Educators From The United States

"what I want is to give people questions (which I think are very creative things) and then when people wrestle with them and struggle with them in their own minds and in their own lives, all kinds of exciting things happen to them. I don't want people to throw the responsibility back to me. (1990)"

"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."

"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."

"(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 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."

"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."

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

"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?"

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

"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."

"(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."

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

"There's a redemption that takes place in art (1990)"

"It's so important for an artist of any kind not to identify with a group. You know what I mean? (Int: And transgress those borders...) LYL: It's about transgression. So if the term Asian American empowers us, fine. But the minute it starts making us smaller than we are....They're going to have to deal with Maxine Hong Kingston the way they deal with Virginia Woolf or any other major writer. They're not going to be able to sweep her into a little ghetto. She has already exceeded those boundaries. They're going to have to deal with her as an equal. In this way, I'm speaking to the Anglo community. To the Asian American community, I would say, "Yes, she's one of us!" But, to the Anglo community, I would say, "Don't try to ghettoize us," because the writers who are among us have already equaled and surpassed many of the Anglo writers they send up the slag."

"All during the Vietnam War, I could feel there was a darkness hanging over the whole world and it lasted for so long."

"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."

"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."

"what I wanted to do was... I was going to write against the minimalist novel in order to write a global novel. The reason I was thinking of a global novel was that I began to notice that every city that I went to anywhere in the world is a cosmopolitan city. You come to Beijing, London, anywhere, and you are surrounded by people from all over the world. Every country has had its diaspora and everybody is going everywhere, and so in order to write a story about any city, any American city or any other city, you have to be able to write characters from every cultural background. A story of a city is also the story of all the people on the entire planet."

"Mental work was harder than physical work, although it was not exactly the mind that teaching strained. (p41)"

"Writing is an act of nonviolence, but it’s very active, very aggressive, but you’re not setting off bombs or guns. Just using the pen. It’s like shouting and getting your voice heard and the range is worldwide. You might not be able to stop a war right now, but the words can go out and influence the atmosphere and the world, way into the future."

"I think that individual voices are not as strong as a community of voices. If we can make a community of voices, then we can speak more truth. Also in a community, we learn to listen…"

"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."

"Once upon a time, a man, named Tang Ao, looking for the Gold Mountain, crossed an ocean, and came upon the Land of Women. The women immediately captured him, not on guard against ladies. When they asked Tang Ao to come along, he followed; if he had had male companions, he would've winked over his shoulder. (first lines)"

"Community is not built once-and-for-all; people have to imagine, practice, and re-create it. (p306)"

"They think that Americans are either white or Black. I can't wear that civil-rights button with the Black hand and the white hand shaking each other. I have a nightmare-after duking it out, someday Blacks and whites will shake hands over my head. I'm the little yellow man beneath the bridge of their hands and overlooked. (p307)"

"Apparently many Caucasians in America do not know that a person born in the USA is automatically American, no matter how he or she may look...Too many people use those two words interchangeably, 'American' and "Caucasian"."

"Do I have to explain why 'exotic' pisses me off, and 'not exotic' pisses me off? They've got us in a bag, which we aren't punching our way out of. To be exotic or to be not-exotic is not a question about Americans or about humans. Okay, okay. Take me, for example. I'm common ordinary. Plain black sweater. Blue jeans. Tennis shoes ordinaire. Clean soo mun shaven. What's so exotic? My hair's too long, huh? Is that it? It's the hair? (p308)"

"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."

"When I write most deeply, fly the highest, reach the furthest, I write like a diarist-that is, my audience is myself. I dare to write anything because I can burn my papers at any moment. I do not begin with the thought of an audience peering over my shoulder, nor do I find my being understood a common occurrence anyway-a miracle when it happens."

"I hope my writing has many layers, as human beings have layers."

"Those critics who do not explore why and how this book is different but merely point out its difference as a flaw have a very disturbing idea about the role of the writer. Why must I 'represent' anyone besides myself? Why should I be denied an individual artistic vision?"

"He did too have a philosophy of life: Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people. (p223)"

"She's lived for a long time, and in many places. Lucky to have her here now. (p268)"

"He spent the rest of the night looking for the plot of our ever-branching lives. A job can't be the plot of life, and not a soapy love-marriage-divorce--and hell no, not Viet Nam. (p288)"

"The lights of the city on hills make a vertical shimmer from sky straight into the water, like a backdrop, like a dream. (p37)"

"Leaning with his back against the door, he could hear this voice, then that one. All was silent but for one voice at a time telling a life. (p214)"

"Linda wrote in her Ph.D. dissertation: "Vietnam duty provided the most unambiguous source of antiwar sentiment." War causes peace. (p227)"

"Maybe it comes from living in San Francisco, city of clammy humors and foghorns that warn and warn-omen, o-o-men, o dolorous omen, o dolors of omens-and not enough sun, but Wittman Ah Sing considered suicide every day. Entertained it. (first lines)"

"What's crazy is the idea that revolutionaries must shoot and bomb and kill, that revolution is the same as war. (p305)"

"In the whole dark universe, I've met you at this bit of fire, and we speak with each other, and listen to each other. All of life and the war led up to this present time of being here with you. (p209)"

"When the peace demonstrations turned violent, and doves and hawks were using the same tactics-revolutionary and governmental provocateurs infiltrating parades and vigils, Governor Ray Gun ordering the National Guard and helicopters to tear-gas and shoot up People's Park and Berkeley (they killed James Rector, and blinded an artist)-Wittman Ah Sing and Taña made up their minds to leave America. (first lines)"

"The wind is time blowing by. (p189)"

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

"Whatever there is when there isn't war has to be invented. What do people do in peace? Peace has barely been thought. (p306)"

"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."

"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."

"To say we are inscrutable, mysterious, exotic denies us our common humanness, because it says that we are so different from a regular human being that we are by our nature intrinsically unknowable. Thus the stereotyper aggressively defends ignorance. Nor do we want to be called not inscrutable, exotic, mysterious. These are false ways of looking at us. We do not want to be measured by a false standard at all."

"I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. (p29)"

"Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing. (p26)"