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Chapter 7 Embodied Mindfulness Charles Johnson and Maxine Hong Kingston on Buddhism, Race, and Beauty John Whalen-Bridge This interview was conducted on May 29, 2004 at the American Literature Association (ALA) Conference in San Francisco. Charles Johnson and Maxine Hong Kingston each gave readings at the ALA that year and generously agreed to meet with me for the interview. Also in attendance were fellow members of the Charles Johnson Society: Marc Conner, Will Nash, Linda Furgerson Selzer, and Gary Storhoff. In 2009, I reorganized the material and asked Charles and Maxine if they would like to review the interview to emend or update any of the points made five years earlier. —JWB Linda Selzer (LS): I’d like to begin by asking about selfhood and representation , about cross-representation. How do each of you feel about representing someone who is supposedly “other”? Joh Whalen-Bridge (JWB): Yes, and Maxine’s Wittman Ah Sing is a very lively male character. But when you represent another gender or race, you have problems both at the level of composition and reception. Critics might not like what you’re doing. So maybe you guys could respond to that idea a little bit. Charles Johnson (CJ): I tend to be very cautious with sexual descriptions because, as we know, it’s a powerful subject. It’s a bomb that can blow up on you if you’re not careful—but I want to know what Maxine says. Maxine Hong Kingston (MHK): When I wrote Wittman Ah Sing, I was seeing that as a big artistic challenge for myself. I saw my career of forty years 141 142 Writing as Enlightenment before as selfish—not ethnocentric but egocentric, just writing from a woman’s point of view. If I could—if I could write a male character, then it would be a great artistic breakthrough. And I believe I was seeing myself as such a limited person and as a limited writer if I could only stay within the bounds of the feminine. There’s the other half of existence and I am—I’m not even trying to create male characters, a male fiction character. Actually, this struggle started when I was writing China Men. One of the ways that I approached this was to give myself permission. I had to have the faith that any one of us is free to be looked at from the point of view of any other human being on this earth. I struggled against the critical argument in which, you know, that you have no right to presume that you can inhabit the body and mind of a person of another race or culture. So I thought, well, I’m not going to listen to that. It’s restricting my freedom. To write a character that’s not me is almost like an out-of-body experience—what we can do is fly out of our own body and inhabit the body of another. That’s already very magical. We can choose any person and write from their insight. At Berkeley in my writing classes, I just gave the students permission. You know? “You, white person, you go ahead and write about black people. I give you permission to do that.” You know? I don’t care what your background is. CJ: At a panel recently with Octavia Butler and some other science fiction writers last fall in Seattle, somebody asked about writing outside your race. Octavia said, “Well, you’re going to get it wrong. But you can try.” She said, “You’re going to get something wrong.” I think I realized after writing Faith and the Good Thing that there are just too many subtleties that I would just never be able to get perfectly. I’ve been married thirty-four years. I know my wife pretty well. But when we first got married, she was going to be a teacher, an elementary school teacher. And then, you know, she had our first kid and she decided to be a homemaker. A little later she went back to school and did a bachelor’s and master’s in social work. At that time—this after she had cancer actually and wanted to get back into the world, 1993. And she said something I thought was really interesting. She said she had never wanted to be a teacher. She had wanted to be a social worker before we met. But she had nursed her grandmother through...

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