Maxine Hong Kingston doesn't seem a great American writer in the way, say, Don DeLillo may be. Rather, she seems someone who has benefited from academia's current interest in women writers and immigrant communities. Even so, her anti-war stance is likely to bring her still more readers as opposition to current policies grows in the US, as it seems set to, if only in the wake of a routine pendulum-swing towards the Democrats.
Kingston's virtues are honesty and compassion. Woman Warrior exposed, among other things, the ruses Chinese women had to resort to in order to gain their American passports. It was a triumphant championing of both women's and immigrants' rights, even if (as she relates in this new book) some Chinese have accused her of giving away their secrets to the public at large. Her answer is that she simply told things as they were, and that everyone knew them by that time anyway -- this last hardly possible considering the great interest Woman Warrior aroused.
But the point is that Kingston does tell the truth as she sees it, and to hold anything back would be against her actual as well as her literary character. And in The Fifth Book of Peace she tells the truth about quite a wide range of people and groups in California who, for the last quarter century and more, have been opposed to much of their country's foreign policy.
In gathering together stories and incidents involving opponents of the Vietnam and Iraqi wars, together with some of their victims, physical and psychological, Kingston does a great service. When your government is saying and doing one thing and you're thinking another, it's all too easy to feel isolated, a voice crying -- or maybe even silent -- in the wilderness. Kingston, in bringing together such people in her varied and uneven narrative, creates a coalition, and thereby gives all of its members added confidence and strength. It's no accident that she works these days as a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley, probably the strongest bastion of anti-war sentiment in the entire US.
Irrespective of its hypothetical Chinese antecedents, this is genuinely a Book of Peace in the modern sense. It may even come to be a sort of bible referred to and cited by peace activists and handed out as encouragement to the wavering and uncertain. This, then, rather than its strictly literary quality, is likely to become The Fifth Book of Peace's eventual claim to fame.
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