Maxine Hong Kingston

In one volume for the first time, three books that together form a bold, groundbreaking retelling of our national story by a great American writer, starting from her experience as the daughter of Chinese immigrants

The child of Chinese immigrants, Maxine Hong Kingston grew up in California and was an unknown writer living in Hawaii when she made her stunning entrance on the American literary scene with The Woman Warrior (1976). Her "memoirs of a childhood among ghosts" was not only an account of growing up poor and Chinese American in the San Joaquin Valley but also an audacious feat of imaginative transformation, drawing on ancient myths and the family stories her mother brought over from China.

A companion to The Woman Warrior, which she called her "mother-book," Kingston's "father-book" China Men (1980) spreads out across a large geographical and historical canvas to envision the lives of her male relatives who immigrated to America. Taken together, The Woman Warrior and China Men offer a profound, kaleidoscopic, genre-defying narrative of the American experience.

Kingston's third book, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1990), is the wildly inventive story of Wittman Ah Sing, a Berkeley graduate student whose experience of the San Francisco Beat scene transforms his understanding of his own Chinese heritage.

Rounding out the volume are a series of essays from 1978 reflecting on her life in Hawaii, later collected as Hawai'i One Summer, personal musings whose subjects range from the contentions of a conference of Asian American writers to home-buying, surfing, and the work of the Beat poet Lew Welch. Also included are hard-to-find essays about the creative process and Kingston's exasperated, insightful account of how most of the reviewers of The Woman Warrior fell prey to lazy stereotypes about the "exotic" and "inscrutable" East.