Like many other Asian American women writers, Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiographical works have been constantly renegotiating with cultural memories by blurring the boundaries of genres, blending the personal with a collective history, interfusing life stories with legend and myth, and mixing together truth and fiction. Born as a Chinese-American writer and a daughter of immigrants from China, Kingston grew up in Stockton, California, and although her works focus mainly on Chinese culture, and deals with discussions of silence and voice, as an Asian American writer, Kingston writes in English. The voice she struggles to have is not the voice that belongs to her cultural heritage. What does the loss of her heritage language mean to an Asian American writer? What are the purposes of singing songs from the ancient past to a new group or audience? Does the writer seek to understand her own cultural heritage, or does she try to obtain understanding, and if so, from whom and for what? The ambivalence lies in the attempt to seek for an understanding that is also foreign to the self. Thus, the retelling of her mother's stories, in order to reconstruct lost memories, creates a completely new representation of the culture and the self. The paper will examine the new outlook Kingston bestows on her Chinese heritage, her own past, and her life in the new world in her works.
Keywords: Language, Identity and Hyphenated Memory, Asian American Studies
