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I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

3.72 of 5 stars 3.72 · rating details · 89 ratings · 32 reviews

In her singular voice—humble, elegiac, practical—Maxine Hong Kingston sets out to reflect on aging as she turns sixty-five.

Kingston’s swift, effortlessly flowing verse lines feel instantly natural in this fresh approach to the art of memoir, as she circles from present to past and back, from lunch with a writer friend to the funeral of a Vietnam veteran, from her long mar...more

Hardcover, 240 pages

Published January 18th 2011 by Knopf

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Feb 01, 2013 Sheli Ellsworth rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: my-reviews

Hong Kingston’s book is a brilliantly penned memoir written in a fluid, narrative poetry genre. She has perfected “turning a phrase” into a campaign all its own, while toting Thoreau and Whitman as running mates. The author reflects on turning 65, takes us on an extended journey into self, and eventually onto China, all while sojourning scenes from earlier transmigrations. The manuscript is not only a memoir, but also the author’s own liberal sentiments in poesy form.
Kingston’s belief in reinca...more

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Sep 20, 2012 Abbe added it · review of another edition

Shelves: in-library

From Publishers Weekly

...more From Publishers Weekly

Told in free verse reminiscent of one of Kingston's idols, Walt Whitman, this uncommon memoir of the artist at 65 is informed by the wide margins on the pages of the Chinese editions of her works (margins her father used to write in). Kingston revisits characters, like Wittman Ah Sing, the monkey from her first novel, and themes from her books: her pacifist, feminist activism; the challenge of stereotypes; East and West. Though this homage to aging, with wisdom gained through a freewheeling reflection on family, the past, fate (karma, we're reminded, means "work," not "doom"), and self-reliance (which is a translation of Kingston's Chinese name, Ting Ting), often rambles, it also has the cohesion and intricate logic of a musical composition. The artist is a mental traveler, presenting her life as a dreamlike journey that culminates in a listing of "my dead," some 50 names, which both pulls Kingston toward oblivion ("Each one who dies, I want to go with you") and inspires seven reasons to live. The desire to create recedes ("I regret always writing, writing") as the memoirist sees herself becoming "reader of the world," a "surprise world" that frees her from the need to create it with words. (Jan.)
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Starred Review The title is from Thoreau, and it is the perfect credo for Kingston, a gentle advocate for justice and peace, an innovative creator of unconventional, mythic, and captivating tales. The very structure of her affecting memoir involves broad margins as Kingston channels musings and memories into one long, streaming poem. Some may quail at the prospect of a narrative-in-verse, but Kingston’s language is so natural, lucid, and subtly rhythmic, reading it is as effortless as breathing. Revered for the candor of her groundbreaking creative nonfiction, beginning with The Woman Warrior (1976), and her playful and profound fiction, Kingston gracefully entwines both genres as she reflects on turning 65, shares piquant stories of family, and catches up with her characters, especially Wittman Ah Sung, who first appeared in Tripmaster Monkey (1989). Kingston’s descriptions of the timeless beauty and evolving struggle of village life in China are mystical and incisive, while wry humor shapes her account of being arrested during a 2003 peace demonstration at the White House. Looking back to her California childhood as the daughter of immigrants, Kingston remembers wanting to ask others, “How do you feel being you?” That is the writer’s great question, and the wellspring of Kingston’s artistry and deep compassion. --Donna Seaman

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Jul 28, 2012 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

Way back in high school, Ms. Sundstrom's AP American Literature class introduced me to Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, which opened my eyes to a different kind of literature, one where the politics of national and ethnic identity lie side by side with imagery and narrative. Here was a woman who looked like me, writing about Chinese Americans struggling to be a part of our nation's fabric while questioning how to be authentically "Chinese"....indeed, what that even means. I went on to r...more Way back in high school, Ms. Sundstrom's AP American Literature class introduced me to Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, which opened my eyes to a different kind of literature, one where the politics of national and ethnic identity lie side by side with imagery and narrative. Here was a woman who looked like me, writing about Chinese Americans struggling to be a part of our nation's fabric while questioning how to be authentically "Chinese"....indeed, what that even means. I went on to read her other books, especially China Men and Tripmaster Monkey, books which specifically addressed the challenges specific to Asian men. So I was quite excited to see her latest, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, sitting on my reserve shelf at the library.

