Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

In a time of destruction, create something.

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

This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don't have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read.

You can't eat straight A's.

You're too young to decide to live forever.

We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.

Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.

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.

Hunger also changes the world—when eating can't be a habit, than neither can seeing.

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.

She was one of the stars, a bright dot in blackness, without home, without a companion, in eternal cold and silence.

Perhaps women were once so dangerous they had to have their feet bound.

Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.

Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.

The images of peace are ephemeral. The language of peace is subtle. The reasons for peace, the definitions of peace, the very idea of peace have to be invented, and invented again

When you raise girls, you're raising children for strangers.

Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars.

Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure. Then I get bitter: I am not loved enough to be supported. That I am not a burden has to compensate for the sad envy when I look at women loved enough to be supported. Even now China wraps double binds around my feet.

…I have changed/I am a dandelion puffball blur. My hair,/scribbles of white lines. My face. Lines/crisscross and zigzag my face./My eyes. I am looking into eyes/whose color has turned lighter, hazy brown./Wind and time are blowing me out." –Maxine Hong Kingston

The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one's guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms.

A story can take you through a whole process of searching, seeking, confronting, through conflicts, and then to a resolution. As the storyteller and the listener, we go through a story together.

I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.

...it's the duty of artists to volunteer to do particle counting. Don't leave creation up to the accountants.

It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips – biblical god trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.)

Upon Good Earth, lay the body down, open the mouth wide, let song rush through.

The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own. (1983: 61)

Because joy and life exist nowhere but the present.

You must not tell anyone, what I am about to tell you.

I was speaking well because I was talking to her; there are people who dry up language.

I'm going away anyway. I am. Do you hear me? I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I am not, I'm not retarded. I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I am not, I'm not retarded. There's nothing wrong with my brain. Do you know what the Teacher Ghosts say about me? They tell me I'm smart, and I can win scholarships. I can get into colleges. I've already applied. I'm smart. I can do all sorts of things. I know how to get A's, and they say I could be a scientist or a mathematician if I want. I can make a living and take care of myself. So you don't have to find me a keeper who's too dumb to know a bad bargain. I'm so smart, if they say write ten pages, I can write fifteen. I can do ghost things even better than ghosts can. Not everyone thinks I'm nothing. I am not going to be a slave or a wife. Even if I am stupid and talk funny amd get sick, I won't let you turn me into a slave or a wife. I'm getting out of here. I can't stand living here anyore. It's your fault I talk weird.

If you should decide during your old age that you would like to live another five hundred years, come here and drink ten pounds of this sap,” they told me. “But don’t do it now. You’re too young to decide to live forever.

How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.

My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by necessity, a riverbank that guides her life. She plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the field and eats food left for the gods.

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. Then I get bitter: no one supports me.

And I had to get out of hating range.

Trong thời đại của sự hủy diệt, hãy tạo ra một điều gì đó. Một bài thơ. Một cuộc diễu hành. Một tình bạn. Một cộng đồng. Một địa điểm thuộc về tài sản chung. Một ngôi trường. Một lời hứa. Một nguyên tắc đạo đức. Một khoảnh khắc yên bình.

When these pictures burst, the stars drew yet further apart. Black space opened. She got to her feet to fight better

The black well of sky and stars went out and out and out forever; her body and her complexity seemed to disappear.

For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space. Sometimes a vision of normal comfort obliterated reality:

Mothers who love their children take them along.

Children, everybody, here's what to do during war: In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment.

In America my mother has eyes as strong as boulders, never once skittering off a face, but she has not learned to place decorations and phonograph needles, nor has she stopped seeing land on the other side of the oceans. Now her eyes include the relatives in China, as they once included my father smiling and smiling in his many western outfits, a different one for each photograph that he sent from America. (1983: 59)

Maybe because I was the one with the tongue cut loose, I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat.

Ocean people are different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don't sleep like eyes....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.

