Educators From The United States

"I totally consider myself an American writer, and that has been my big battle: to get to realize that my roots as a writer are no longer, if they ever were, among Indian writers, but that I am writing about the territory about the feelings, of a new kind of pioneer here in America. I’m the first among Asian immigrants to be making this distinction between immigrant writing and expatriate writing. Most Indian writers prior to this, have still thought of themselves as Indians, and their literary inspiration, has come from India. India has been the source, and home. Whereas I’m saying, those are wonderful roots, but now my roots are here and my emotions are here in North America…"

"Novelists aim for fullness of catharsis, not a political pamphlet. (1996)"

"An author focuses on a few individual characters, and hopes that a larger frisson of emotion and revelation comes across to the reader. (1996)"

"I’ve never felt compelled to write about this or that, or to take a position whether it’s political or ideological. However, I know that because of who I am, what I am, this will come out. I am a woman, so therefore my writing will be about strong women. Because I am the person I am, the women will be very much along my lines and think the way I think, so to speak. It’s hard for me to write about marginal women. I don’t even know what that feels like. Therefore, I will be criticized that my male characters suffer…"

"This is another thing about being honest with one’s writing. You know that the big umbrella term is Latino/Latina. Twenty years ago, we defined ourselves categorically with the word Chicana. This has been amplified and that’s okay as long as they’re talking about the same experiences, but that is not the case. We are all migrants, there’s not one of us that did not come from an immigrant family. There are different stages; however, some are still coming in from El Salvador and Mexico, some like my family on both sides came in the early part of last century. Some come directly as rural people and others as city people, one is not better than the other…"

"… I inhabit the body of a woman, my soul is the soul of a woman, and my eyes are the eyes of a woman, so what else can come out? Of course the women are going to loom to the foreground and the males will go to the background that is not male bashing. It is not because I feel an imperative, a mission; it’s because of who I am and what I am."

"I’ve written and published nine novels, and each time I’ve found it difficult not to bring forth the issues that most concern me, whether it be class struggles, women’s issues, cultural and trans-border experiences. And sincerely, I feel comfortable delving into these issues over and over again because I see their relevance to our society today…"

"I am, I get very happy. I go into a phase of satisfaction or joy or happiness when I’m writing. It’s painful, but I like the serenity that I get when I write. I can’t be doing it always, that’s why there are gaps. When I finish with the first draft, there is a time I don’t do any writing at all. But once I get into that phase, it’s a very rich, a very fulfilling phase of my life. So I look forward to it when it comes upon me again. I am very grateful. I write because it is an experience of joy and fulfillment."

"…We Chicana/o authors are naturally drawn to concentrate on the challenges and issues that confront our society, which in turn are different from those that our Latin American colleagues face. I really think that we, on this side of the border, tend to be more direct and frank; perhaps some of us might be considered more audacious and blunt. And I believe this comes to us as a result of being brought up in the U.S., where we’re taught to be outspoken. Where a Latin American author circumvents or evades, a Chicana/o aims straight at the heart of the issue without mincing words."

"makes me feel seen:) The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. One of the first books where I saw my multiple identities—American, Chinese, daughter—on the page, and after all these years it’s still one of the most powerful."

"what I don't like is the word "fiction." I think it's a false word, and it's led to "non-fiction." I mean, you're either a storyteller, an inventor in language or event or whatever, or a poet of storytelling-or you're not I guess I'd use the example of Maxine Hong Kingston, who for The Woman Warrior got a non-fiction award. Well, that really got me sore, because that really was a great work of storytelling."

"… It’s difficult not to fall into the stereotype trap here because our culture almost encourages it. It’s undeniable that among us live the Dominant Machos and the Submissive Females. However, I’ve tried to conquer that reality by working with it, yet not dehumanizing those characters, thus keeping them from being stereotypes."

"Maxine Hong Kingston is one of our best writers."

"The "unknown" is often depicted in racist literature as the "darkness" within a person. Similarly, sexist writers will refer to fear in the form of the vagina, calling it "the orifice of death." In contrast, it is a pleasure to read works such as Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, where fear and alienation are described as "the white ghosts." And yet, the bulk of literature in this country reinforces the myth that what is dark and female is evil. Consequently, each of us-whether dark, female, or both-has in some way internalized this oppressive imagery. What the oppressor often succeeds in doing is simply externalizing his fears, projecting them into the bodies of women, Asians, gays, disabled folks, whoever seems most "other.""

