Northeastern University has organised an engaging event, where the focus was on Maxine Hong Kingston’s works. She just completed writing a memoir which is a complete 230-page text. She wanted to write something that would be unique and speak of her, and hence, this memoir was born, “I returned to my way of writing as a child.”
The event saw around 50 members of the faculty, not to mention students, in the Cabral Center. It was a part of the lecture series, by the name ‘Encountering the Humanities’. The author in the lecture, in regards to her turn to writing, said, “I was born speaking poems and with talk stories.” She then proceeded this event by reading some of the more interesting passages from “I Love a Broad Margin to My Life” and “The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts”, two of her many works.
Georges Van Den Abbeele, the dean of the university’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities, is very impressed with Kingston’s works. He said, “She is the author of an entire series of transformative books and has won almost every literary award that I can think of.”
Kingston was born to first-generation Chinese immigrants. She is rather obsessed with one figure of this group – her mother, who usually appears in her writings. On that note, what I found interesting is she doesn’t fixate on big things only; she would incorporate any kind of things or events in her writings. As she puts it, “I am given to writing whatever happens that day. It could be a small event or a large event, but both are important.”
Her writing style, inspired by Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, and Norman Mailer, is laced with philosophical insight. She believes that any action undertaken will always have unforeseen consequences and she like contemplating about it early in the morning. “An act of love I do this morning,” she stated, “saves a life on a future battlefield.”
Kingston’s tales are usually thought of as expressions of deeply personal accounts. However, she doesn’t have quite the same opinions.“If I can write deep down about myself, then that is everybody else.”
Pranjali Wakde
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