Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston's books include The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, To Be the Poet and “The Fifth Book of Peace.
From her Q & A with David Ulin about her latest book, the poetic memoir I Love a Broad Margin to My Life:
David L. Ulin: “I Love a Broad Margin in My Life” returns to material you’ve written about previously, particularly in “The Woman Warrior.” Have you ever considered going back and updating any of your earlier works?--Marshal Zeringue
Maxine Hong Kingston: I have found things that I could have done better in “The Woman Warrior.” But then I thought: Let the work of one’s youth just stand.
DLU: What would you have done better?
MHK: After I went to China, I saw that the villages there look like pueblos, like any adobe village you could find in Africa or South America. When I wrote the book, I pictured farmhouses the way we have them in the U.S., so there would be a farmhouse surrounded by fields, and then at a distance another farmhouse with its fields. I didn’t realize that all the people lived together in a pueblo and that their common fields were all out there. Everything that one does, in your house, affects the people on the other side of the wall. So I would have written about the villages better. That is a mistake in...[read on]