As they walked back to the laundry, Brave Orchid showed her sister where to buy the various groceries and how to avoid Skid Row. "On days when you are not feeling safe, walk around it. But you can walk through it unharmed on your strong days." On weak days you notice bodies on the sidewalk, and you are visible to Panhandler Ghosts and Mugger Ghosts.

The difference between mad people and sane people,” Brave Orchid explained to the children, “is that sane people have variety when they talk story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.” Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

A new darkness pulled away the room, inked out flesh and outlined bones. My mother was wide awake again. She become sharply herself - bone, wire, antenna - but she was not afraid. She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow - alone in white not unlike being alone in black. She had also sailed a boat safely between land and land.

Human beings don't work like this in China. Time goes slower there. Here we have to hurry, feed the hungry children before we're too old to work. I feel like a mother cat hunting for its kittens. She has to find them fast because in a few hours she will forget how to count or that she had any kittens at all. I can't sleep in this country because it doesn't shut down for the night. Factories, canneries, restaurants - always somebody somewhere working through the night. It never gets done all at once here. Time was different in China. One year lasted as long as my total time here; one evening so long, you could visit your women friends, drink tea, and play cards at each house, and it would still be twilight. It even got boring, nothing to do but fan ourselves. Here midnight comes and the floor's not swept, the ironing's not ready, the money's not made. I would be still young if we lived in China. (1983: 98)

Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse. Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, "'First thought best thought' is not 'First word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does.

I regret always writing, writing. I gave my kid the whole plastic bag of marshmallows, so i could have 20 minutes to write. I sat at my mother's deathbed, writing. I did swab her mouth with water, and feel her pliant tongue enjoy water, then harden and die. Before I had language, before I had stories, I wanted to write. That desire is going away. I've said what I have to say. I'll stop and look at things I called distractions. Become a reader of the world, no more writer of it.

The villagers were speeding up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted to see that her infidelity had already harmed the village, the waves of consequences would return unpredictably, sometimes in disguise, as now, to hurt her. This roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see is circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby. Awaken her to the inexorable. People who refused fatalism because they could invent small resources insisted on culpability. Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars.

The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one’s guts not be turned into action.

But the men—hungry, greedy, tired of planting in dry soil—had been forced to leave the village in order to send food-money home.

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

His Good list outstripped the Evil list; Good may always preponderate in this method of reckoning.

Once you open your eyes in the water, you become a flying creature....How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.

The whole world lived inside the gourd, the earth a green and blue pearl like the one the dragon plays with.

Here they all were together, idle above their fields, nobody hoeing, godlike; nobody weeding, New Year's in summer.

If only I could let my mother know the list, she —and the world—would become more like me, and I would never be alone again.

I refused to cook. When I had to wash dishes, I would crack one or two. “Bad girl,” my mother yelled, and sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn’t a bad girl almost a boy?

Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, TV dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts.

What are you going to do for a living? Yea, you're going to have to work because you can't be a housewife. Somebody has to marry you before you can be a housewife. And you, you are a plant. Do you know that? That's all you are if you don't talk. If you don't talk, you can't have a personality. You'll have no personality and no hair. You've got to let people know you have a personality and a brain. You think somebody is going to take care of you all your stupid life? You think you'll always have your big sister? You think somebody's going to marry you, is that it? Well you're not the type that gets dates, let alone gets married. Nobody's going to notice you. And you have to talk for interviews, speak right up in front of the boss. Don't you know that?

