I Love a Broad Margin To My Life

Jan 18, 2025 1:52 AM

Author:Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston, author of such seminal works as The Woman Warrior and China Men, is one of the most important American writers of her generation. In this remarkable memoir, she writes from the point of view of being sixty-five, 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 ficitonal 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 Chinese villages her father and mother left in order to come to America.

Reviews

This will delight Hong Kingston's admirers. It may test the uninitiated, but the author's verbal and linguistic mastery makes handsome amends

—— Times Literary Supplement

A splendid raconteur, who shares with us the myths and stories that emerge from the lode of a culture's deepest realities

—— Chicago Tribune

A meditation on form and formlessness, on meaning and identity, and [on] how the most essential truths often exist outside the boundaries

—— Los Angeles Times

This isn't just first class scholarship, it's energetic writing ... a must-read for anyone who wants to know why every night a billion people got to bed obese and another billion go to bed hungry

—— George Alagiah

It is an absorbing, fascinating and timely book. The analysis ... is compelling, and their warning is stark. Best of all, it's a rattling good read

—— Matthew Fort

Food is powerful stuff not to be trifled with. A grand read

—— Fergus Henderson

A lively, informative, panic-free guide to the end of our "food empire" and where we go from here

—— Jeremy Harding, Contributing Editor, LRB

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