The Fifth Book of Peace

Zusatztext 42083305 Informationen zum Autor Maxine Hong Kingston Klappentext A long time ago in China, there existed three Books of Peace that proved so threatening to the reigning powers that they had them burned. Many years later Maxine Hong Kingston wrote a Fourth Book of Peace, but it too was burned--in the catastrophic Berkeley-Oakland Hills fire of 1991, a fire that coincided with the death of her father. Now in this visionary and redemptive work, Kingston completes her interrupted labor, weaving fiction and memoir into a luminous meditation on war and peace, devastation and renewal.If 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 hills in 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 perimeters 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. 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 turned, 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. “Winds of forty-five miles per hour . . .” “. . . sixty-five-mile-per-hour firewind . . .” “. . . record heat and winds . . .” “Foehn winds.” “Northeast winds . . .” I would have to look up “foehn,” which sounds like “wind” in Chinese, as in “typhoon.” “The fire has jumped the junction of Highway Twenty-four and Highway Thirteen.” It’s blown over and through ten lanes. Ten lanes are not wide enough firebreak. It’s on our side of the freeway. “. . . dynamite College Avenue.” “. . . draw the line at College Avenue.” “. . . helicopters and available cropdusters chemical-drop the Claremont Hotel.” “If the Claremont Hotel goes, explodes, the fire will burn to the Bay.” “No cars have been trapped in the Caldecott Tunnel.” Once, a propane truck had exploded inside the tunnel—a giant flamethrower pointed at Oakland. NO TANK TRUCKS WITH HAZARDOUS MATERIALS ALLOWED IN CALDECOTT TUNNEL A pol...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Maxine Hong Kingston
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 28.09.2004
• EAN: 9780679760634
• ISBN: 978-0-679-76063-4
• Pagine: 416
• Dimensioni: 131 mm x 202 mm x 21 mm
• Serie: Vintage Contemporaries; Vintage Contemporaries
• Categorie: Narrativa > Romanzi > Epistole, diari; Saggistica > Filosofia, religione > Biografie, autobiografie