and "I did not wait for twenty years to write the pieces in this book, which is like a diary. There is sometimes only a week or two between an event and my writing about it. I wrote about my son's surfing upon coming home from it. I wrote about the high school reunion before going to it. The result is that I am making up meanings as I go along. Which is the way I live anyway. There is a lot of detailed doubt here. and "In this collection of eleven pieces, originally issued as a limited hand-printed edition, Maxine Hong Kingston does not attempt to capture Hawai'i but and "instead and incidentally and " to describe her and "piece by piece, and hope that the sum praises her. and " The essays provide readers with a generous sampling of Kingston's an angle of vision, exquisitely balanced and clear-sighted, that awakens one to a knowledge of things.