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The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 16 (2005)

Reconﬁguring the “American Paciﬁc”:
Narrative Reenactments of Viet Nam
in Maxine Hong Kingston’s
The Fifth Book of Peace
Gayle K. SATO*

In 1967, Earll and I, with our son, left Berkeley in despair over the war. . . .
We had not, of course, escaped from the war, but had put ourselves in the very
midst of it, as close as you could get and remain in the United States. We shouldhave though of it—hardware and soldiers were sent to Hawai‘i, which funneledeverything to Vietnam. . . . We heard the target practice—with missiles—in
the mountains, where we hiked, and looked at the jagged red dirt like wounds
in the earth’s green skin.
—from “War,” Hawai‘i One Summer
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. . . .
Failing to fetch me at ﬁrst keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
—from “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass
Dawn of the day of meeting the veterans, . . . I dig peelings and bamboo
leaves and coffee grounds and ashes into my new compost; I’m making
earth. . . . I strew grass seed, and think about Walt Whitman’s grass, which
grows from the dead.
—from “Earth,” The Fifth Book of Peace
Copyright © 2005 Gayle K. Sato. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Professor, Meiji University

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GAYLE K. SATOI REMEMBERING WAR AND WRITING PEACE
Maxine Hong Kingston is often said to be the most widely-taught living author in the United States.1 Her fame rests chieﬂy on her ﬁrst book,
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976),
which did more than any other single work to galvanize and garnerrespect for the ﬁeld of Asian American literary studies when it was still
an emerging discipline in the seventies and eighties. When Kingston’shome was destroyed by the Oakland-Berkeley ﬁre in October 1991, shelost a nearly completed manuscript called “The Fourth Book of Peace,”a work conceived as continuing a legendary series of Chinese “Books ofPeace” that were “lost in deliberate ﬁres,” victims of book-burnings ordered by ruling monarchs who had acquired and maintained their power
through war.2 Kingston heard about the ﬁre on the radio as she was driving home from a funeral service for her father. Thinking to save her bookand a few other precious possessions inherited from her parents, sherushed to the area, slipped past police barricades, and walked through asmoldering, blackened landscape to get to the site of her home, which
she found completely leveled. The Persian Gulf War was then in progress, and she emerged from the site with a piercing vision of the devastation being wrought in Iraq and the necessity of communicating thisvision to others. She quotes from Oakland Fire Captain Ray Gatchalian,
Green Beret and Vietnam veteran, to articulate the connection between
ﬁre and war that inspired her to rewrite the lost book as a renewed commitment to paciﬁsm:“Seeing it the next morning, it brought me back to the shock and horror of
Vietnam. When I looked down on the devastation that day, I thought what an
opportunity this would be to bring busloads of people and busloads of children
and tell them when we, as a country, decide to go to war against somebody,this is what we are going to get. When we decide to send our military and ourbombs into a country, this is what we’re deciding to do.”3

The day after the ﬁre, Kingston revisited the site with two friends tosearch for her book manuscript, which she ﬁnally found, a feathery thickness of white ash that melted instantly beneath the weight of her hand.
Thereafter, Kingston returned many times with family and friends or byherself to retrieve burnt bits and pieces of former possessions, some recognizable and others not, until she realized that there was no end to sucha process and began searching for other ways of dealing with the com-

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bined loss of father, home, and book. The Fifth Book of Peace, publishedtwelve years after the ﬁre and in the midst of the second US war against
Iraq, not only rewrites the lost “fourth book” but reframes Kingston’s
entire oeuvre as a form of peace activism through writing. The Fifth Book
of Peace offers an imaginative reconﬁguration of “American Paciﬁc”
from its embodiment and signiﬁcation of military-based paciﬁcation into
places and practices of non-violent paciﬁsm.
This reconﬁguration of the American Paciﬁc takes the form of narrative reenactments of the Viet Nam War from the point of view of peace
activism in the seventies and veterans remembering Viet Nam in thenineties. These reenactments embody a process of collaboratively remembering and writing Viet Nam, a narrative process that is both collective and private, critical and redemptive, and that offers closure
through insistence on incompleteness. Kingston’s concern with memory
work’s methods and results places her writing within an extensive corpusof Asian American literature that critically remembers and re-presents
the history of twentieth-century US wars in Asia. Although such memory work has always been a strong component of Asian American literature, an escalation of new US wars abroad in the closing decades of thetwentieth century together with conﬂicting transnational movements toremember or redress the heroes and victims of different theaters of WorldWar II have lent a particular urgency to the task of reading Asian
American literature within the framework of Asian/American war memory.4
The concept of “narrative reenactment” deployed here is adapted from
Marita Sturken’s discussion of cultural memory as a dynamic, collaborative process involving both reconstruction and erasure. In her book
Tangled Memories, which investigates the forms and politics of remembering the Viet Nam War and the AIDS epidemic, Sturken views memory as “a narrative rather than a replica of an experience that can be
retrieved and relived,”5 and argues that public memory “most often takes
the form of cultural reenactment, the retelling of the past in order to create narratives of closure and to promote processes of healing.”6 This definition reworks the psychoanalytic meaning of the term “reenactment,”
which signiﬁes a survivor’s unavoidable repetition of a traumatic experience. Reenactment in the psychoanalytic sense occurs when a subject
is unable to occupy a point of view outside an event because its overwhelming nature resists narrativization; in such cases, memory is restricted to a literal repetition, or reenactment, of the original traumatic

