Born on October 27, 1940, in Stockton, California, Maxine Hong Kingston is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. One of six children, Kingston was not supposed to be a writer at all: her mother wanted her to be an engineer. However, after a few semesters at the University of California at Berkeley, Kingston decided to major in English. She graduated from Berkeley in 1962 and taught English and mathematics to high school students before publishing her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts in 1976. A blend of memory and family stories, fiction and personal experiences, myth and history, The Woman Warrior won the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was included in Time magazine's top ten list of books for the year. In 1980 Kingston published China Men, which features "On Discovery" as its first story. China Men was nominated for the 1980 Pulitzer Prize and...