"Of course Toni Morrison's work has been important to me, and that of Maxine Hong Kingston. Both women have encouraged me to believe that I'm on the right track, and that we share something-that it's not so lonely, for there are other women and other people thinking and writing about the same sorts of things."

"Growing up as I did as a kid, I don't see how I could not have been a feminist. In Chinese culture, people always talk about how girls are bad. When you hear that, right away it makes you radical like anything. (1977)"

"When I read Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir, The Woman Warrior, it struck me with particular force because of the warrior fantasies I had had in my childhood... At the heart of her drama is the tension between fantasy and insanity, balanced with exquisite skill."

"The Woman Warrior was a very important book in my life. I discovered it in 1977…in Amherst, Massachusetts. I was an undergraduate there...for a long time I was in despair. I thought, there was really no audience for my voice. And the narrator, the protagonist in The Woman Warrior, she was working hard to let her voice out. She had to wade through the contradictions of this dual culture, this heavy-duty heritage. If she had the power and the fortitude to continue her 'pressed duck' voice, to eke out that voice, I said, perhaps so must I continue my struggle."

"sometimes I think writing has nothing to do with me and that I shouldn't take credit for it. I feel that something comes from outside through me onto the typewritten paper. Often, I sit at the typewriter and compose stuff I didn't even know I knew. It happens all the time. It's not like I've decided what I'm going to write. (1977)"

"(What do you think about revenge?) MHK: I come from a culture where revenge is important. So many of the stories and operas I grew up on have that theme of revenge. I think has something to do with justice in our lifetime rather than justice in another reincarnation. But in American culture revenge is really questioned. Christianity says no revenge. The vengeance I will permit myself has to come in a new form. I wrote in The Woman Warrior that the Chinese idiom for "revenge" can also mean "reporting to five families." If you can find the words for an injustice and put it in some artistic shape, and let everyone know, then revenge has taken place. It has something to do with broadcasting the reputation of one that you want revenge against. Revenge cannot take the form of an eye for an eye, not like that. (1986)"

"I love Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior-what a wonderful book that was for me. That gave me permission to keep going with what I'd started with House on Mango Street."

"(Your books are a lot about people's inhumanity to one another, so I wondered where you find comfort and balance?) MHK: I ask that of myself a lot: where are the sources of life so that you can renew yourself! I find help in nature. We should always remember to plop ourselves under the trees because every time I've ever done that I feel the earth giving me energy and the sky giving me perspective, and I come as close as I ever do to satori. Then I realize that life in the city cuts me up into pieces. I know that, and yet I don't leave it. All I have to do is go out into nature and it gives me strength to come back and work on. And I read-there are writers who give you life whether or not they write well, it's very odd. I feel that way about Anaïs Nin, who sometimes I don't think writes well. I re-read Orlando whenever I feel stuck, and I read poetry. (1986)"

"I feel so bad sometimes thinking of this great oral tradition, and along comes somebody like me who writes it down. People go to the library and pull out a book and say, "Here's the authentic story." It's not! That was only the odd person who came along, like Homer, and wrote it down. It's the same thing with the Chinese. Most of the tradition was oral and then someone came along and wrote it down."

"When I write I also claim America in a literary way, in an artistic way. When people claim countries, it's usually thought of as conquering them in war. I'm claiming America in a pacifist way, in an artistic way."

"I feel that everyone has a blurred area, which is a border between their imagination and what actually happens, and I am very interested in that border."

"You go into the subconscious by not writing and then you make it normal consciousness by writing. Then you rewrite until you are working almost mechanically: the grammar and the structure all mental and rational. But now comes the time for not doing any writing. I mean to get far into the subconscious, where there are not word sequences."

"I don't like hearing non-Chinese people say to a Chinese person, "Well now I know about you because I have read Maxine Hong Kingston's books." Each artist has a unique voice. Many readers don't understand that. The problem of how "representative" one is will only be solved when we have many more Chinese American writers. Then readers will see how diverse our people are."

"The only way to get any work done-without polling everybody, as in a statistical study in sociology-is to give your own peculiar vision; because that's what's interesting, the way one person sees the world. It's up to other people to ask themselves whether they think like that or not. And if they don't think like you, that should be very exciting to them. They would read about something that they are completely unfamiliar with... I was just in Hong Kong and I loved seeing Chinese who were different from myself. To think of the possibility of another way of being Chinese or being a human being is much more exciting than to see someone just like me."

"it's like a habit. I have to eat, I have to breathe, I have to write."

