Kingston was born in Stockton, California 1940, she was the 3rd of eight children to a Chinese immigrant parents, and the first to be born in America. Her American name, Maxine, was after a blonde who was always lucky in gambling. Ting Ting, her Chinese name, comes from a Chinese poem about self-reliance.

At the early part of her school education, she kept silent and for her talking was terrible. When she was in the fourth grade and all of a sudden a poem came out of her. By the age of nine, her progress in English enabled her to write poems in her new language, and though she was a gifted story-teller, she preferred the solitary task of writing. An extremely bright student, she won eleven scholarship that allowed her to attend the University of California at Berkeley. She began as an engineering major, but soon she switched to English literature.

In 1976，while Kingston was teaching creative writing at a private school, she published her first book, The Woman Warrior. It details the experiences of first-generation Chinese Americans. It combines Chinese folk stories, myth, and her family’s experience as immigrants in the United States. Though considered as a memoir, it was, in fact, a novel about Chinese in the world. It won the national Book Critics Circle Award, and became a literary classic.

As well as being praised for her literary works, Kingston must also be noted for her vision of the kind of borderless world we could create if we try -now that we are all more or less world citizens, regardless of our origins. But more than that, if you substitute the word “Chinese” with “human” in Kingston’s passage, you have a question to pose the whole world. Kingston’s is a moral vision, one to guide not only writers, but all who challenge tradition, history and old-fashioned notions of identity.

For Kingston, writing has been central in her life. “My writing is an ongoing function, like breathing or eating,” she explains. “I have this habit of writing things down. Anything, and then some of it falls into place as in China Men and Woman Warrior.She admired the changes a storyteller can implement when she or he tells the same tale many times, and in her work, she tries to remain this freedom to change a story’s interpretation by guarding ambiguity in the static writing. Doubt is part of every story, not certainty, and this is part of what makes her writing unique.