an eminent memoirist and a celebrated Chinese-American autobiographer, is best known for The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) and its companion volume, China Men (1980). The Woman Warrior won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 for non-fiction, and China Men was awarded the 1980 American Book Award. Kingston's unusual blend of fantasy, autobiography, and Chinese folklore makes her works highly personal and unconventional. The Woman Warrior and China Men are heavily influenced by many related sources, particularly her mother's childhood stories of China, her own experiences as a first-generation Chinese American, the less-than-favorable treatment of her ancestors who immigrated to America, and the racism and denigration of women that she encountered growing up in post-World War II California.
Maxine Ting Ting Hong was born on October 27, 1940, in Stockton, California, which had been a major supply center during the California gold-rush era of the mid-nineteenth century. A year earlier, in 1939, her mother, Ying Lan Hong, had arrived from China at Ellis Island, New York, to join her husband, Tom, who had emigrated from China to the United States fifteen years earlier. Named for a blond female gambler whom her father had met while working in a gambling establishment in California, Maxine, the first of six American-born children in the family, grew up in Stockton's Chinatown, where her parents owned a laundry business. She never felt that her parents encouraged her to do well in her academic studies, in part because in their conservative Chinese culture, women often are not expected to have careers outside of the home. Her negative childhood experiences are reflected in The Woman Warrior, in which she exhibits a certain bitterness leveled at her parents, as well as at American and Chinese cultures.