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scene.7 Although such a model of blocked narration has been used effectively by literary critics to analyze narrative representations of traumatic
memory, Sturken’s reconceptualization of reenactment facilitates analysis of therapeutically- or redress-oriented narratives of Asian/American
wars, including Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace.
Sturken’s “narrative reenactment” is a productive framework because
it situates textual analysis in the middle ground between pathologicaltraumatization and complete health. This middle ground is where many
Asian/American literary representations of war memory are situated,deﬁned at one end by the unacceptability of abject incapacitation and at
the other by the impossibility of perfect agency. In this middle ground,
Asian American writers envision psychic and political recuperation
while remaining skeptical about the possibility or desirability of complete recovery. The four major narratives comprising The Fifth Book of
Peace occupy this middle ground. Kingston’s account of the ﬁre and its
effect on her artistic activity (chapters one and two, called “Fire” and“Paper”), the ﬁctional story of activist Wittman Ah Sing’s relocation to
Hawai‘i to avoid being drafted and to search for a more promising
environment for paciﬁst living (chapter three, called “Water”), andKingston’s account of teaching writing workshops for Vietnam veteransin the wake of the ﬁre (chapter four, called “Earth”) are narratives thatreenact the suffering of participating in or witnessing the Viet Nam War.
It is the process of narrative reenactment—a process of returning to thesame ground to remember and retell it yet articulate it anew each time,
a process that creates an incremental and always partial narrative
recovery of the past—that contains the possibility of an ethical, community-building practice of paciﬁsm. This paper analyzes the narrative
reenactment of Viet Nam comprising chapter three of The Fifth Book of
Peace in terms of Kingston’s reconﬁguration of “American Paciﬁc.” The
next section will build a context for such an analysis by tracing the trajectory of Kingston’s oeuvre as reﬂecting a principle of narrative reenactment, whereby each new work revisits and expands on previously
narrated episodes of war memory and thus contributes to an evolving
intertextual narrative of paciﬁsm. The third section will discuss the implications of Kingston’s use of American poet Walt Whitman in her representation of anti-war activism in Hawai‘i. I will argue that Kingston’s
use of Whitman enables a reconﬁguration of “American Paciﬁc” as aplace and practice of collaborative grassroots paciﬁsm, and that thisreconﬁguration which comprises chapter three of The Fifth Book of5-Gayle Sato(p111) 6/9 05.7.12 6:45 PM ページ 115

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Peace is part of the author’s continuously evolving narrative reenactment of Viet Nam and other US wars in Asia.
II

PACIFISM AS INTERTEXTUALITY IN KINGSTON’S WRITINGS:FROM WOMEN WARRIORS TO BOOKS OF PEACE

Kingston’s six books are notable for their destabilization of traditionally deﬁned boundaries between ﬁction and autobiography, and for theircounter-memories of Chinese American history which present a multicultural and feminist critique of dominant US narratives of national identity. The ﬁrst and second books, The Woman Warrior (1976) and China
Men (1980), established Kingston reputation as an autobiographer andignited a longstanding debate within the Asian American community
around issues of cultural “authenticity,” artistic license, and the ethnic
writer’s gendered relationship to dominant culture.8 Although The
Woman Warrior and China Men were originally conceived as one work,
Kingston decided to publish them separately, with the result that The
Woman Warrior narrates stories about historical and legendary Chineseand Chinese American women, including Kingston’s female relatives,
while China Men does the same for Chinese and Chinese American men.
These two books were followed by Hawai‘i One Summer (1987), a slender volume of personal essays about Hawai‘i that originally appeared ina column written for the New York Times during the 1970s. First published as a limited handbound edition, Hawai‘i One Summer was a little
known work until the University of Hawai‘i Press reissued it in 1998.
Kingston’s fourth book, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), wasthe ﬁrst of her works to be explicitly labeled and marketed as a novel,
although it, too, blends ﬁction and memoir. The title is an allusion to themonkey protagonist of the Chinese classic Journey to the West (called
Saiyuuki in Japan), and the story concerns a male Chinese American
playwright coming of age during the Asian American and anti-war
movements of the seventies. (His name is Wittman Ah Sing, and his storyis picked up and continued in the third chapter of The Fifth Book of
Peace.) A long gap followed in Kingston’s output after she lost the manuscript of what would have been her ﬁfth book. The actual ﬁfth book
was published more than ten years after Tripmaster Monkey—To Be thePoet (2001), which consists of the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures inthe History of American Civilization that Kingston delivered at Harvard
University in 2000. Finally, in 2003, the recuperated book that Kingston

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had described as a “nonﬁction ﬁction nonﬁction sandwich”9 was published as The Fifth Book of Peace.
In the remainder of this section, I will look at each of these six books
in turn in order to describe Kingston’s oeuvre as performing a narrative
reenactment of Asian/American wars from her perspective as an Asian
American. Further, I will argue that viewing Kingston’s oeuvre as suchforegrounds its paciﬁst trajectory, that paciﬁsm is a form of intertextuality in Kingston’s writings.
The Woman Warrior has ﬁve chapters, each featuring a different
female protagonist. The ﬁrst chapter concerns Fa Mook Lan, the fabled
Chinese woman warrior who saved her father’s life when he was conscripted. She took his place in battle disguised as a man, and achieved
legendary fame as a general. In The Woman Warrior, Fa Mook Lan’s
homecoming is enacted through her laying down of masculine arms andarmor and donning a traditional wedding garment to take up the duties
of ﬁlial wife and daughter-in-law. While this scene can be read as bothcritiquing or afﬁrming traditional gender roles, the dominant tone of Fa
Mook Lan’s representation in The Woman Warrior is one of power andtriumph. Kingston treats Fa Mook Lan differently in The Fifth Book of
Peace. Appearing at the end of the book rather than the beginning, thenarrative of Fa Mook Lan’s return from battle valorizes a transition fromfront to home front. She is deﬁned as “a woman who brings the menhome” and embodies the association of peace with domestic life. This
reconﬁguration of Fa Mook Lan reiterates a relationship between women
and war that Kingston poses at the beginning of the last chapter of The
Fifth Book of Peace, when she describes the origins of her writing workshops for Viet Nam veterans and quotes at length from one of the many
vets who wrote to her out of their own memories of surviving ﬁres. Thisman says that “veterans need to report to women.”10 Women are “sanctuary,” they “bring soldiers home,” and they “need to hear the war stories.”11 In the version of Fa Mook Lan’s homecoming that appears in The
Fifth Book of Peace, “woman” and “home” punctuate almost every line:
Now, go home. By her voice,the men recognize their general—a beautiful woman.
You were our general? A woman.
Our general was a woman. A beautiful woman.
A woman led us through the war.