There is less narrative to this long prose poem of a book, and more memoir-like glimpses of Kingston's life, particularly her marriage to her Caucasian husband. She writes about a trip to Guangzhou, China taken long after her first journeys back to her family's homeland, noting the changes that the economy has brought to her parents' villages, more TVs and paved roads. Kingston dovetails this memoir with the story of her old character Wittman Ah Sing, who has left his non-Chinese wife to revisit China. In between, Kingston weaves vignettes of watching war on the small screen and getting arrested for protesting in front of the White House. ("How can it be that all the cops are men, / and all for Peace women? I can’t live / in such a world. I don’t want to keep / living out the myth that men fight / and women mother.") In the end, it is a meditation about aging, revisiting home, and accepting that the concepts of identity and home must evolve. Most of all, it is about redemption in a marriage; the author and her character both return to their respective spouses because "can't divorce until we get it right. / Love, that is. Get love right."

I was, overall, pleased to have the time and space to enjoy and sink deep into Kingston's words. It's not a quick read but a rewarding one. (less)

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Jun 10, 2011 Victoria Aldea added it

I Love a Broad Margin to My Life is a memoir-prose work of literature written by Maxine Hong Kingston. In it she describes her life in China and then as an Asian-American. She discloses myths and proves to be a story teller like many of those that belong to generations before her. As Kingston vastly approached her 60's, she found it was time to reflect on her life as thus refers to it as the "broad margin" in her book. Her illustrious use of metaphors and moral views allow the reader to think ph...more

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May 12, 2011 Darryl rated it 5 of 5 stars

In this fascinating and unforgettable memoir, Maxine Hong Kingston, an award-winning second generation Chinese-American writer and pacifist, shares the story of her past life and the experiences of her family in the United States and her extended relatives in her ancestral village in China, along with an extension of the story of Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of her novel Tripmaster Monkey. What makes this a unique read is that it is in verse form, often in the Chinese talk-story form that Ki...more In this fascinating and unforgettable memoir, Maxine Hong Kingston, an award-winning second generation Chinese-American writer and pacifist, shares the story of her past life and the experiences of her family in the United States and her extended relatives in her ancestral village in China, along with an extension of the story of Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of her novel Tripmaster Monkey. What makes this a unique read is that it is in verse form, often in the Chinese talk-story form that Kingston uses in her earlier books The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts and China Men.

The book begins in the present, as Kingston reflects on her upcoming 65th birthday in "Home":

I am turning 65 years of age.
In 2 weeks I will be 65 years old.
I can accumulate time and lose
time? I sit here writing in the dark—
can't see to change these penciled words—
just like my mother, alone, bent over her writing,
just like my father bent over his writing, alone
but for me watching. She got out of bed,
wrapped herself in a blanket, and wrote down
the strange sounds Father, who was dead,
was intoning to her. He was reading aloud
calligraphy that he'd written—carved with inkbrush—
on his tombstone. She wasn't writing in answer.
She wasn't writing a letter. Who was she writing to?
Nobody.
This well-deep outpouring is not for
anything. Yet we have to put into exact words
what we are given to see, hear, know.
Mother's eyesight blurred; she saw trash
as flowers. ‟Oh. How very beautiful.”
She was lucky, seeing beauty, living
in beauty, whether or not it was there.

In "Leaving Home", Wittman Ah Sing, an aging Chinese-American free spirit, decides to travel to China, alone from his wife:

"I need
to get to China, and I have to go
without helpmeet. I've been married to you
so long, my world is you. You
see a thing, I see it. The friends you
like, I like. The friends you can't
stand, I can't stand. My
perception is wedded to your perception.
You have artist's eyes. I'd wind up
seeing the China you see. I want
to see for myself my own true China."

In "Viet Nam Village" she writes about her experiences as a pacifist, including an all-woman demonstration against Operation Iraqi Freedom in front of the White House, for which she, Alice Walker, and others were arrested and temporarily detained. In this section, she compares her arrest with those of her father's, many years in the past:

I had nothing apposite to say, but
had to talk. "Now I'm on the trip
my father went on. In a paddy wagon to jail.
I'm reliving his arrests. I'm knowing his feelings.
Scared. Helpless. He wondered what would become
of him. Maybe deportation. They're driving
him to the border, never to see his family again.
Oh, but my father wasn't committing civil
disobedience like us. He committed crime,
ran gambling, half the take in the city.
It was his job—go to jail, regularly.
Once a month, they raided the gambling house,
and took just one guy, my father.
He was all alone in the paddy wagon
riding through the streets and out of town.
It was okay. By the end of the night, he
was home. They let him go. He gave them money
and whiskey and cigarettes, and they let him go.
He gave them a fake Chinese name,
a different Chinese name every time;
he doesn't have a record." BaBa
used to say, "I want the life
you live." Now I'm living
the life he lived.

