Memoirists From The United States

"While I love young people, I like to talk to people my own age. I feel very lucky when we get together and there are middle-aged people and they still have their art, their writing, their acting. That's exciting. Like there is still life and the business of time and taking that away from them has not stopped them from being youthful."

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

"I am looking for a language of peace. I am trying to rewrite a book of peace. And so maybe that is fighting for the soul, not just of Chinese American people, but the human soul. I want the human soul to be one where people care for one another and where people cherish and nourish and value one another, and I am trying to think of ways of conflict resolution that have to do with talking or hugging or something, whereas his idea of conflict resolution is to kill each other. (1991)"

"("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."

"One of the things he (Thích Nhất Hạnh) says is that we don't know how to feel peace. We don't understand the joy that is peace. We think that it's boring. And that is an aesthetic and a social perception. He is dealing with many of these same problems we are facing, and I just know he has some answers. (1991)"

"I feel that it's part of my work as an artist, a creator, a human being, is to integrate and to be more inclusive and to define American as large and not as exclusive. (2007)"

"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."

"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)"

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"No husband of mine will say, "I could have been a drummer, but I had to think about the wife and kids. You know how it is." Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure. (p48)"

"From the fairy tales, I've learned exactly who the enemy are. I easily recognize them-business-suited in their modern American executive guise, each boss two feet taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye. (p48)"

"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."

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

"I had to get out of hating range. (p52)"

"Not many women got to live out the daydream of women—to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself. (p61)"

"These struggles have got to result in happy endings for all, and the readers must learn not to worship tragedy as the highest art any more. (1990)"

"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."

"(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-"

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

""You must not tell anyone," my mother said, "what I am about to tell you." (First line, "No Name Woman")"

"He repeated himself so often that some of what he said seeped into the ears. (p190)"

"Attraction eludes control so stubbornly that whole societies designed to organize relationships among people cannot keep order, not even when they bind people to one another from childhood and raise them together. (p12, "No Name Woman")"

"Ocean people are different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don't sleep like eyes. Those who live by the sea examine the driftwood and glass balls that float from foreign ships. They let scores of invisible imps loose out of found bottles. In a scoop of salt water, they revive the dead blobs that have been beached in storms and tides: fins, whiskers, and gills unfold; mouths, eyes, and colors bloom and spread. Sometimes ocean people are given to understand the newness and oldness of the world; then all morning they try to keep that boundless joy like a little sun inside their chests. The ocean also makes its people know immensity. (p90)"

""We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment." (Brave Orchid, p154, "At the Western Palace")"

"As you know, any plain person you chance to meet can prove to be a powerful immortal in disguise come to test you. (p119)"

"The hero's home has its own magic. (p81)"

"Fancy lovers never last. (p81)"

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

"The difference between mad people and sane people...is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over. (p159, "At the Western Palace")"

"He sings melodies that wind like ribbons into the vistas. (p75)"

"I don't want anybody attached to me forever with gratitude. (p85)"

"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"."

"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."

"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."

"I travel a lot, and I know that I communicate very well in person, on one to one, but the books say things in a better way than I can get verbally, and also it works so efficiently, with those books getting out all over the world. (1990)"

"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."

"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)"

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

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

"When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound. (p19)"

"The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods. (p64)"

"We confuse gay liberation with straight imitation. Straightness is our goal. This pushes us away from the uniqueness that is the gay experience."