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A woman has led us home.
Fa Mook Lan disbands the army.
Return home. Farewell.
Beholding—and becoming—Yin, the Feminine,
come home from war.12

Whereas in The Woman Warrior Kingston cites her mother’s chanted
Chinese-language version of the legend of Fa Mook Lan as the sourceof her narrative, in The Fifth Book of Peace she uses her own English
rendition of her mother’s chant and in the process changes the emphasis
of Fa Mook Lan’s story from one of triumphant (masculinist) warfare topeaceful (feminist) homecoming. Thus, the concluding pages of The
Fifth Book of Peace suggest that a change in Fa Mook Lan’s signiﬁcationof warriorhood has taken place between her appearances in Kingston’sﬁrst and most recent books. In The Woman Warrior, which is a response
and contribution to Asian/American feminist movements of the seventies, Fa Mook Lan is created as an antidote to one of the book’s otherstories, that of No Name Woman, an aunt who committed suicide after
being brutally punished for a pregnancy resulting from rape. In The
Woman Warrior, Fa Mook Lan has the necessary function of offsetting
the “lesson” of No Name Woman’s fate by embodying the possibility ofwomen successfully challenging repressive patriarchal institutions andlaws. In The Fifth Book of Peace, the new emphasis on peace in Fa Mook
Lan’s representation suggests that she has been re-imagined in responseto changes in Kingston’s priorities. In the 1990s, examples of empowered Asian “women warriors” were no longer a rarity in Asian American
literature or American cultural discourses. What did remain almost
nonexistent or invisible was a literary tradition of “books of peace,” towhich Kingston now devoted her creative energy by recuperating thestill-radical potential of a traditional alignment of “woman” with “home”
and “peace.”
Looking back on the trajectory of Kingston’s writing from the standpoint of her most recent version of Fa Mook Lan, an abiding concern
with writing war into peace becomes clearly visible. In Kingston’s second book, China Men, the chapter called “The Brother in Vietnam”
offers a remarkable synopsis of the extent to which twentieth-century
American history is a history of US wars in Asian countries. In the following excerpt, Kingston recalls an incident from her elementary schooldays in Oakland:5-Gayle Sato(p111) 6/9 05.7.12 6:45 PM ページ 118

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For the Korean War, we wore dog tags and had Preparedness Drill in theschool basement. We had to ﬁll out a form for what to engrave on the dog tags.
I looked up “religion” in the American-Chinese Dictionary and asked my mother what religion we were. “Our religion is Chinese,” she said. . . . The kids at
school said, “Are you Catholic?” “No.” “Then you’re a Protestant.” So our dog
tags had O for religion and O for race because neither black nor white. Minealso had O for blood type. Some kids said O was for “Oriental,” but I knew it
was for “Other” because the Filipinos, the Gypsies, and the Hawaiian boy wereO’s. Zero was also the name of the Japanese ﬁghter plane, so we had better
watch our step. The teachers gave us anti-Communist comic books and Civil
Defense pamphlets about atomic bomb attacks. . . . “The War,” I wrote in acomposition, which the teacher corrected, “Which war?” There was more than
one.13

There indeed has been more than one war of consequence for Asian
Americans, but their cumulative effect and recurrent location in Asia are
accurately signiﬁed by the singular proper noun, “the War.” This shortpassage succeeds in placing the Viet Nam War in the context of WorldWar II, the Korean War, and the Cold War, and it raises important issues
about what it means to survive a war, how the Hong family in particular has survived various wars, and the relationship of racialized minorities in the United States to US wars abroad. All of these concerns aredeveloped further in The Fifth Book of Peace.
In particular, the relationship between racialized minorities in the US,
the primary subject of China Men, and US wars abroad, the primary
framework of The Fifth Book of Peace, is underscored in the latter workthrough updated versions of Kingston’s parents’ immigration. China
Men, which consists of portrayals of Chinese American men thatre/claim America as home for Chinese immigrants and their descendants,
presents a false version of Tom Hong’s immigration. It turns out that thisdiscrepancy is not the result of the author’s aesthetic choices but the dangers of immigration for Asians. Kingston’s father entered the US on his
third attempt as a stowaway from Cuba during a period of anti-Asian
immigration laws, and this illegal entry was not revealed by Kingston’smother until fears of possible deportation were nulliﬁed by Mr. Hong’s
death. New details about Kingston’s mother’s escape from China in 1939
on the eve of Japan’s takeover also appear in The Fifth Book of Peace.
Kingston tells these new stories in an episode where the BBC ﬁlms her
in a boat off Angel Island, the infamous west coast detention station for
Asian immigrants. That Kingston continues to narrate her parents’ entry

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into the US more than twenty-ﬁve years after the fact recalls Rob
Wilson’s observation of both China Men and The Woman Warrior: that
Kingston’s efforts to claim and celebrate Chinese Americans’ American
identity inevitably bring to the surface a counter-narrative of exclusion.14
Some critics have gone further to suggest that China Men, as well as
Tripmaster Monkey, supports an ofﬁcial version of multiculturalism thatworks to maintain racial discrimination in American society, and indeed,in the Angel Island episode, Kingston reafﬁrms a popular concept ofAmerica-as-multicultural-family: “I wanted the BBC to show the world
a multicultural, multiracial America. Every time we go to war, we’re ina schizophrenic agony. Whoever the enemy is, they’re related to us.”15
However, this is not an uncritical act of national afﬁliation. When invitedby the BBC to be part of a documentary series on “writers and teachers
journeying across national boundaries,”16 Kingston wanted the ﬁlm
focused not on China but the writing workshops she was conducting for
Viet Nam veterans with the support of the Community of Mindful Living, founded by Buddhist monk and Viet Nam exile Thich Nhat Hanh.
What results from Kingston’s use of the opportunity provided by the
BBC is a multi-layered narrative reenactment of Asian/American wars.
On one level, the BBC footage ﬁlmed off Angel Island is a literal simulation of a Chinese female immigrant’s entry into the US during a particular moment in history, one marked by anti-Asian immigration laws
and impending US involvement in World War II. The critical implications of this particular narrative of American immigration, erased in thestandard Ellis Island version, are underscored by being embedded withina second-generation Asian American’s reenactment of the Viet Nam
War. Within the framework of dominant US national narratives, Viet
Nam is commonly understood as being totally unlike World War II,
which is constantly rescripted as a “good” war. But in the framework of
Asian American counter-memory, the Viet Nam War is not different
from, but quite similar to, World War II. Both are part of a larger historical pattern of American military paciﬁcation of Asian nations. In theepisode of the BBC ﬁlming Kingston’s narrative of her parents’ obstructed entries into the US, we are reminded of the entire history ofAmerican wars and nation building, and how differently this history canbe remembered by Asian Americans.
China Men was followed by Hawai‘i One Summer, and in this thirdbook, not just one chapter but the entire volume is framed by the Viet
Nam War. Hawai‘i One Summer is a collection of eleven prose pieces,5-Gayle Sato(p111) 6/9 05.7.12 6:45 PM ページ 120

