The Fifth Book of Peace

Maxine Hong Kingston

Secker & Warburg, 2003 - Fiction - 401 pages

"In the middle section of this book, Kingston reconstructs for us her lost novel, the lush and compelling story of the Chinese-American Wittman Ah Sing and his wife, Tana - California artists who flee to Hawaii to evade the draft during the Vietnam War. Wittman and Tana help to create an official Sanctuary for deserters and GIs who've returned devastated by their experiences in Vietnam - not unlike, as it turns out, the metamorphical sanctuary Maxine creates, back in her real world, by inviting war veterans to participate in writing workshops. As the vets share their stories, she teaches them both the value of writing - the accurate transcription of what is in the heart - and the value of community.".

About the author

Born in California to immigrant Chinese parents, Kingston was educated at the University of California at Berkeley. Kingston soared to literary celebrity upon the publication of her autobiographica The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976). The Woman Warrior is dominated by Kingston's mother; her next work, China Men (1980), although not autobiographical in the manner of her previous book, is focused on her father and on the other men in her family, giving fictionalized, poetic versions of their histories. The combination of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and myth in both books create a form of balanced opposites that one critic has likened to yin and yang. Her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, was published in 1989.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Fifth Book of Peace
• Author: Maxine Hong Kingston
• Publisher: Secker & Warburg, 2003
• ISBN: 0436202646, 9780436202643
• Length: 401 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General