I hope my writing has many layers, as human beings have layers. - Maxine Hong Kingston

("A friend once described Woman Warrior as convoluted.") MHK: Oh, I'm very proud of being convoluted. I try to be convoluted. Life is convoluted. I know there are some people who have a certain expectation of a linear kind of story where everything is explained to them and it goes at a slower pace and it's more of an accessible, popular kind of writing style. If they expect that, then they can't get into a more complicated book. I think that people like that miss out on something because they are not willing to work harder.

Community is not built once-and-for-all; people have to imagine, practice, and re-create it. (p306)

To say we are inscrutable, mysterious, exotic denies us our common humanness, because it says that we are so different from a regular human being that we are by our nature intrinsically unknowable. Thus the stereotyper aggressively defends ignorance. Nor do we want to be called not inscrutable, exotic, mysterious. These are false ways of looking at us. We do not want to be measured by a false standard at all.