I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

Born in 1940, one of eight children, Maxine Hong Kingston is the daughter of Chinese immigrants to America. Her father, a scholar in China, ran a laundry business and a gambling den in California; her mother practised Chinese medicine. Maxine embraced education, winning a place at the prestigious university of Berkeley and becoming a teacher. But she also began to write and her extraordinary books have become key texts in the American canon. In many ways, this memoir recalls her first major work The Woman Warrior in which she blended Chinese myth with fiction and autobiography to reflect on her mother's past life in China and the experience of Chinese (and other) immigrants to America. In I Love a Broad Margin to My Life , she writes from the point of view of being sixty-five, looking back on a rich and complicated life of literature and political activism, always against the background of what it is like to have a mixed Chinese-American identity. Passages of autobiography, in which she describes such events in her life as being imprisoned with Alice Walker for demonstrating against the Iraq war, meld with a fictional journey in which she sends her avatar Wittman Ah Sing on a trip to modern China and back to visit the village where her father's life began. Beautifully written, endlessly thought-provoking, this is an important book from one of the major writers of her generation.

Maxine Hong Kingston was born in California in 1940, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She studied engineering at Berkeley before switching to English literature. After her marriage to actor Earll Kingston, she moved to Hawai'i where she worked as a teacher and continued to write her highly acclaimed books. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including, in 2008, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.