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

In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.

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

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

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

I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.

People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even later when I grew up, I was constantly wearing dungarees, wearing guy shirts.