Introduction
About the Author
Maxine Hong Kingston is born in the 1940s and is the daughter of Chinese migrants who then operated a gambling house. They later went on to operating a laundry as a consequence of which Katherine and her sisters labored for long hours. In the year 1962 Katherine finished her graduation from the University of California at Berkeley and in the same year tied the nuptial knot with actor earl Kingston, whom she had encountered during an English course. In the year 1963 Katherine gave birth to a son, Joseph. The couple was enthusiastically involved in antiwar activities in Berkeley but in 1967 had to escape to Japan to evade the escalating brutality and drug misuse of the antiwar movement. After seventeen years they returned to California where Kingston resumed to teaching writing at the University of California Berkeley.
Author’s intent in writing the book and the meaning it carries
“It had to be fiction, because Peace has to be supposed, imagined, divined, dreamed. Peace’s language, its sounds and rhythms, when read aloud, when read silently, should pacify breath and tongue, make ears and brains be tranquil.”
For many years Kingston searched for the Three Lost Books of Peace, heard to be ruined in deliberate fires a long time ago. In her travels she asked about the Chinese Peace Books and asked others to make inquiries about the lost Peace Books as well. The second section of “The Fifth Book of Peace” explains this analytical endeavor and ends by sharing what “The Fourth Book of Peace” looked like. Kingston admits that she couldn’t “re-enter fiction” to finish the Book of Peace, explaining that a community was needed in order to reconstruct the work. Concluding the second section with this autobiographical note, Kingston makes it clear that, although she has reconstructed the contents of “The Fourth Book of Peace,” which is the “fictional” story of Wittman Ah Sing, his wife Tana, and their son Mario, “The Fifth Book of Peace” cannot end on a fictional note.
In an Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston By Li Wang Katherine Kingston states “The title The Fifth Book of Peace comes from a Chinese myth that says once there existed three books of peace that taught us how to end war, how to make a peaceful world. And those books are lost in Chinese history. When there is a new ruler they burn the books of the previous kingdom and then they start all over again. They start civilization all over again. And I think that’s where those books got lost. Then I started to write a new one, thinking that I was going to write a book of peace for our times. And that burned in the Oakland-Berkeley Hills fires. That’s why I have The Fifth Book of Peace. This is the one that has lasted.”
Peace activist, wise woman, writer, teacher, mother, healer and social commentator are the only some of the several roles that Katherine Hong Kingston has been renowned for. Her books are political. By raising crucial questions she urges her readers to reflect intensely about social issues. Accenting contemporary American culture, Kingston shines radiance on the multiplicity that shapes, and time and again rips America as a nation. Because it integrates features and technique from many diverse genres it is difficult to label or categorize her literature. Her latest book, “The Fifth Book of Peace” (2003) is a memoir that dabbles in legend, epic, and various forms of fiction and nonfiction. One might look at the book as a holistic project: extremely political, intensely spiritual, and exceedingly personal.
“The Fifth Book of Peace” is about the journey towards peace as the book itself is part of that process. Perhaps it’s better to say that “The Fifth Book of Peace” is about creating, finding, and expressing peace through the experiences of battle, society, reflection, and renaissance. The Vietnam War is at the center of the book, the years during the war and its long-term effects. “War” is discussed from different perspectives: individually, locally, nationally, and internationally. The book is layered with many themes and features and allows for a deep, diverse reading.
Identify and describe the rhetorical devices used to help convey this meaning, mainly the elements of syntax, diction and organization
“The Fifth Book of Peace” is broken into four interwoven sections. The foremost segment documents the days around the 1991 fire that ruined her home, including the book she was working on, titled “The Fourth Book of Peace.” The following section gives the history of the “Lost Books of Peace” and Kingston’s research of their legend. “The Fourth Book of Peace” is recreated in section three, which is the imaginary story that Kingston cannot conclude as formerly intended. The final section of the book documents her work with the veterans writing community, which Kingston began in a 1993 workshop, “Reflective Writing, Mindfulness, and the War: A Day for Veterans and their Families.” Entitled Fire, Paper, Water, and Earth respectively, the four sections complement each other in this invigorating literary work.
The book’s design is a search for peace that proves transformative in the course. The opening is as heart-stopping harrowing as any war diary, with the author caught in a landscape of overwhelming panic and loss. A firestorm ravages her home in the Oakland hills, destroying whole neighborhoods and killing several dozen people. So this book of peace begins at its contrary, with a blaze consuming everything in its path and creating its own boundaries as it consumes the oxygen, the homes and the lives adjoining it. Special attention is given to language, which sometimes acts as a barrier and at other times as a vehicle for sharing and bonding.