In "Mother's Village", she travels with her husband, a "white demon", to her mother's ancestral village, where she learns about her family's past history. She is treated like royalty, not from her status as a famous American writer, but because she is a descendant of a former emperor of the region:

"Your names are here," said the mayoress, pointing
to branches nearest the door. A fear
went through me, that fear when I am about
to learn something. I asked carefully,
"Were we soldiers? Were we servants?"
I would've asked, "Were we courtiers?"
but didn't know courtier. Most likely,
we were courtiers. "No! No! You emperor!
You emperor!" You who left for America,
became American, you forget everything.
You forget who you are. Emperor!
Chew Sung Emperor. Emperor of the Northern Sung.
Emperor of the Southern Sung. A teacher of English
took my hand, bowed over it, and said,
laughing, "Your majesty."

As she leaves her ancestral village, she sits next to a younger woman from her village, who is leaving China for the first time to reunite with her husband in America:

Once I was on an airplane beside
a village girl in the window seat. At takeoff
I asked her, "Where are you going?"
"Waw!" She shouted in surprise, and grabbed
ahold of my hand, "You speak like me!"
"Yes, I speak Say Yup language."
"Are you from the village?" "No, my MaMa
and BaBa came from Say Yup villages.
They left for New York. They lived in New York,
then California. I was born in California."
I feel like a child, younger than this girl; I'm
telling about parents as if I still had them;
I'm talking in my baby language. "Waw!"
she exclaimed, loud as though yelling across fields.
"Iam going to New York! I
am meeting my husband in New York. He's
waiting for me in New York. He works
in a restaurant. He's rented a home. He sent
for me, and waits for me." She did not
let go of my hand; I held hers tightly
as we flew the night sky. She looked
in wonder at webs of lights below.

I'm hard pressed to put into words how much I enjoyed I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, but I would say that this is easily one of the best works of verse I've read. Maxine Hong Kingston is my favorite living American writer, and this book confirms my love of and respect for her work.(less)

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Oct 02, 2012 Ashanti Miller rated it 5 of 5 stars

My Maxine. I read the last 20 pages of this book against a warm sunset at San Francisco's Ocean Beach. All of the Western San Francisco locals who could sneak away from work were present to play tourist in their own city and enjoy a rare warm day.
On the walk there, I stubbornly hoped this would not be Maxine Hong Kingston's last book and that she would give us one last gift or series of gifts, but sitting on a beach boardwalk bench as the book closed, the author ended up all the story lines of...more

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Jun 29, 2011 Mark rated it 3 of 5 stars

"Before I had language, before I had stories, I wanted to write.
That desire is going away.
I've said what I have to say.
I'll stop, and look at things I called
distractions. Become reader of the world,
no more writer of it. Surely, world
lives without me having to mind it.
A surprise world! When I complete
this sentence, I shall begin taking
my sweet time to love the moment-to-moment
beauty of everything. Every one. Enow."

I have nothing to say really. Books are to read not write about for me anyway. May...more

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Feb 11, 2011 Bayneeta rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir, nonfiction

This is memoir in verse--really not my thing, but I admire Kingston's Woman Warrior so much that I stuck with it.
"Before I had language,
before I had stories, I wanted to write.
That desire is going away.
I've said what I have to say.
I'll stop, and look at things I called
distractions. Become reader of the world,
no more writer of it. Surely, world
lives without me having to mind it.
A surprise world! When I complete
this sentence, I shall begin taking
my sweet time to love the moment-to-moment
beauty o...more

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Apr 06, 2012 Anne Broyles added it

Those who are familiar with Maxine Hong Kingston's work may appreciate this memoir in verse. As much as I loved THE WOMAN WARRIOR long years ago, I had trouble staying focused on this book, despite the wonderful title (from a Thoreau quotation). I kept thinking that if I had read every single other book she had written, I would understand the context more clearly, but as much as I admire this author, this was not the book for me to read at this point.

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Aug 04, 2012 Cade rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry, non-fiction

I don't usually read memoirs. That this was written in verse is what made it attractive to me and it did not disappoint. Maxine Hong Kingston's perspective and life experiences are quite different from mine, so I found this very enlightening as a memoir, as well as moving, challenging and humorous. As verse, I thoroughly enjoyed Hong Kingston's use of language, cultural references and imagery, with the tone flowing across a spectrum from chillingly stark to lush and lyrical, and every emotional...more

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Jul 12, 2011 Joy rated it 1 of 5 stars

I'm very much into reading memoirs, and I do like having a broad margin in my life, but I did not enjoy this book. The free verse style of writing was hard to read. I love punctuation and paragraphs. Also, the content was of no interest. There is, however, always new information: Eighty out of every one hundred people live in cities. Interesting thought: "Women are better at living than man is.

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Sep 02, 2012 pausetowonder rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Painfully bad. Obscenely, aggressively naive.

I persevered until:

I felt love palpable and saw love manifest -- it's pink. ... I could open my arms wide and gather up great big pink balls of Peace and hurl them east toward Iraq... also threw pink balls of Peace to the Iraqi children, to protect them...

