Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiography is a complex work that takes careful analyzation. To fully understand how she uses this piece to tell her story, one must examine several aspects of Chinese culture. It is an interesting work that requires thought.

An haunting book that details the life of a Chinese American woman who struggles to find herself. Although the non-chronological structuring of the book is rather hard to follow, it is amazing. This book leaves an indelible mark on the mind and pierces the soul. Extremely recommended!

This book contains many plays written by Mr. Hwang but the one play that I will review will be "FOB." The play "FOB" focuses on the power struggle between the 2 sexes and the battle between Mainland Chinese immigrants and Americanized Chinese. One aspect of the dislike that I had with the book was the inconsistant behaviors of the characters. But one thing I liked is the about this play is that it can be very interpertive and that the story is not very straight forward

David Henry Hwang is best-known for his play, "M Butterfly," and this is a shame. Although "Butterfly" is indeed a wonderful play, Hwang is one of the more versatile playwrights today, and this book shows the breadth of it. Most of his plays (FOB, Dance and the Railroad) deal with Chinese Americans, but he often wanders into other veins. "1000 Airplanes on the Roof," a science-fiction piece about alien abduction, is a terrific example. Try to get ahold of a copy of this book if you can; it is well worth it.

In this book, Maxine Hong Kingston proclaims to want to live the life of the poet. Working on her "longbook"--her thousand-plus page novel about Vietnam war veterans (her first novel since 1989's "Tripmaster Monkey")--has consumed so much of her life, creatively and otherwise, that she longs to live a poets life. The poets life, as she conceives it, is a life full of peace, surrounded by the most beautiful, beatific, awe-inspiring things. Instead of the arduousness of plots and stories, the brevity and aesthetic succinctness of poetry seems like a much more cozy alternative. Her enthusiasm for the poet's life is always near being tongue-in-cheek. A fellow poet reminds her that poets must revise, like novelists. Also, there's the sense that in arguing for poetry, she is arguing against it by claiming it to be like an aesthetic hit of crack--it's wonderful to experience in short and powerful bursts, then it goes away. So, perhaps, she ends up arguing for the novel ... it's hard to tell. Nevertheless, as she documents her poetry experiments, some nice lines and scenes emerge (particularly the last section of the book, "Spring Harvest," where she experiments with "four word poems"!). She also claims to close "To Be the Poet" with a poem (on Fa Mook Lan--another variation of the Fa Mu Lan myth, a la the "White Tigers" story in "The Woman Warrior") that will end her longbook. Kingston's poetry is hardly "strong" in the Harold Bloom sense but it is pleasant enough. But it leaves us longing even moreso for the "longbook."