Young Chinese American Wittman Ah Sing, a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and student of the 1960s, is an absolutely extraordinary fictional creation. He’s skinny, hip, six feet tall, an unstoppable playwright, a poet, a genius, and a nut. A fifth-generation Californian, he feels alien to both his Chinese heritage and the American culture that stereotypes him and others of his race.
Maxine gives an overview of the book:
Young Chinese American Wittman Ah Sing, a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and student of the 1960s, is an absolutely extraordinary fictional creation. He’s skinny, hip, six feet tall, an unstoppable playwright, a poet, a genius, and a nut. A fifth-generation Californian, he feels alien to both his Chinese heritage and the American culture that stereotypes him and others of his race.
Read full overview »
About Maxine
Maxine Hong Kingston was born on October 27th, 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...
Published Reviews
Dec.13.2007
… Here she re-creates [a] lost fictional narrative and sets it alongside an account of her life after the [1991 Oakland fire] fire, so that the Vietnam-era doings of her antic hero, … who moves to Hawaii to...
Dec.13.2007
As far back as her late 1980s television interview with Bill Moyers, Maxine Hong Kingston talked about reimagining the contents of ancient China’s three Books of Peace—instructions on how to avoid...














Note from the author coming soon...