Maxine Hong Kingston was born on October 27, 1940 in Stockton, California. She was the first of six American-born children; her parents, Tom and Ying Lan Hong, had had two children in China before they came to America. Her mother trained as a midwife in To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton. Her father had been brought up a scholar and taught in his village of Sun Woi, near Canton. Tom Hong left China for America in 1924, but finding no work for a poet or calligrapher, he took a job in a laundry. He was swindled out of his share of the laundry, but Ying Lan joined him in 1939 in New York City, and they moved to Stockton where Hong had been offered a job in a gambling house. Maxine was named after a lucky blond gambler who frequented the establishment. In 1976, while Kingston was teaching creative writing at the Mid-Pacific Institute, a private school, she published her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. One reviewer, Michael T. Malloy, described the book as having an exotic setting but dealing with the same subjects as mainstream American feminist literature, specifically the "Me and Mom" genre. Other reviewers were surprised by its fresh subject matter and style, and they sang the praises of this poetic, fierce, delicate, original novel/memoir. Kingston strove for a Chinese rhythm to her voice, a typical Chinese-American speech, and rich imagery; her first book was a great success. In the end of Woman Warrior, her shy girl character finds resolution as she breaks female silence and inherits an oral tradition that she carries on as a written tradition.

Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech University, "Feminism in China"

Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color

The Fictive Documentary: Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman"

"The Woman Warrior"

The Good Life