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most of which originally appeared in Kingston’s “Hers” column in the
New York Times during the seventies. They were gathered into a limited
edition of 150 hand-bound copies published by Meadow Press in 1987,
and later reprinted by the University of Hawai‘i in 1998. In the 1998
Preface to Hawai‘i One Summer, Kingston says she wrote the essays inthe middle of her seventeen-year stay in Hawai‘i.17 A whole decade oflife in Hawai‘i is thus condensed into the “summer of 1978” that forms
the nominal subject of these essays, organized into three sections called“June,” “July,” and “August.” The 1998 Preface also mentions one reader’s observation that the book contains many allusions to suicide. Rereading it myself after a lapse of several years, I am startled by the
number of references in just the ﬁrst essay to nuclear holocaust and otherkinds of death and disaster, particularly since this piece is about the purchase of a ﬁrst home following upon the success of The Woman Warrior.
The last two pieces in Hawai‘i One Summer close the volume on thesame somber note with which it begins. These concluding pieces concern beat poet Lew Welch, whose suicide is connected to “the black pallthat spread over the world during the long war” in Viet Nam,18 andKingston’s fear for the safety of her son who bodysurfs at merciless
Sandy Beach. The last sentence in Hawai‘i One Summer juxtaposes theanxiety of a death-ﬁlled present with a deliberate act of imagining survival: “I . . . ﬁnd some comfort in the stream of commuter trafﬁc, cars
ﬁlled with men over twenty, passing Sandy Beach on their way towork.”19 Framed as it is by the subject of violent death, Hawai‘i One
Summer can be read as a pre-text for Kingston’s fourth book, Tripmaster
Monkey, which introduces her famous anti-war activist character
Wittman and begins with his thoughts of suicide.20
Visually and thematically, the end of Hawai‘i One Summer and the
beginning of Tripmaster Monkey face each other across the Paciﬁc
Ocean. Hawai‘i One Summer concludes with an image of Kingston
standing on the southeastern shore of O‘ahu consumed with thoughts ofdeath and willing herself to imagine a safe future. Tripmaster Monkey
begins with an image from the other side of the Paciﬁc—Wittman Ah
Sing walking through Golden Gate Park while mentally facing theBridge and the ocean beyond it. He, too, is preoccupied with thoughtsof death while willing himself to imagine a peaceful future. Although
Wittman envisions and rejects the possibility of making a spectacularleap off the Golden Gate Bridge, he cannot rid his mind of the image ofa Vietnamese Buddhist monk who immolated himself to protest the war.

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121(Sandy Beach is located on O‘ahu’s leeward coast and therefore faces
southeast and not northeast toward the direction of San Francisco. However, this technicality does not diminish the larger geographical and symbolic alignment of O‘ahu and San Francisco Bay as “facing” each otheracross the Paciﬁc.) The ending of Kingston’s third book and the beginning of her fourth thus suggest that in the decade that passed between
the writing of Hawai‘i One Summer in the seventies and Tripmaster
Monkey in the eighties, Kingston returned to memories of the events surrounding her relocation to Hawai‘i. She invented Wittman Ah Sing as
an alter-ego to reenact her story of living through the suicidal missionthat the Viet Nam War seemed to have become.
As The Fifth Book of Peace was nearing completion, Kingston’s actual
ﬁfth book, To Be the Poet (2002), was being written up. This book, too,is an integral part of the paciﬁst trajectory in Kingston’s work, since
poetry itself is deﬁned as a peaceful genre. In the ﬁrst paragraph,
Kingston boldly declares that she wants a poet’s life of peace; twelve
years and one thousand pages of laboring in prose to produce the “longbook (about the long wars in Viet Nam and in the Middle East)” havecreated a need for “the easiness of poetry,” “the brevity of the poem,”
the “always happy” life of the poet.21 The point is not whether this definition of poetry is right or wrong, but what Kingston’s desire for poetry
expresses—a longing for stillness, simplicity, lightness, laughter, andfree time, a desire, in short, for a peaceful life. A genius at writing what
she needs into existence—her recuperation of No Name Woman proceeds from a declaration that “[u]nless I see her life branching into mine,
she gives me no ancestral help”22—Kingston simply writes her poet’slife into being. It is delightful, and peaceful, to accompany Kingston
from her bardic opening declaration (“I Choose the Poet’s Life”) throughher tongue-in-cheek petulant demands for inspiration (“I Call on theMuses of Poetry, and Here’s What I Get”) to the magically easy transition from prose lines into poetic lines that concludes the volume (“Spring
Harvest”). The last poem included in To Be The Poet is Kingston’sEnglish rendition of the chant of Fa Mook Lan, exactly as it appears at
the end of The Fifth Book of Peace. It is accompanied by the following
epiphany: “I am ending the longbook with a poem. All that prose added
up to this one poem. If I hadn’t put myself into a poetic state, I wouldn’t
have thought to end this way. I went through a poetry door and came outof the war story.”23 Echoing what happened between the conclusion of
Hawai‘i One Summer and the beginning of Tripmaster Monkey, To Be

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The Poet and The Fifth Book of Peace also create an intertextual dialogue, though less pre-text and reenactment than parallel narratives,
wherein the stories of Kingston’s writing-in-community for veterans andher personal quest for poetry arrive in tandem at the same conclusion. It
is one more example of how, just as there are no ﬁrm borders between
ﬁction, history, and autobiography within each of Kingston’s works, theborders between separate works also blur when they are read in theframework of an intertextual narrative of paciﬁsm. For Kingston, the taskof remembering war in order to write peace has been a lifetime paper
project that began with her ﬁrst narrative about women warriors who“right” wrongs by “writing” them.24
III VETERANS OF PEACE RECONFIGURE THE AMERICAN PACIFIC:WALT WHITMAN, WITTMAN AH SING, AND MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
The American Paciﬁc, as both geo-political and symbolic terrain, is a
primary site and subject of The Fifth Book of Peace. Wittman relocatesto Hawai‘i in order to start a new life for himself and his family, drawn
like countless others before and after him by the promise of rejuvention
in “paradise.” The allure of Hawai‘i works as powerfully on self-aware
newcomers like Wittman and his artist/wife Tana, who bring with thema critical understanding of hegemonic structures and their status asunwelcome outsiders, as it does for those who come to Hawai‘i morenaively, arrogantly, or self-centeredly as tourists, military, capitalists,
and immigrants.25 Wittman’s chapter in The Fifth Book of Peace suggests that Kingston sought a more comprehensive retelling of her own
relocation to Hawai‘i, which had previously been told only through a
few vignettes in China Men and the essays comprising Hawai‘i One
Summer. In particular, almost all the key episodes narrated in Hawai‘i
One Summer are recycled in Wittman’s narrative, such as the ambiguities of being an anti-materialist homeowner, Kingston’s sorrowful remembrance of Beat poet Lew Welch, whom she had met before leaving
California, a couple of snorkeling expeditions to the island on the windward side of O‘ahu known as Chinaman’s Hat, son Joseph’s terror uponsighting a menehune (a Hawaiian sprite) and many of his other experiences as a young child transplanted to a very different culture, and the
AWOL soldiers whom Kingston and her husband met and helped
through their work at the sanctuary for draft resisters provided for a few
weeks by the Church of the Crossroads in Honolulu.

