Kingston, Maxine Hong (1940– )

US writer. A major voice of Chinese-American culture, her semi-fictional The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) was followed by China Men (1980), which continued her imaginative chronicling of family history and cultural folklore. Her work documents the Oriental experience, dealing with alienation, exploitation, and the problems of both national and racial identity, in a prose of delicate precision and vivid power.

Of Chinese descent, Kingston was born in Stockton, California, and moved to Honolulu, Hawaii. Her more recent books include Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), about a fifth-generation Californian who feels alien to both his Chinese heritage and American culture; To Be The Poet (2002), written mostly in verse; and The Fifth Book of Peace (2003), a novel that skilfully combines memoir, history, culture, and fantasy.