Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.

"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.

Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.

I do not think a similar goal, to attain fame, drove me when I was a child and young woman.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.

According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."