Maxine Hong Kingston: The Fifth Book of Peace
By Sheena Fallon, Development Coordinator
Last Wednesday Maxine Hong Kingston came to the University of Minnesota as part of the English Department's Esther Freier Endowed Lecture in Literature Series, with a lecture titled "The Art of Making Peace." This semester I'm teaching an introductory literature class about writing and activism, and I had been looking forward to this lecture so much that I had assigned my class The Fifth Book of Peace. It's early in the semester, and my students were having trouble making the jump from the literary journalism I had assigned at the beginning of the semester and this book. Although it says memoir on the back of the book, Kingston makes "claims" that aren't objectively and verifiably true: the Oakland-Berkley fire that took her home was in part caused by her father, recently deceased; it occurred because "God was showing us Iraq" - the first Iraq war; that the manuscript she lost in the fire, The Fourth Book of Peace, had to burn as the first three mythical books had burned.
When I was first introduced to her work in China Men, I read these moments as artistic license, an incorporation of talk-story and myth into nonfiction, which I deftly pointed out to the students in my Multicultural Literature section. But in the lecture it was clear to me that I had been reading her work all wrong - those things that seemed "made up" to me weren't fiction to her. In the course of the lecture, she told the story of The Fifth Book of Peace, and at each moment that seemed more magical realism than objective truth, stopped to share with us how she had doubted herself and what she was experiencing, and asked others if they felt or experienced the same things.
To finish her lecture, Kingston spoke about the time she and other peaceful demonstrators for CODE PINK were arrested in front of the White House on International Women's Day in 2002. Her story seemed true enough (in the nonfiction sense) until the moments before the arrests, when the "atmosphere turned a rosy color" and the protesters "gathered it into balls and threw it towards Iraq and towards the White House." The skeptic in me wanted not to believe, but the artist in me was right there with Maxine Hong Kingston, taking in the rosy atmosphere. We must imagine peace in order for it to exist.
"The way of seeing the world - even one person's seeing of it - could cause it, could change it," she writes in The Fifth Book of Peace. "Only change oneself, and the world will change." Perhaps what is so remarkable about Kingston work is that she not only allows herself to see the rosy atmosphere: she has the courage to ask others if they see it too.