文字勇士:汤婷婷

14 A Word Warrior: Maxine Hong Kingston

Kingston was born in Stockton, California 1940, she was the 3rd of eight children to a Chinese immigrant parents, and the first to be born in America.

Her American name, Maxine, was after a blonde who was always lucky in gambling.

Ting Ting, her Chinese name, comes from a Chinese poem about self-reliance.

At the early part of her school education, she kept silent and for her talking was terrible.

When she was in the fourth grade and all of a sudden a poem came out of her.

By the age of nine, her progress in English enabled her to write poems in her new language, and though she was a gifted story-teller, she preferred the solitary task of writing.

An extremely bright student, she won eleven scholarship that allowed her to attend the University of California at Berkeley.

She began as an engineering major, but soon she switched to English literature.

In 1976, while Kingston was teaching creative writing at a private school, she published her first book, The Woman Warrior.