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Playwright Wittman Ah Sing is conceived as a complex amalgam offour ﬁgures: American poet Walt Whitman, the monkey hero of theChinese classic The Journey to the West (called Saiyuuki in Japan), a
stereotyped character named “Ah Sin” in a story by American writer Bret
Harte, and Asian American writer Frank Chin, who was the most vocal
and famous critic of The Woman Warrior as well as Kingston’s “literaryarch rival.”26 As mentioned earlier, Wittman ﬁrst makes his appearancein Tripmaster Monkey, a Joycean novel that begins with his thoughts ofsuicide and concludes in a tour de force monologue about himself andhis artistic mission. This personal performance caps a three-night run ofan epic staging of another Chinese classic, The Water Margin, involving a cast of hundreds, spontaneous audience participation, and a ﬁreworks extravaganza that hints one last time at Wittman’s death wish andunderscores the seductive power of ﬁre and ﬁrearms. In Tripmaster
Monkey, Wittman’s play is about a particular war and the nature of war
itself, and through staging this play he battles the social and political systems that deny his full existence as a human being and an American. Yetby the end of the second night he also comes to a realization that no one
wins through warfare, not even the heroes of the Chinese classics onwhom he has so long built his identity politics. In The Fifth Book of
Peace, Wittman’s narrative also culminates in a communal play but one
that, from the outset, is conceived as a paciﬁst enterprise. In the discussion of Wittman that follows, I focus my analysis on Kingston’s new
deployment of Walt Whitman to provide her character with a vision andmethod for articulating Hawai‘i’s alternative potential as another kindof “American Paciﬁc,” and to create a writing partner through whom she
can reenact her own memory of Viet Nam.
Walt Whitman worked on one volume of poems his entire life, editing and adding to it through several versions beginning in 1855 andending with the so-called “death bed” edition of 1891–92. (In this sense,
Whitman’s oeuvre, too, is marked by formal and thematic reenactment.)
Leaves of Grass thus spans the half century of US history that included
the building of the transcontinental railroad, the Civil War, and America’stransition from an agrarian to an industrialized society. Although
Whitman’s stylistic and philosophical excesses border at times onnaiveté, arrogance, or mediocrity, and although Whitman’s contemporary Emily Dickinson is generally considered by literary critics to be
America’s greatest poet, Whitman’s image as America’s national bard
remains intact and his inﬂuence on the development of twentieth-century

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American poetry has been profound.27 Dickinson, in fact, is also a quintessential poet of excess, but the socio-cultural circumstances of her life
and the nature of her psyche and genius channeled that excess into a minimalist style and reclusive lifestyle. Whitman’s excess insisted on public expression, to the point where he found it necessary to dissolve theborders between private and public so that the song of America would
be a “Song of Myself,” the title of his ﬁfty-two stanza epic poem thatbroke taboos regarding appropriate poetic form and subject matter.
Whitmanian excess gives Wittman access to Hawai‘i. It provides amodel of ethically responsible poetic license to speak for and from
Hawai‘i, even as a newcomer. Whitmanian excess signiﬁes permission
to speak of anything and everything to any degree: “I harbor for good or
bad/I permit to speak at every hazard/Nature without check with original energy.”28 However, such freedom of expression is understood as
being responsible to spiritual integrity: “I believe in you my soul, theother that I am must not abase itself to you, / And you must not be abased
to the other.”29 Whitmanian excess also grants supreme authority to theindividual that is at the same time humble and democratic: “I resist anything better than my own diversity, / Breathe the air but leave plenty afterme, / And am not stuck up, and am in my place.”30 A third key aspect ofWhitmanian excess is that it deﬁnes identity both locally (by gender andplace) and globally: “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son.”31
But above all, perhaps, Whitmanian excess—as both vision and style—is essential to Wittman’s commitment to a paciﬁst livelihood because it
makes democracy and community inseparable from an ability to witness,grieve, and transform violence and death. Whitman’s poetry is ﬁlled withrepresentations of the myriad forms of death, including passages like thefollowing which could easily be taken for a description of a bombing in
the year 2005 despite the technological “advances” in weaponry thathave occurred since the Civil War: “The fall of grenades through the rent
roof, the fan-shaped explosion, / The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood,iron, high in the air.”32 Whitman’s poetry is also ﬁlled with meditations
on death that seek to absorb the fact of death into a vision of life: “Thesmallest sprout shows there is really no death, /. . . . And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.”33
Before transporting Wittman to Hawai‘i, Kingston enhanced his
Whitmanian vision and method with cultural knowledge she herself did
not have as a newcomer to the islands in the late sixties. From the moment
Wittman settles in for the long plane ride and another passenger, a Native

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Hawaiian, challenges his motivations for moving to Hawai‘i, he is readyto negotiate the cultural kapu (Hawaiian for “taboo,” “no-entry”) of theislands, the prohibitions on who can enter, who can speak, what can besaid. This preparedness is depicted through Wittman’s dialogue withfour heterogeneous historical ﬁgures—James Jones, Haunani-Kay/
Mililani Trask, Gauguin, and Lew Welch. Jones is the author of From
Here to Eternity (1951), a World War II novel set in Hawai‘i whose
protagonist is an anti-war soldier named Prewitt.34 This book seems tobe the sole reading material that Wittman has brought with him, and it
is referred to and used as a roadmap during the Ah Sings’ ﬁrst two daysin Hawai‘i. It is also a book that Kingston herself reads from as part ofher mental preparation for her ﬁrst writing workshop with veterans.
Haunani-Kay Trask, who helped found and teaches in the department of
Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i, and Mililani Trask, alawyer, are sisters who have played a prominent role in Hawaiian sovereignty movements since the seventies. Haunani-Kay Trask has written about her “mainland” education and subsequent politicization into a
Hawaiian identity in her widely-read volume of essays, From a Native
Daughter (1993).35 Although the Trask sisters are not explicitly mentioned in the book, Polly Keoua, the beautiful Native Hawaiian returning home from law school who confronts Wittman on his knowledge ofand relationship to Hawai‘i, can be read as a reference to them. Gauguin
is a ﬁgure who signiﬁes both Wittman’s and his wife (a painter) Tana’s
artistic pursuits in Polynesia. Wittman’s frequent references to Gauguin
indicate his attraction to the romantic ﬁgure of the artist-in-Paradise, but
his identiﬁcation with Gauguin also expresses awareness of being a linguistically and culturally handicapped foreigner, one charged with the
responsibility of observing new surroundings as honestly and vigorously
as possible. Lew Welch, whom Kingston met before leaving Berkeley,
disappeared into the woods around San Juan Ridge in Nevada County inthe spring of 1971 while he was staying at a cabin owned by poet Gary
Snyder. He left a suicide note and is presumed to have shot and killed
himself although his body was never recovered. Welch had suffered frombouts of depression and alcoholism since his graduation from college,
but Kingston connects his disappearance to the war in southeast Asia,
quoting from his poem “Chicago” which says, “I’m just going to walkaway from it. Maybe/A small part of it will die if I’m not around / feeding it anymore.”36 This reference to Lew Welch opens the chapter on
Wittman.