Grotesque and offensive.

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Aug 29, 2011 Anittah rated it 2 of 5 stars

Short:

The words and pictures oozed underfoot, and I felt grounded in nothing. I rarely give up on books entirely — at the very least, I’ll read the first sentence of every paragraph — but I gave up on this a quarter of the way through.

Less short:

http://www.librarienne.com/2011/08/29...

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Apr 22, 2011 Holly Procida rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult-non-fiction

This is the first memoir in verse I have read. What a unique lady! I haven't read The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, but I have read some other powerful work from women writers in the 60s and 70s. I loved the facts about life as a Chinese American and her visit back to China were dispersed through the writing and can only image how difficult it must have been to prune your life into such succinct words. Clearly my memoir will never be like this. I need parenthesis around pare...more

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May 02, 2011 Mary rated it 5 of 5 stars

It makes you want to say to her "Sing me another story like that. And don't leave out any of it--not the sad parts or the funny asides, not the sweetness or the harshness, not the history lessons, not any of those people..."

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Aug 14, 2011 jennifer marked it as half-read

i liked this, a lot more than i expected. but i had to return it, overdue. i am going to read her other (non 'woman warrior') stuff before i re-check it out, so i can get it. lots of meditations on 'tripmaster monkey', which i might have ignored due to that 90s band.

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Feb 16, 2012 Roseann rated it 2 of 5 stars

Just not my thing, pretty hard to follow. I love stream of consciousness writing ala Virginia Wolfe, but this was too disjointed for my taste.

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Feb 08, 2011 GraceAnne rated it 4 of 5 stars

Magical, lyrical, and often very, very funny. The fates of the Tripmaster Monkey and the Woman Warrior might break your heart, though.

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Feb 11, 2012 Susan rated it 5 of 5 stars

As always, Maxine Hong Kingston experiments with how language might be used. This is poetry and fiction rolled into one.

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Feb 07, 2011 Deena marked it as to-read

Read about this here: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/...

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Feb 16, 2011 Harvee rated it 4 of 5 stars

Memoir written in verse covers trips to China with her husband and son and her views of her ethnic homeland and culture.

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Oct 07, 2012 Gary rated it 5 of 5 stars

in the tradition of the "long poem" (h.d., pound, eliot, wc williams) 'tho critics ( " reviewers " ) may never make the association, this one is an epic and a memoir,
to be read aloud by candlelight ...
to ones you love ( including yourself ).
i laughed a dozen times and wept several.
each time i thought it had reached its peak, i was tricked because around the corner awaited a yet greater surprise.
the ending rivals don quixote or the tempest.
what can i tell you ?

http://poetryflash.org/archive/?s ...more

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Feb 10, 2013 Layne Wong added it

Beautiful language that I enjoyed reading over and over again for deeper meaning.

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Feb 09, 2013 Drew Hoffman rated it 5 of 5 stars

Maxine Hong Kingston's poetry-as-autobiography is stunningly lovely, marked by her trademark quiet strength and fierce resolve.

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Mar 14, 2013 Streator Johnson rated it 5 of 5 stars

This free-verse autobiographical poem is a wonderful read.

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Mar 27, 2011 Paul added it

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Jan 07, 2013 Terri Jacobson rated it 1 of 5 stars

An autobiography in verse. Didn't really care for it.

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Mar 16, 2011 Linda Robinson rated it 5 of 5 stars

As unfamiliar as eastern music chords, as exotic as orchids, yet this book feels strangely attached to my heartstrings. The discomfort at the freeform prose I felt in the identical way I feel discomfort with my own careening thought processes. Diamond bright insight, soft rain of family love, sharp edges of do, do, do in a lifetime are all here in a garden of experiential blooms.

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Feb 28, 2013 Erika rated it 3 of 5 stars

I was really excited to start reading this book, but after it took a left turn to travel to China, it became a bit hard for me to follow.

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Nov 14, 2011 Kevin Fanning rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry, totally-worth-owning

Review TK

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About Maxine Hong Kingston

She was born as Maxine Ting Ting Hong to a laundry house owner in Stockton, California. She was the third of eight children, and the first among them born in the United States. Her mother trained as a midwife at the To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton. Her father had been brought up a scholar and taught in his village of Sun Woi, near Canton. Tom left China for America in 1924 and took a job in...more

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Quotes from I Love a Broad Margin ...

“Upon Good Earth, lay the body down,
open the mouth wide, let song rush through.” — 2 people liked it

“…I have changed/I am a dandelion puffball blur. My hair,/scribbles of white lines. My face. Lines/crisscross and zigzag my face./My eyes. I am looking into eyes/whose color has turned lighter, hazy brown./Wind and time are blowing me out." –Maxine Hong Kingston” — 2 people liked it

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