After having excelled in her high-school studies, Hong won eleven scholarships that allowed her to attend the University of California at Berkeley, from which she graduated in 1962. That same year, she married Earll Kingston, an actor. Two years later, she returned to Berkeley to pursue a teaching certificate, which she received in 1965. For the next two years, she taught English and mathematics in Hayward, California, and then in 1967, she, her husband, and their son, Joseph, moved to the island of Hawaii, where her great-grandfathers first had worked when they immigrated to America. In China Men, Kingston describes the experiences of her forefathers working on the rough plantations of Hawaii, which they called Sandalwood Mountain.
In Hawaii, Kingston taught English at the state university and at Mid-Pacific Institute, a private school; in her spare time, she wrote. When The Woman Warrior was published in 1976 and became an immediate and unqualified success, she retired from teaching and devoted her energies to writing. China Men, which relates the ordeals of the male members of Kingston's family in America, appeared in 1980, followed by Hawaii One Summer (1987), a collection of twelve prose selections. In 1989, she published Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, her first traditionally structured novel, in which she tells the fictitious story of Whitman Ah Sing, a Chinese American living in Berkeley, California, during the counter-culture 1960s, with its hippies, tie-dyed tee-shirts, and drug addiction. The energetic adventures of Whitman Ah Sing, whose name evokes images of the American poet Walt Whitman and his refrain phrase "I sing" — "Ah Sing" — reveal the protagonist's unease about his role and future in America.
Kingston is a frequent commentator and guest speaker at academic conferences and cultural events across the country, and she has often found it necessary to write articles defending The Woman Warrior, explaining herself and rebutting some critics who feel that the famous autobiography focuses too much on exotic Chinese history and not enough on the day-to-day racism that Chinese Americans face in American society. To these charges, Kingston responds that she is not trying to represent Chinese culture; she is portraying her own experiences.
