"Remaking the World" One Story at a Time in The Fifth Book of Peace and Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace

We tell stories and we listen to stories in order to live. To stay conscious. To connect one with another. To understand consequences. To keep history. To rebuild civilization.

—Maxine Hong Kingston (Introduction 1)

"Listening to people who had lived to tell the tale," Maxine Hong Kingston writes in the introduction to her edited collection Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (2006), "I believed that it was the telling that kept them alive. They had survived hell and come back to warn us at home" (1). Listening and telling, Kingston suggests, are two viable ways to strive for peace through artistic creation. In both the structure and content of her memoir, The Fifth Book of Peace (2003), Kingston shows how acts of listening and telling are privileged forms of communication that emphasize the importance of community and the potential for testimony. Veterans therefore can be read as a companion to The Fifth Book. Veterans collects "fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose" from veterans of the Vietnam War, other military conflicts, and even, as Michael L. Wong writes in his afterword, "from other armies" (608). These books are material manifestations of the potential for artistic creation from traumatic experience; both are narratives of trauma that, through a structure that foregrounds relationality and emphasis on writing in sangha (a Sanskrit word that loosely means community), illustrate and demonstrate how to transform witnessing into testimony in order to remake the world peacefully.¹

In The Fifth Book, Kingston recounts how she established sangha so that writers—specifically veterans—would have a safe space to narrativize their experiences. Organized for people who shared wartime experiences regardless of conflict, Kingston's Veterans' Writers Workshop was created using sangha as a model and thereby highlights her belief in the power of community.² These sanghas are founded on the impulse to create art amid geopolitical chaos. The structure of The Fifth Book reflects its communal origins; Kingston herself calls it a "nonfiction fiction nonfiction sandwich" and says:

I've decided to leave in all the stuff about how to get into the thinking mind, the mind that can write. How do you get into words again? I'm going to leave all that in. . . . So this book enters a real nonfiction place, then it flies to a fiction place, and then it grounds us again in a nonfiction place. I haven't seen another book like it, nor, once again, do I know how people will categorize it. Are they going to call it fiction or nonfiction?

("As Truthful" 91)

No stranger to presenting her readers with complicated texts, Kingston addresses the challenges that readers and critics may face as they attempt to classify The Fifth Book. Once again, she is unsure of the narrative frames through which people will approach her work; both The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980) similarly challenge the boundaries of genre, while the underanalyzed Hawai'i One Summer (1987) presents Kingston's reflections episodically in a collection of essays. Kingston notes that her initial impulse was to publish The Woman Warrior and China Men as one volume, like The Fifth Book, even though ultimately, she explains, "the women's stories and the men's stories parted into two volumes, naturally replicating history and geography" ("Personal" 24). The Woman Warrior, China Men, and The Fifth Book, Silvia Schultermandl suggests, are texts that cross over genres, thereby "forc[ing] the readers to read outside of conventional genre categories" (112). Similarly, Te-hsing Shan examines reviews of The Fifth Book, noting that one reason there are few articles in academic and popular publications alike is because "critics and reviewers do not know how to cope with this complicated, heterogeneous, and 'weird' text, which defies easy categorization" (1).³

One way to understand Kingston's use of heterogeneity in The Fifth Book is through Cathy Caruth's concept of "traumatic structuring" (21). In The Fifth Book, as Kingston notes, one goal was to get into the mind of the writer, particularly the mind of a writer...