Wittman Ah Sing is an unstoppable hipster poet and playwright on the streets of San Francisco, after the Beats have left and before the hippies have arrived. He falls in love with Nancy the Beautiful, marries Tana, and chases his dream to write and stage an epic drama spanning America and China.

In her singular voice—humble, elegiac, practical—Maxine Hong Kingston sets out to reflect on aging as she turns sixty-five. Kingston’s swift, effortlessly flowing verse lines feel instantly natural in this fresh approach to the art of memoir, as she circles from present to past and back, from lunch with a writer friend to the funeral of a Vietnam veteran, from her long marriage (“can’t divorce until we get it right. / Love, that is. Get love right”) to her arrest at a peace march in Washington, where she and her "sisters" protested the Iraq war in the George W. Bush years. Kingston embraces Thoreau’s notion of a “broad margin,” hoping to expand her vista: “I’m standing on top of a hill; / I can see everywhichway— / the long way that I came, and the few / places I have yet to go. Treat / my whole life as if it were a day.” On her journeys as writer, peace activist, teacher, and mother, Kingston revisits her most beloved characters: she learns the final fate of her Woman Warrior, and she takes her Tripmaster Monkey, a hip Chinese American, on a journey through China, where he has never been—a trip that becomes a beautiful meditation on the country then and now, on a culture where rice farmers still work in the age-old way, even as a new era is dawning. “All over China,” she writes, “and places where Chinese are, populations / are on the move, going home. That home / where Mother and Father are buried. Doors / between heaven and earth open wide.” Such is the spirit of this wonderful book—a sense of doors opening wide onto an American life of great purpose and joy, and the tonic wisdom of a writer we have come to cherish. From the Hardcover edition.

A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity.

From the National Book Award-winning author of classics like THE WOMAN WARRIOR comes a stirring collection of essays, celebrating memory, history, and island tradition.In these eleven thought-provoking pieces, originally gathered in a limited, hand-printed edition, acclaimed writer and feminist Maxine Hong Kingston tells stories of Hawai'i "piece by piece, and hope that the sum praises her." The essays provide readers with a generous sampling of Kingston's signature: her exquisite angle of vision, her balanced and clear-sighted prose, and her stunning insight that awakens one to a wealth of knowledge.