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None of these four historical ﬁgures, however, provides Wittman witha method or vision for reconﬁguring the “American Paciﬁc.” Rather,
Keoua/Trask, Gauguin, Jones/Prewitt, and Welch serve as touchstones
for Wittman’s political and cultural consciousness. Welch and Keoua,
for example, are framing devices, raising issues about how and for whom
an “American Paciﬁc” is to be deﬁned. Gauguin and Prewitt, on the other
hand, are deployed primarily as negative role models. On the plane, when
Tana mediates tension between Wittman and Polly by requesting to draw
her and ends up giving the drawing to Polly as a gift, Wittman wryly
notes that Gauguin did not give away paintings to his Tahitian models.
Likewise, Prewitt is quickly and literally disposed of as a roadmap of
any lasting value when Wittman uses his copy of From Here to Eternity
to wedge one of the tires of his car and thus escape from a crazy white
man shooting at him at Ka‘ena point, the northwestern tip of O‘ahu where
the paved highway ends in a dirt road. (There is no public thoroughfare
circling the island of O‘ahu completely.) Thus, although Keoua, Welch,
Gauguin, and Prewitt embody the key issues of Wittman’s relocation,
they do not provide models for dealing with them that are acceptable orappropriate to Wittman himself. Welch’s suicide is a form of response
already rejected at the end of Tripmaster Monkey. Jones’ racism undermines the appeal of From Here to Eternity as spiritual or literary support
for draft resistance. (“Wittman hated the book for being gook-ﬁlled. . . .
Seven times Jones calls the aloha shirt a gook shirt. He wrote “gook” 30times.”37) Keoua’s cultural politics are tailored to her particular priorities as a Native Hawaiian; Wittman cannot simply mimic or assume themfor his own position as a mainlander Asian American. Gauguin, like
Prewitt, is too much a product of western Orientalism to be useful as arole model for an Asian American artist. In the ﬁnal analysis it is Walt
Whitman, frequently called the “poet of the open road,” who provides
Wittman with a workable method of inter-subjective communication anddemocratic re-mapping through which to seek out Hawai‘i’s embodiment of an alternative “American Paciﬁc.”
A brief description of Wittman’s ﬁrst two days in Hawai‘i will illustrate how Kingston uses Whitmanian excess to provide her anti-war
activist/artist with a philosophy capable of validating his geographicalrelocation and a style capable of narrating it. The Ah Sings’ ﬁrst day onO‘ahu consists of their renting a car in Honolulu and cruising throughWaikiki before driving around the southeastern tip of the island andalong the windward coast until, at nightfall, they ﬁnd a house to rent in

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Kahalu‘u. On the second day, Wittman completes a “circle” of the islandby continuing north along the windward coast as he drives back into
Honolulu the long way to return the car. A large chunk of the chapter istaken up with the events of this second day. Wittman socializes with a
Hawaiian family living on the beach at Kahana Bay, stumbles into live
ammunition drills when he enters a military kapu area, visits a heiau(sacred site), gets shot at by a stranger in a cabin at Ka‘ena Point, backtracks down the middle of the island through pineapple and sugar caneﬁelds and military housing, then past Pearl Harbor and into Honolulu
once more. He then takes a bus into Waikiki after returning the car, joins
an anti-war demonstration there, and when it turns ugly hitches a rideback home with two newly arrived African American VISTA workers
who come onto the scene. They are, by chance, heading to Kahalu‘u, so
the three drive back to the windward side via the Pali highway, which atthat time was one of only two inland routes through the Ko‘olau mountain range connecting the leeward and windward coasts. In other words,
Wittman’s ﬁrst two days in Hawai‘i take him completely around andthrough the island of O‘ahu. Symbolically speaking, he covers the“entire” island and meets “all” segments of the population. Kingston’smanner of narration gives the impression of itemizing everyone andeverything Wittman sees during these ﬁrst two days. A rough count, forthe entire chapter, yields 40–50 named characters identiﬁed by occupation and place of residence or origin, and another 300 unnamed individuals comprising the participants in two peace parades, the regular staff
for the Church of the Crossroads, the AWOL soldiers who ﬁnd sanctuary there, their supporters, the Kahalu‘u community where the Ah Sings
live, and a busload of tourists. Kingston’s technique of conspicuous enumeration replicates Whitman’s exhaustive catalogs of people and places
as well as the intention behind such a style. The “song of myself ” created by Whitman/Wittman seeks to embrace all individual embodimentsof animate and inanimate existence within a vision of harmonious coexistence. Exhaustive itemization, in other words, is a rhetorical correlative for a vision of democratic community in Wittman’s chapter of The
Fifth Book of Peace as it is in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
This style and vision of “inclusiveness” in both Whitman and Kingston
has been interpreted by some critics as supporting a hegemonic deﬁnition of multiculturalism in which whiteness remains the measure of“American” identity and socio-economic privilege.38 My own view isthat the over-arching sensibility and intention behind Kingston’s writing,5-Gayle Sato(p111) 6/9 05.7.12 6:45 PM ページ 128

