karlpejera: Interview: Maxine Hong Kingston

The Woman Warrior's author talks about changing times in China, turning to poetry 'to hasten the pace of creation' and getting arrested with Alice Walker

Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir of growing up in California as the daughter of illegal Chinese immigrants was greeted rapturously when first published in the 1970s. "A poem turned into a sword" was the New York Times's verdict, while one critic compared her to James Joyce.

The Woman Warrior blended its author's childhood memories with the stories told by her parents, and delivered an invigorating dose of mythology, revolutionary politics and martial arts to a western audience that would wait another decade before films by Zhang Yimou and Chen Caige brought Chinese culture to more general notice.

Meeting Hong Kingston now, as she stops off in London to talk about her new book I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, en route to a conference on her work in Switzerland, it all feels a very long time ago. Although very few writers from China and the Chinese diaspora are widely read in English, the subject matter has lost its strangeness. Returning to The Woman Warrior, what is striking is that so much of what it describes has become familiar from other sources, from the gruelling apprenticeship served by the swordswoman, fighting dragons and phantoms in the mountains, to horrible scenes of female infanticide, foot binding, and the stoning to death during wartime of a suspected traitor.

In the new book, Kingston returns to China and her parents' villages. "Twenty years ago it took a day-and-a-half," she says, "two years ago it took four hours on the superhighway. And they do have televisions and cellphones and water and electricity but my cousin was still farming with water-buffalo. I could see that any moment now they'll probably sell the water-buffalo and mechanise ..."

Having spent a decade each on two previous books, Kingston was keen to up her own pace, and says she wrote this one in verse "to hasten the pace of creation. Because poetry is condensed I don't have to make my way right over to the right margin, I don't have to leap around in time and space, and I can say a lot with fewer words if I can just find the right words."

The book's wide margins gave the book its title, and while its short lines adhere to no particular meter they give the story a shape that some critics have referred to as epic ? "but I don't think it's epic, the idea of epic is so large and we think of the epic poem as a war story and I think this is more intimate than that". Rather than Homer, Kingston says she was channelling Walt Whitman ? "I embed his words into mine so I can sing along with him" ? and was influenced by her own father's poems. She includes a translation of one of these and says her next project will be to translate the rest and publish them with examples of his calligraphy ? "but maybe I won't even be able to get it published, this will not be so commercial".

I Love a Broad Margin blurs the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, combining sections of reportage including a lengthy description of her arrest at an anti-war demonstration outside the White House alongside Alice Walker in 2003, with fantasy characters such as the male alter ego she also describes as her avatar, Wittman Ah Sing.

"If I were a man that's the man I would be. He's also my imaginary friend, the way I had when I was a child, and then I brought him back in this new book because he's like Beatrice taking Dante through the underworld. So he accompanies me to these places in the middle of nowhere where a woman can't go, and then at a certain point I have to go on alone because we face our mortality alone. I picture him as quite tall with a beard," she says. "He's one of these old hippies you see around, sort of balding on top but they still have the pigtail at the back."

Kingston talks like one of these old hippies herself. Of the "Code Pink" women's march against the Iraq war that saw her arrested and briefly imprisoned, she says "it was the most truly peaceful demonstration I have ever participated in, real non-violence, palpable feelings of love. I could feel love between me and the next woman and the next and I swear the air turned pink, so warm and happy, and the feeling of community, I mean everyone, and we had the most peaceful gentle arrest."

Her account of this dramatic day is not without humour. '"My wife is gonna kill me," said a black cop; "I'm arresting Alice Walker."' Later, in the cells, Walker helps her out: "I spoke, asked her/ to undo my handcuffs, and if they/ won't untie, to help me unbutton and lower/ my pants, I had to pee. She got them off." But there is also something self-aggrandising about the whole thing, which sits badly with references to Iraq itself: "The oasis that gives you/ haven is Basra, the air station and naval/ base. Basra, home of Sinbad the Sailor,/ and before that, the Garden of Eden./ Please stand on a roadside, and hold/ the Bell of Peace".

A feminist from her student days at Berkeley, Kingston left California for Hawaii with her American husband in the late 60s, so repelled were they by the violence of the anti-war movement. Since then she has largely stuck to her pacifist beliefs, giving writing seminars to war veterans to "help them think about what they're doing, what's going on in the world and what's going on in their conscience" ? though she quickly adds that she's not out to brainwash anyone.

Now 70, Kingston is a tiny, beautiful person, with an extravagant mane of white hair and a sweet voice. "I think I was 16 when I was getting my first white hairs," she says proudly. "I've met a young woman with white hair like mine and she turns out to come from the village my mother comes from."

Amazed by The Woman Warrior in my 20s, and disappointed by the new book, I was wary of our meeting, fearing silence and embarrassment. But Kingston's sincerity is apparent and disarming. Even as I gasped inwardly at her comparing herself to Shakespeare and Jane Austen ("I've written 6 books./ Hers are 6 big ones, mine/ 4 big ones and 2 small ones.") I was interested by what she was saying.

Recently she has been following the example of Colette, who took up needlepoint in her 80s when she gave up writing. "When I finished this book I knitted some scarves and tea cosies. It was so much fun figuring out where to put the openings for the spout and handle!" But her memoir includes much darker reflections on ageing. Near the end is a list of people important to her who have died. Typically, this is partly name-dropping: Grace Paley and Eartha Kitt both feature. But then she begins a list of reasons to go on living, "1. Kill myself, and I set a bad example/ to children and everyone who knows me."

Has she thought about killing herself?

"Yes I do get suicidal," she replies, "yes, yes, and depressed, maybe melancholy and where I could feel romantic about dying." Later she qualifies this, suggesting she was thinking of friends rather than herself, "but when someone I love dies, I do want to go with them and I have to work against that. And one way is to say OK, I am going to make a list of reasons to stay. Then I wrote about seven reasons and when I read it later I thought it looked like a to-do list and then it came to me: as long as you have a to-do list you have to keep living."

Susanna Rustin

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