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 marriage ("can't divorce until we get it right. Love, that is. Get love right") to her arrest at a peace march in Washington, where she and her and "sisters and " protested the Iraq war in the George W. Bush years. Kingston embraces Thoreau's notion of a "broad margin," hoping to expand her "I'm standing on top of a hill; I can see everywhichway - the long way that I came, and the few places I have yet to go. Treat my whole life as if it were a day."On her journeys as writer, peace activist, teacher, and mother, Kingston revisits her most beloved she learns the final fate of her Woman Warrior, and she takes her Tripmaster Monkey, a hip Chinese American, on a journey through China, where he has never been - a trip that becomes a beautiful meditation on the country then and now, on a culture where rice farmers still work in the age-old way, even as a new era is dawning. "All over China," she writes, "and places where Chinese are, populations are on the move, going home. That home where Mother and Father are buried. Doors between heaven and earth open wide."Such is the spirit of this wonderful book - a sense of doors opening wide onto an American life of great purpose and joy, and the tonic wisdom of a writer we have come to cherish.