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and Whitman’s, are fundamentally generous and democratic. Whitman’s
poem of America is at pains to embrace the whole of society from themost empowered to the most marginalized, leaving no one unacknowledged, hence his famous excessive catalogs that itemize and level
American people and places (as in the oft-cited example of his placing
the President next to a prostitute). Kingston, I believe, understands
Whitman’s excess as the mark of a writer who can assume both thesupreme conﬁdence and utter humility that are necessary for presuming
to inhabit the lives of others, to speak for and about them from one’s own
limited point of view. This is Wittman Ah Sing’s situation when hearrives in Hawai‘i, as it is the challenge faced by every minoritizedAmerican poet confronting the subject of “America.”
But if poetic license is key to Kingston’s original conception of
Wittman in Tripmaster Monkey, Wittman’s reappearance in The FifthBook of Peace indicates that Kingston has gone beyond Whitman’s representation of democratic community by drawing out the implicationsof his representation of death for the relationship of community to paciﬁsm. Thematically if not stylistically, the aspect of Leaves of Grassemphasized in The Fifth Book of Peace is its representation of war, theWhitman who is known for his profound sorrow over the Civil War, his
nursing of wounded war veterans, and his celebrated elegy for President
Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.” Three brief but
explicit allusions to Whitman in The Fifth Book of Peace make thisemphasis quite clear. The ﬁrst allusion is the third passage quoted at the
beginning of this essay. It refers to Canto 6 of “Song of Myself,” which
elaborates Whitman’s central metaphor, grass, as a symbol of death andregeneration. The second and third allusions occur near the end of the“Water” chapter, when Wittman is observing wounded soldiers at Tripler
Army Hospital, and giving parting words of advice to two AWOL soldiers who had been hiding at the Ah Sings’ Kahalu‘u home but decided
to turn themselves in:
Whitman’s namesake had spent the Civil War in hospitals, reading to thewounded, giving them nickels to buy milk, writing to their mothers, holding
the dying in his arms, and kissing them goodbye.39
Giving the non-readers words to live by, Wittman quoted the healing poet of
the American Civil War: “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun
and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up forthe stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue
not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take your
hat off to nothing known or unknown.”40

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Certainly in the history of European and American literature, the representation of death as the ultimate democracy, the great leveler, is nothing new. But in Whitman’s handling of this theme, particularly throughthe grass metaphor and in his Civil War poems, the representation ofdeath’s democratizing effect is imbued with an eloquent capacity formourning and reconciliation.
In her most recent work, Kingston draws out the paciﬁst implicationsof Whitman’s attentiveness to Civil War veterans and his insistence onviewing death in relation to life. Thus, the Wittman who reappears in
The Fifth Book of Peace is not only endowed with Whitman’s methodof observing, naming, and embracing everyone and everything, but understands his articulation of community as a form of promoting peace.
Community, in other words, is deﬁned in The Fifth Book of Peace as amanifestation and medium of paciﬁsm. On a very basic level, beingwith-others, or connecting oneself to others, is deﬁned as a life-afﬁrming
gesture that is foundational to peace, just as its antithesis, disconnectionand exclusion, is the foundation of warfare. Wittman’s Whitmaniancatalogues and excursions during his ﬁrst two days on O’ahu lay thegroundwork for the climax and conclusion of the “Water” chapter—two
paciﬁst “projects” that deﬁne and connect Wittman to a community
where he performs his artistic work and a community where he lives,
and that connect these two communities to each other. That is, Wittmanstages a communal play for the AWOL soldiers and their supporters at
the Church of the Crossroads sanctuary, and opens his house in Kahalu‘u
for a grand housewarming party to which the entire community is invited. These are interconnected events that together deﬁne Wittman’s
paciﬁst manner of living and earning a living. Wittman’s son Mario, whogrew up in the Kahalu‘u neighborhood and was schooled at the Churchof the Crossroads, appears as a high school graduate in the last episodeof the narrative. His refusal after being pressured by friends to join the
military as a means of social and economic opportunity is identiﬁed as
the most signiﬁcant outcome of Wittman’s and Tana’s paciﬁsm. He has
become what his peace-making parents had hoped for most of all—a
young man who decides he will not be a person who kills others.
IV COLLABORATIVE GRASSROOTS PACIFISM
Community is vital to memory work that seeks to alleviate grief orredress grievances. If bearing witness and remembering are productive
negotiations of suffering and death, it is owing to the circuit of listening

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and speaking that structures such activities. In American literature andpopular culture, narrative reenactments of Viet Nam are replete withinstances of redemptive circuits of listening and speaking as well as
episodes of violence that occur when either speaking or listening isobstructed. One thinks of the Wall in Washington, D.C. where thousandsof letters and mementos have been left as messages for the dead and missing, the veterans in Tim O’Brien’s stories and novels, such as Norman
Bowker (The Things They Carried ) who commits suicide because hecan’t ﬁnd a listener, or the homeless veteran in Andrew Pham’s memoir
Catﬁsh and Mandala, who has abandoned a wife and child because hecan only live with his memories alone in the Mexican desert.41
Kingston’s writing workshops for veterans pull its participants gently
back into the world of the living and the future. The dedication for The
Fifth Book of Peace—“to Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace”—forms
a linguistic parallel to the circles brushed in ink on the dust jacket of thebook, the book’s title page, and the four title pages for each of the book’s
chapters. Together, these linguistic and graphic circles inscribe what
may become possible through collaborative memory work: antagonistic
relationships may become reciprocal, destructive binaries may be transformed into life-generating circles of energy. Mutual assistance may
enable veterans of peace to bear witness for soldiers and veterans of war
to become non-violent peace builders.
At her second writing workshop for veterans, Kingston called on
Wittman’s spirit to assist her, but I think he is always with her whether
explicitly summoned or not. I read Wittman as a “partner” Kingston has
created to enable collaborative remembering and witnessing of her own
life, her survival as an Asian American of Asian/American wars. The
process of intertwined forgetting and remembering that Sturken points
to as enabling traumatic experiences to be re-shaped into acceptable,
afﬁrmative historical narratives of self and nation is also at work in personal memory. Kingston did not recognize the depth of her unhappinessat the time she wrote the pieces collected into Hawai‘i One Summer.
Read in the framework of narrative reenactment of war memory, the 340
pages of Tripmaster Monkey and 172 pages of the “Water” chapter fromThe Fifth Book of Peace indicate the intensity of the Viet Nam memorythat Kingston sought to express. The weight of this memory looms larger if we add on the 69 pages of Hawai‘i One Summer and 111 pages of
To Be The Poet that function as pretext and context for Wittman’s narratives. The creation of Wittman Ah Sing is Kingston’s strategy for5-Gayle Sato(p111) 6/9 05.7.12 6:45 PM ページ 131