My mother is not smiling; Chinese do not smile for photographs. Their faces command relatives in foreign lands - 'Send money' - and prosperity for ever - 'Put food in front of this picture.' My mother does not understand Chinese- American snapshots. 'What are you laughing at?' she asks. (1983: 58)

To write out the precepts again, we contend with them, and keep them; we build our humanity, and keep our humanity alive... Thay has named the precepts 'wonderful'... Wonderful because they can protect us, and show us how to live a joyous life, an interesting, adventurous, deep, large life, and how to be with one another, and with animals, plants, and all the Earth and universe. Wonderful because when we practice the precepts, we existentially become humane, we embody loving kindness... Standing in the midst of burning ruins, I was glad that I knew the precepts. Though I kept their tenets imperfectly, even in aspiration I created some invisible good that could not be destroyed... The Five Wonderful Precepts give clear and simple directions to finding that life. In devastation, I have blueprints for making home anew (90-92). --For a Future to Be Possible: Commentaries on the Five Wonderful Precepts

To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.

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.

our land: The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening and Double Yoga. Northland Wildflowers and Quilts to Wear. Songs for the Dulcimer and Bread Baking Basics. Using Plants for Healing and I Always Look Up the Word Egregious. I took the books she’d read to me, chapter by chapter, before I could read to myself: the unabridged Bambi and Black Beauty and Little House in the Big Woods. I took the books that she’d acquired as a college student in the years right before she died: Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But I did not take the books by James Michener, the ones my mother loved the most. “Thank you,” I said now to Jeff, holding The Novel. “I’ll trade this for

Lie to Americans. Tell them you were born during the San Francisco earthquake. Tell them your birth certificate and your parents were burned up in the fire. Don't report crimes; tell them we have no crimes and no poverty. Give a new name every time you get arrested; the ghosts won't recognize you. Pay the new immigrants twenty-five cents an hour and say we have no unemployment. And of course, tell them we're against communism. Ghosts have no memory anyways and poor eyesight. And the Han people won't be pinned down.

INTRODUCTION TO GENDER AND SOCIETY The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir A classic analysis of the Western conception of the woman. Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks A primer about the power and potential of feminist action. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Feminism redefined for the twenty-first century. QUEER THEORY AND INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM Gender Trouble by Judith Butler A classic, and groundbreaking, text about gender and the boundaries of identity. Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein A 1990s-era memoir of transition and nonbinary identity. This Bridge Called My Back ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa A collection of essays about the intersections between gender, class, sexuality, and race. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde A landmark collection of essays and speeches by a lauded black lesbian feminist. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston A memoir of growing up as a Chinese American woman. MODERN HISTORY How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor A history of the Combahee River Collective, a group of radical black feminists operating in the 1960s and 1970s. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts Investigative reportage about the beginning of the AIDS crisis. A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski An LGBT history of the United States, from 1492 to the present. CONTEMPORARY QUESTIONS Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus by Vanessa Grigoriadis An exploration of the effects of the sexual revolution in American colleges. The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin A book about the shifting power dynamics between men and women. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay Essays about the author’s experiences as a woman and our cultural understanding of womanhood. All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister An investigation into the lives of twenty-first-century unmarried women. GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN FICTION Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown A groundbreaking lesbian coming-of-age novel, originally published in 1973. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin A classic of morality and desire, set in 1950s Paris, about an American man and his relationship with an Italian bartender. Angels in America by Tony Kushner A Pulitzer Prize–winning play about the Reagan-era AIDS epidemic. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson A coming-of-age and coming-out novel about a woman growing up in an evangelical household.

Probably all babies, having recently been nothing, have a tenuous hold on life.

Adultery, perhaps only a mistake during good times, became a crime when the village needed food.

…I saw twelve angels wheeling in the sun, rays of white wings and gold light. “Swans!

All heroes are bold toward food.

I couldn't tell where the stories left off and the dreams began, her voice the voice of the heroines in my sleep.

The emigrants confused the gods by diverting their curses, misleading them with crooked streets and false names. They must try to confuse their offspring as well, who, I suppose, threaten them in similar ways—always trying to get things straight, always trying to name the unspeakable. The Chinese I know hide their names; sojourners take new names when their lives change and guard their real names with silence. Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

Perhaps I made him up, and what I once had was not Chinese-sight at all but child-sight that would have disappeared eventually without such struggle.

The day was a great eye, and it was not paying much attention to me now.