"Asian American writers like Maxine Hong Kingston are aware of that too: that you can think in another language and borrow from its sensibility, from its syntax and idiomatic phrasing to add something new to the English language"

"part of the tension in my writing is that the oral tradition is very different from the written, and I see the oral tradition as being very alive, very immediate. It has the impact of command; it has the impact of directly influencing action. Also the oral stories change. A story changes from telling to telling. It changes according to the needs of the listener, according to the needs of the day, according to the interest of the time, and the story can be different from day to day. So what happens when you write it down? Writing is so static. The story will remain as printed for the next two hundred years and it's not going to change. That really bothers me, because what would really be neat would be for the words to change on the page every time, but they can't. So the way I tried to solve this problem was to keep ambiguity in the writing all the time."

"One of the wonderful things about the 1960s was language. There was a new language and there were wonderful new ways of describing psychedelic states, spiritual states, trying to find new words for political actions like those of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. What do you call that when you sit at the lunch counter and you don't move and you do it with peace and love?"

"I do believe that if we study any one discipline deeply, it will connect us to everything else."

"(Q: "In your Book of Peace, what would you be claiming?") Oh, what would I be claiming this time? What I would like to do is claim evolution that we can evolve past being a warring species into a peaceful species so that we are not predators anymore, and that we stop being carnivorous. If only we could stop being cannibals-"

"I think that in order to recognize a warm-hearted human being, you have to be a warm-hearted human being yourself."

"I don't want to regurgitate. Writing should be constantly an act of creation and going forward into the new."

"remembrance and that happiness are mourning, too, transformed."

"(Q: "will that be your major goal-to achieve peace?") Yes, yes-to put out into the world a vision of peaceful living and of how human beings can relate to one another harmoniously and joyfully and how groups of people come together. I feel that peace has hardly been imagined. It is rarely dramatized in the theater, in the movies, even in books."

"I have this motto which is, Pay attention and tell the truth. And in telling the truth, sometimes you tell it fictionally, sometimes you tell it nonfictionally."

"I think that if a person doesn't read, maybe they cannot come out of themselves. You know you delineated a. . .I think a growth process of human development. . .first there is an awareness of the ego, the self, and then of another and many others to become a communal person. And we need to go even beyond that our family, tribe, Chinatown, gang, nation-into a larger selflessness or agape. I think it is a very rare person who will take on public and global responsibilities... Reading and writing should expand and transform the self...must be an essential tool for envisioning and making the world."

"If we imagine characters, can we cause them to appear in the real world? What if I could strongly write peace, I can cause an end to war."

"The way I've looked at it is that I want to write about myself and other people in the truest way possible. To write a true autobiography or biography, I have to know what the other person dreams and how her imagination works. I am less interested in dates and facts."

"I do believe that our lives and our art go together. Who I am and what I write are the same...I feel that the writing process doesn't just begin when you are putting words on paper. It begins in the living that you do before, and I feel powerful enough now so that I can set up my daily living circumstances in order to support me and support my art."

"("A friend once described Woman Warrior as convoluted.") MHK: Oh, I'm very proud of being convoluted. I try to be convoluted. Life is convoluted. I know there are some people who have a certain expectation of a linear kind of story where everything is explained to them and it goes at a slower pace and it's more of an accessible, popular kind of writing style. If they expect that, then they can't get into a more complicated book. I think that people like that miss out on something because they are not willing to work harder."

"I've spent too many years carrying writing as if it were a burden that's only mine. I want to tell everybody, and young people too, that there are many things that we must do in community. I wish I had started sooner."

"I am a very slow, slow writer and thinker and reader- (Interviewer: You are a perfectionist.) MHK: Actually I think maybe it's the normal course of creation. The journey in the Odyssey takes twenty years. It takes twenty years to live an experience, learn its meanings, find the words to tell it."

"The woman is exceptional."

"war is utter destructive violent chaos. There is no "art," no "order(s)," no "just war." No matter what the ideologies, wars are the same. (sonshi)"

"When I was writing The Woman Warrior, I felt that I was writing something completely different; that nothing like it had ever been written. So I thought if I couldn’t get it published, I would just keep copies and it would really be okay if it was published after I die or if somebody discovered it 100 years from now, 1,000 years from now. I’m always thinking about people reading it someday — and that will be alright."

"Remember when the narrator is bullying the other girl? She says to her, “Just say ‘ow.’ Just say anything, just make a sound.” I guess that’s the first step: make a sound. I think for everybody that just being able to speak up is a bravery, which they have to learn. But for a writer, it’s to be able to find a style and a rhythm and a structure to be able to tell a story. I think that is another way of finding voice, and it’s not that easy…."