Kingston - The Fifth Book of Peace

Table of Contents

TO VETERANS OF WAR,
VETERANS OF PEACE

Acclaim for Maxine Hong Kingstons

THE FIFTH BOOK OF PEACE

Chosen as one of the Best Spiritual Books of 2003 bySpirituality &Healthmagazine

Astonishing.... Part fiction and part autobiography, revery, prophecy, and how-to manual.... Wherever we are in this fifth book... Kingston is a lotus, a flowering of divine intellect, and a bodhisattva, sticking around, one birth short of nirvana, to ease our suffering. Harpers

A sharp, aching account.... [It] captivates... because of the splashy urgency of its writing. Los Angeles Times Book Review

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

Powerful.... Kingstons elegant arc from the person to the global constitutes a profound act of humility and compassion.Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I loved itI couldnt stop reading it. Maxine Hong Kingston is one of our best writers. The Fifth Book of Peace has the generosity of spirit and the luminous prose we so urgently need in this time of war after war.Leslie Marmon Silko

A passionate plea that draws on U.S. history and Buddhist wisdom to argue for an all-inclusive and peaceful world. People

Moving.... A richly various extended meditation on peace.... The lesson embodied in The Fifth Book of Peace could not be more timely.The Boston Globe

An amazing testament to the existence of peace, even in the midst of war. The book is a communal effort, beautifully orchestrated by Hong Kingston and pieced together with open eyes. She doesnt romanticize, doesnt ignore the failures of past peace movements, but bravely searches for new possibilities. Rocky Mountain News

Beautifully rendered.... Intelligent and poetic.... Kingston gives readers entre into something powerful. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Dense, complex, urgent.... Kingston is interested here in the process of telling stories to come to a happy ending. Newsday

Immediately striking about The Fifth Book of Peace is the uncanniness with which it nails the anxiety of this nation.... Kingstons stories and practicesand particularly her characters, both real and imagined have a refreshing authenticity. The Oregonian

Intense, often moving.... [Kingston] lays down layers of meaning, deftly weaving symbolism and imagery. The Miami Herald

An arresting tour de force.... This is surely a better book than the one [Kingston] lost. Fort Worth Star-Telegram

[An] uncompromising examination of the meanings of peace.... Secrets and truths that lesser writers would take to their graves, [Kingston] delivers with startling openness.... She has gathered a community of the lost, the disempowered, the people who never get to write alternative histories, and gifted them the fierce power of her voice.The San Diego Union-Tribune

Her recounting of the fire is astonishing. She has a poets eye for description.... Kingston has... created something good out of painful memories. Austin American-Statesman

Powerful.... Thoughtful and passionate. Entertainment Weekly

Gripping.... [Filled] with bracing honesty.... Kingston has written a moving, urgent book that discounts facile notions of peace as a passive state. The Charleston Post & Courier

Satisfying.... Surreal, vivid detail. The Columbus Dispatch

Brilliantly imaginative.... Fine writing and intriguing stories.... As always, Kingston is a superb stylist. The Star-Ledger

FIRE

If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation. I have lost my book156 good pages. A firestorm blew over the Oakland-Berkeley hills in October of 1991, and took my house, things, neighborhood, and other neighborhoods, and forests. And the lives of twenty-five people.

I almost reached my manuscript, typescript, printouts, and disks in time. I was driving home from funeral ceremonies for my father. I have lost my father. Hes gone less than a month; we were having the full-month ceremony early, Sunday day off. Never before had I driven by myself away from Stockton and my parents house. I turned on public radio for the intelligent voices, and heard that the hills were burning, toward Moraga, toward Walnut Creek. Its not my poor sense of direction, I told myself, but the newscasters in confusion. The perimeters of the fire were different from station to station, from taped news to live news. North of the Caldecott Tunnel, south of the Caldecott Tunnel, east, west of the Warren Freeway. I pictured wildfire far up in the hills ridgelines of flame spilling down, then running up sere-grass slopes. I have seen it at nightred gashes zigzagging the black. Impossible that it cross ten lanes of freeway and take over settled, established, built city.

Behind me, my sister-in-law Cindy was chasing me at ninety miles per hour. My family believed that I didnt know about the fire, and would drive into it, and not be able to find my way out on the altered, burning streets. Like all the Chinese members of our family, I have an instinct that left is right and vice versa. Too easily lost. Cindy, who is not Chinese but Arkie, ran out of gas at Tracy.

In a half-hour, halfway there, forty miles to go, I was speeding over the Altamont Pass (where there be ghosts and accidents; it is the ground upon which the stabbing happened at the Rolling Stones concert, after Woodstock), and through the windfarms. Some windmills turned, and some were still. Here the winds and all seemed normal; I had no evidence that hurricanes of fire were storming on the other side of these hills but for the radio. Forty-five houses have gone up in flames. About a hundred homes. A hundred and fifty structures have burned. The numbers would keep going upnine hundred degrees, the temperature of molten lava; twenty-one hundred degrees, the temperature of kilns; thirty-five hundred houses. Winds of forty-five miles per hour...... sixty-five-mile-per-hour firewind...... record heat and winds... Foehn winds. Northeast winds... I would have to look up foehn, which sounds like wind in Chinese, as in typhoon. The fire has jumped the junction of Highway Twenty-four and Highway Thirteen. Its blown over and through ten lanes. Ten lanes are not wide enough firebreak. Its on our side of the freeway.... dynamite College Avenue.... draw the line at College Avenue.... helicopters and available cropdusters chemical-drop the Claremont Hotel. If the Claremont Hotel goes, explodes, the fire will burn to the Bay. No cars have been trapped in the Caldecott Tunnel. Once, a propane truck had exploded inside the tunnela giant flamethrower pointed at Oakland.

NO TANK TRUCKS
WITH HAZARDOUS MATERIALS
ALLOWED IN CALDECOTT TUNNEL

A police car was parked sideways across my exit, Broadway Terrace. I drove fast to the next exit, which was blocked by a Highway Patrol car and flares. They are setting up the roadblocks moments ahead of me, I thought. If only I had driven faster, I might have saved the book, and my mothers jewelry, and my fathers watch, and his spectacles, which fit my eyes, and his draft card, which I had taken from his wallet. This card is to be carried on your person at all times. He carried it safely for over fifty years.