汤婷婷

汤婷婷（Maxine Hong Kingston，1940年—），华裔美国女作家。生于加利福尼亚州斯托克顿，籍贯广东新会。

生平

1958年入加州大学伯克利分校进修工程学、英国文学。后任加州日落中学和夏威夷中学教师、夏威夷大学和密歇根大学英国文学系教授。成名作是回忆录式小说《女勇士》（The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts，1976），融入了中国的故事传统，获美国《现代》周刊七十年代最佳作品奖。1989年发表的《孙行者》（Tripmaster monkey : his fake book）获美国西部国际笔会奖。

Maxine Hong Kingston (Chinese: 湯婷婷; born Maxine Ting Ting Hong; October 27, 1940) is an American novelist. She is a professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated in 1962 with a B.A. degree in English. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese Americans.

Kingston has contributed to the feminist movement with such works as her memoir The Woman Warrior, which discusses gender and ethnicity and how these concepts affect the lives of women. She has received several awards for her contributions to Chinese American literature, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1981 for China Men.

Kingston has received significant criticism for reinforcing racist stereotypes in her work and for fictionalizing traditional Chinese stories in order to appeal to Western perceptions of Chinese people. She has also garnered criticism from female Asian scholars for her "'over-exaggeration' of Asian American female oppression".

Life and career

Kingston was born Maxine Ting Ting Hong on October 27, 1940, in Stockton, California, to first-generation Chinese immigrants parents: her father, Tom Hong (d. 1991) and her mother, Ying Lan Chew. She was the third of eight children and the oldest of the six born in the United States.

In China, Tom Hong worked as a professional scholar and teacher in his home village of Sun Woi, near Canton. In 1925, Hong left China for the United States in search of better prospects. However, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—a xenophobic response to the influx of Chinese workers in the 19th century—was still in effect, preventing Hong from legally entering the United States. He attempted to enter from Cuba twice before finally succeeding in 1927.

Furthermore, early-20th-century U.S. employment laws were rife with racism, leaving little interest in hiring a well-educated Chinese immigrant. Hong had been a scholar in his home village of Sun Woi, near Canton. However, in America, Hong was limited to working menial jobs - washing windows and doing laundry. He saved his earnings and became the manager of an illegal gambling house, which led him to get arrested numerous times. Hong "was canny about his arrests, never giving his real name and—because he apparently sensed that quite a few people thought that all Chinese looked alike—inventing a different name for each arrest. Consequently, he never acquired a police record in his own name." Hong was able to bring his wife over in 1939. During the fifteen years they were separated, Kingston's mother, Chew, had studied Western medicine and become a doctor. Yet in Stockton, she was just another immigrant.

Shortly thereafter, Kingston was born; she was named "Maxine" after a blonde patron at the gambling house who was always remarkably lucky. Kingston, a quiet child, did not learn English until the age of five. She recalls an I.Q. test once recording her score as zero. Asked to paint a picture for class, she presented a black sheet, representing stage curtains before a show. Her earliest memories are of World War II—cousins in uniform. Fascinated by war and soldiers, she grew up hearing her mother recount China's history as a continuous cycle of conquest and conflict: “We were always losers. We were always on the run.”

At a young age, Kingston was drawn to writing and won a five-dollar prize from Girl Scout Magazine for an essay she wrote titled "I Am an American". She majored in engineering at University of California, Berkeley, before switching to English. She met her husband, actor Earll Kingston, while they were both students at Berkeley, and they married in 1962. Kingston then began her career as a high-school teacher.