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By Kasey Cullen
 The Writers at Rutgers Series welcomed author Maxine Hong Kingston to the University on October 27th. Coincidentally, it was the author's birthday, and her visit began with dinner and a celebration at the Rutgers Club in her honor. Several deans, professors, graduate students, and undergraduate members of student leadership organizations joined Ms. Kingston and her husband, Earl Kingston, in celebrating her sixty-fourth birthday. Dr. To-Thi Bosacchi, Director of the Asian American Cultural Society, toasted Kingston for her significant contributions to Asian American and American culture. Mr. Kingston then toasted his wife for being a wonderful friend and companion for many decades, and Ms. Kingston laughingly led the assembled group in singing a bit of The Beatles'  "When I'm Sixty-Four."
The evening continued in the Rutgers College Student Center, where hundreds of people awaited the reading. She was introduced by Professor Shuang Shen of the English Department, who called Ms. Kingston, "one of the most important feminist writers in the United States," a writer whose work focused on the relationship between truth and fiction, always asking, "What is the value of truth as fiction, and fiction as truth?"
Ms. Kingston walked onto the stage to enthusiastic applause. She began her reading by thanking the student leadership programs that sponsored her visit to Rutgers and commented: "Leadership is a large theme in my books. My characters, my narrators are always thinking 'How am I going to be a leader?'" These concerns apply to family dynamics as well; as "the oldest of six children and the first American and the first English speaker," Ms. Kingston says, she was always wondering, "How do I lead my brothers and sisters into America?" Ms. Kingston's first reading was "the first poem I ever created - not the first I ever wrote because I didn't know how to write yet." The poem, inspired by her childhood surroundings in California, was written in a mix of English and the Cantonese dialect she spoke at home. It was a long journey, she said, to go from speaking Say Yup to speaking and writing in English, which is partly why language issues often show up in her books as parallels to struggles with cultural identity.
Ms. Kingston also read excerpts from her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, which won the National Book Critics Circle award when it was published in 1976. This famous book is a collection of narratives from the perspectives of different generations of Chinese and Chinese-American women, and is now a staple of contemporary American literature and Women's Studies classes. She later published China Men, the companion book to The Woman Warrior, which tells the tales of the men in her family, and which won the National Book Award in 1981.
Although these books are characterized as biographies, both weave together real accounts with traditional stories and imaginative ruminations, making them read more like fiction. Ms. Kingston's mix of folktales and personal accounts allows her work to depict many of the challenges American immigrant families have faced and continue to face. Her books thus reach many readers on deeply personal levels regardless of their cultural background, helping them understand their own traditions and communities.
Ms. Kingston's most recent book is The Fifth Book of Peace. In it, she revisits the story of Whittman Ah Sing, the young protagonist from her picaresque novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, as he grows into adulthood and becomes a father and advocate of nonviolence. This fictional portion of the book is paralleled by deeply personal narratives from Ms. Kingston's life. It begins with the description of the devastating loss of her house, and a manuscript she had been calling The Fourth Book of Peace, during the Oakland hills fire in 1991. In an interview about the book, Ms. Kingston explained the title:
A long time ago in China, there were three Books of Peace, all lost, probably in library fires. At changes of regimes, the Chinese destroy the former culture. I searched all over the world for those three lost Books of Peace, and when I found no trace of them, I set to work writing one for our time. I'd been working for two years when the Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire destroyed my book, which I called The Fourth Book of Peace. To have that book of peace destroyed in a fire, like its ancestors, I thought I must have been on to something cosmic.
The Fifth Book of Peace reflects both a new writing process for Ms. Kingston, and an attempt to create a new style. At the reading, Ms. Kingston described the fire, and said, "I wondered how, after this destruction, I could gather creative energy again. I think I had to find more processes by which a person can be creative." Her solution was to establish a community of writers by gathering a group of war veterans who were interested in sharing their experiences. This process led to a book that is concerned with the destruction of war but not consumed by it, focusing instead on poetically peaceful moments and attempting to shape a literary form in the spirit of nonviolence. She noted that this attempt feels particularly important to her right now, as a way of searching for hope and peace in a time of fear and war.
After the reading, Ms. Kingston answered some questions from the crowd, then graciously signed books, posed for a few photos, and enjoyed some traditional Chinese cuisine at the reception. She even stayed late to talk with admirers about the theme of loss in the new book. The Fifth Book of Peace represents a new stage in her career, gracefully merging her personal and political views with her need to write and tell stories. On her birthday, Maxine Hong Kingston's visit was a gift to the Rutgers community, a reminder of the power that writing can have in working toward healing, and toward peace.
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