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bringing her own Viet Nam memory into narrative reenactment. ThroughWittman, Kingston can speak and listen to herself, search out her forgetting and rethink her remembering. Whitman is also present throughWittman. His gentle, fearless, forgiving manner of inspecting and naming death in all its forms and conditions is especially invoked whenever
the two deaths most grieved and least represented in The Fifth Book of
Peace are mentioned—the death of Kingston’s father on the eve of the
Oakland-Berkeley ﬁre and the death of her mother toward the end of thebook’s completion. Grass still grows from the dead, who return to earth
as compost, but the earth cannot indeﬁnitely sustain the loss of its green
skin through unnatural ﬁres and wars. The Fifth Book of Peace presents
a model for grassroots peace activism based on collaborative remembering and writing; its aim is to “write until the stories full of explosions
become quiet.”42 Whitman and Wittman assist Kingston in imagining,
performing, and teaching such memory work.
NOTES
1Kingston’s status as the most-taught living author in the US was recently reiterated
by Sau-ling Wong in her keynote talk for the Asian American Literature Association
symposium in Kyoto on September 25, 2004, “Maxine Hong Kingston in a Global
Frame.”
2
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace (New York: Knopf, 2003), 45.
3Ibid., 14.
4
Although there is a rapidly growing literature on transnational Asian/American war
memory, particularly on the Asia-Paciﬁc theaters of World War II, only a small portionof it deals speciﬁcally with Asian American literature. For studies of the history, politics, and semiotics of Asian/American war memory, see StudsTerkel, The “Good War”:
An Oral History of World War II (New York: New Press, 1984); John W. Dower,
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton,
1999); Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese
Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Lisa Yoneyama,
Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2000); and T. Fujitani et al., Perilous Memories: The Asia-PaciﬁcWar(s) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). On war memory in Asian American literature, see Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996) and Gayle K. Sato, “Asian American Literary History:
War, Memory, and Representation,” in Asian American Literary Studies, ed. Guiyou
Huang (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), forthcoming.
5
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and thePolitics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 24.
6
Ibid., 7.
7
For a description of trauma as a form of blocked narration, see Bessel A. Van der
Kolk and Onno Van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and theEngraving of Trauma,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 158–82.

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For a concise overview of Kingston’s career, see Patricia P. Chu, “The Woman
Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston,” in A
Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, ed. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong and Stephen
H. Sumida (New York: Modern Language Assoc., 2001), 86–96. Useful volumes ofcritical essays on The Woman Warrior are Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, ed., The Woman
Warrior: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Shirley Geoklin Lim, ed., Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (New York: Modern Language Assoc., 1991). Jinqi Ling, Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Formin Asian American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) contains an
excellent chapter on China Men.
9
Linda Trinh Moser, “Kingston, Maxine Hong,” in The Continuum Encyclopedia of
American Literature, ed. Steven R. Seraﬁn (New York: Continuum, 2000), 629.
10
Kingston, Fifth Book of Peace, 247.
11
Ibid., 247–48.
12Ibid., 392.
13
Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980; New York:
Ballantine Books, 1981), 275–76.
14
Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Paciﬁc: From South Paciﬁc to Bamboo
Ridge and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 27–28.
15
Kingston, Fifth Book of Peace, 361.
16
Ibid., 359.
17
Maxine Hong Kingston, Hawai‘i One Summer (San Francisco: Meadow Press,
1987; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), xi.
18
Ibid., xi.
19Ibid., 72.
20
Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1989).
21
Maxine Hong Kingston, To Be the Poet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2002), 3.
22
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among
Ghosts (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; New York: Vintage, 1977), 10.
23
Kingston, To Be the Poet, 110–11.
24
Amy Ling, Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (New York:
Pergamon Press, 1990), 158.
25
For an account of the decimation of the Hawaiian population after contact with thewest, and a history of Hawai‘i by a Native Hawaiian scholar focusing on the period
before the US-engineered overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, see David E. Stannard,
Before the Horror: The Population of Hawai‘i on the Eve of Western Contact (Honolulu:
Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawai‘i, 1989); and Jonathan Kay
Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002). For an accessible, comprehensive
discussion of Native Hawaiian cultural traditions and their manipulation by corporate
tourism, see Elizabeth Buck, Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in
Hawai‘i (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). For a more narrowly focused
but complementary discussion of colonizing discourses about Hawai‘i, see Phyllis Turnbull and Kathy E. Ferguson, “Military Presence/Missionary Past: The Historical Construction of Masculine Order and Feminine Hawai‘i,” Social Process in Hawai‘i 38(1997): 96–107.
26
The quotation is from David Leiwei Li, Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 67. When

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The Woman Warrior was lavishly praised in the mainstream press and embraced bywhite feminists, it set off a hostile, long-standing debate in which Kingston was accusedof misrepresenting Chinese and Chinese American culture and selling out to a white
Orientalist literary establishment. Kingston’s negotiation of this contentious period of
Asian American culture through the writing of China Men and Tripmaster Monkey canitself be understood as a conversion of war into peace through narrative reenactment.
27
For a compelling interpretive history of American poetry in terms of two descentlines, a dominant “popular” mode of poetry represented by Whitman and a tradition of“professional poets” represented by Dickinson, see Lewis Putnam Turco, Visions andRevisions of American History (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986).
28
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass, ed. Jerome Loving (1891–92;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 29.
29
Ibid., 32.
30
Ibid., 42.
31
Ibid., 48.
32
Ibid., 61.
33
Ibid., 34.
34James Jones, From Here to Eternity (1951; New York: Avon, 1975).
35
Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in
Hawai‘i, Rev. ed. (1993; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999).
36
Kingston, Fifth Book of Peace, 65.
37
Ibid., 124.
38
Wilson places Whitman in the context of imperialist discourses of Americanization:“. . . [S]ome icon of technological might such as the moon landing or the transcontinental railway, or ‘the people’ itself seen as some intoxicating social glue of mass conglomeration as in Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself,’ secured a conviction of American national
subjectivity.” Li points to elements of Tripmaster Monkey that illustrate Kingston’s
incomplete critique of the valorization of whiteness in America’s master narrative of
national identity. See Wilson, Reimagining the American Paciﬁc, 17; and Li, Imagining
the Nation, 81–90.
39
Kingston, Fifth Book of Peace, 234.
40
Ibid., 236.
41
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Penguin, 1990); Andrew X.
Pham, Catﬁsh and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape andMemory of Vietnam (1999; New York: Picador, 2000).
42
Kingston, Fifth Book of Peace, 314.