This initiatory section, called “Fire,” is followed by “Paper,” “Water” and “Earth.” Using four elements as an organizational principle gives the book a lucid design to reflect on, with each component serving as a representation written large over the four entrances of this giant temple of words. The elements are, by designation, crucial and fundamental but not isolated: As they interact and interconnect, a grander cumulative blueprint emerges. “Paper” (element of regeneration, wood) is a comprehensive cogitation on writing, centered on the author’s manuscript consumed in the fire.
As The Fourth Book of Peace, it aimed to continue the Three Books of Peace of Chinese myth whose destruction she explains. “At kingdoms’ rise and fall,” she writes, “the new king would cut out the historians’ tongues. Writers had to set fire to their own books, and be burned to death in the book fire. Historians whose tongue stumps were cauterized lived on. They made dumb gestures that could not express subtle, complex ideas, such as descriptions of the way the world has never been but might be.” The next section, “Water,” revives Whitman Sing, hero of Kingston’s novel, Tripmaster Monkey, who now moves to Hawaii to avoid being drafted to fight his fellow Asians in Vietnam.
But even island paradises know of war. If no man is an island, no island is an island, either; its connections simply occur underwater. “Water” ends with the creation of a community of conflict. The book’s finale, “Earth,” documents the author’s creation of a writing workshop for veterans, where she begins her manuscript again. With this innovative leap, Kingston liberates herself from the customary isolation of writing.
Not only has a writing workshop, this spiritual community practiced Buddhism in the tradition of the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, a pacifist Zen master in exile from Vietnam. Veterans who’d lost their souls in Vietnam now reclaim them through the teachings of a former “enemy.” Their stories form a fitting climax to the book. (Some of their stories even continue beyond the book’s borders: John Mulligan’s memoir Shopping Cart Soldiers is now published, and Jim Janko’s work is due out soon.)
Here we see we’re all veterans, all touched by war, directly or indirectly. T5BP shows how war trauma can be healed in a community by making it conscious (through words), and by becoming conscious of being conscious (through meditation). Indeed, Kingston closes with a stirring call to action: “Children! Everybody! Here’s what to do during war. In a time of destruction, create something: a poem, a parade, a community, a school, a vow, a moral principle; one peaceful moment.”
Fittingly then, the book defies categorization, combining memoir, fiction and journalism, with each clearly delineated. The net effect calls into question not only division of genres but the very concept of separation.
In “Fire,” she examines the burnt rubble that was her home: “We stood under the arch, under the bathtub, and looked down at the footprint of the house. It looked like the low ruins of pueblos and heiaus.”
Does she care to define “heiau” to her readers? No, and more power to her for it. To borrow from Sarah McLachlan, she excels in building a mystery.
Sometimes the book reads like someone’s journal, the journal of someone teaching writing workshops. In Earth, as a form of healing for herself and others, she recounts helping war veterans write their stories with an angle on peace.
There is no simple English translation for Hawaiian expressions since many of the words are concepts and ideas specific to the culture and history of the island. “Aloha” for example, is much more than a word. It is a state of being or mind that accords with behavior and thought just as much with language. Learning this vocabulary in the context of the story, the reader discovers that language is very much a part of a people’s culture.
The Hawai’i Resistance, a nonviolent group protesting militarization, sponsored The Walk for Peace parade and rally at the Church of the Crossroads. Four days earlier the Church began Sanctuary for all AWOL GIs making a stand against the war. The mission and goals of Sanctuary are declared at The Walk for Peace rally, “In its broadest contemporary meaning, Sanctuary refers to community solidarity with one of its members’ confrontation with the illegitimate authority of the state…
Sanctuary gives meaning to their acts, offers the hope that by their stand, they might effect some change, and provides them the opportunity to raise the issue of conscience in their own words. For the individual concerned, Sanctuary provides the physical sustenance, but more importantly, moral support of a community of like-minded people…the solidarity established between soldiers and draft resisters and the civilian public (i.e. church members) convincingly breaks down the popular image that the peace movement opposes individual GIs as well as the military system…” (197-8)
Addressing social issues through pioneering styles and transformative language, Kingston’s memoir revisits her childhood, growing up in the Chinese-American culture of post World War II California. Weaving dreams, legends, and daily experiences, Kingston constructs her identity (and analyzes that construction) amid the forces of ancestry, culture, and contemporary politics. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the “Mademoiselle” Magazine Award, and one of “Time” magazine’s top ten nonfiction books of the decade, “The Woman Warrior” has recognized itself in the American canon of literature.
“Kaleidoscopic… Mesmerizing…. Employing language that is a lush and vibrant lure skimming the still lake of our collective experience as Americans who have attended far too many wars in far too few years, Kingston reels in the big questions… and displays them with both authority and care. The Fifth Book of Peace is a big book, chock full of real, not self, importance.” –The Baltimore Sun.