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The loss of her home and manuscript to the Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire inspires the famed author to examine the role of conscience and the creative impulse in finding peace in the modern world. |
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GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | FICTION
The Fifth Book of Peace
a novel by Maxine Hong Kingston
Alfred A Knopf, New York, 2003, 402 pp, $26.00
EXCERPT:
f a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation. I have lost my book -- 156 good pages. A firestorm blew over the Oakland-Berkeley hillsin 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. He's 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. It's not my poor sense of direction, I told myself, but the newscasters in confusion. The perimeter 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 night -- red gashes zigzagging the black. Impossible that it cross ten lanes of freeway and take over settled, established, built city.
[CONTINUED BELOW]
Behind me, my sister-in-law Cindy was chasing me at ninety miles per hour. My family believed that I didn't 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 burned, 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 up -- nine hundred degrees, the temperature of molten lava; twenty-one hundred degrees, the temperature of kilns; thirty-five hundred houses.