Maxine Hong Kingston has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 14 ratings. The most-rated is The Woman Warrior.
The Woman Warrior
Summary
Acclaimed author Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior broke new ground when it was first published 35 years ago, weaving autobiography, history, folklore, and fantasy in to a candid and revelatory story about the daughter of Chinese immigrants in mid-20th century California. Now in audio for the first time, The Woman Warrior is read by television and movie star Ming-Na (ER, Mulan) in a performance that captures the book’s amazing spectrum of hope, longing, fear, and strength. Kingston, winner of the National Book Award and National Humanities Medal, beautifully mixes reality and fantasy in relating her experience growing up a stranger in America and an outsider to her family’s history in China. Thanks to the author’s unique storytelling style and voice, this book remains one of the most commonly taught college texts in America. Hear it performed here for the first time.
©1975, 1976 Maxine Hong Kingston (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
I Love a Broad Margin to My Life
Summary
Born in 1940, one of eight children, Maxine Hong Kingston is the daughter of Chinese immigrants to America. Her father, a scholar in China, ran a laundry business and a gambling house in California; her mother, a doctor in China, helped with the laundry and worked in the fields. Maxine won scholarships to the University of California at Berkeley, where she returned to teach as Senior Lecturer in the Department of English. But alongside her academic life, she had embarked on a career as a writer, and her extraordinary books have become key texts in the American canon. In many ways this memoir recalls her first major work, The Woman Warrior, in which she blended Chinese myth with fiction and autobiography to reflect on her mother's past life in China and the experience of immigrants to America. In I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, she writes from the point of view of being 65, looking back on a rich and complex life of literature and political activism, always against the background of what it is like to have a mixed Chinese-American identity. Passages of autobiography, in which she describes such events in her life as being imprisoned with Alice Walker for demonstrating against the Iraq war, meld with a fictional journey in which she sends her avatar Wittman Ah Sing on a trip to modern China. She also evokes her own poignant journey, without a guide, back to the villages of her father and mother. Beautifully written, endlessly thought-provoking, this is an important book from one of the major writers of her generation.
©2011 Maxine Hong Kingston (P)2011 Audible, Inc.