WITH her flowing white hair, Maxine Hong Kingston appears like the female version of a mystical Chinese sage or a fiftysomething activist left over from the heady days of America's anti-Vietnam War campus rebellion.
Maybe she is both. The author of Woman Warrior and China Men has an imagination which soars far beyond normal reality, feeding off her Chinese heritage but let loose by her Californian background and her own genius.
Ms Kingston, who is in Hong Kong this week, is one of the world's most celebrated writers of Chinese origin. Among many accolades, Woman Warrior , won the US National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 and her following work, China Men, the American Book Award in 1981.
Those books defined what it was to be Chinese-American. They spanned the two continents and several generations as well as the persecution, endurance and change of the migrant community. They drew on the extraordinary imagery of her ancestral peasant culture and mythology as handed down in childhood stories by her mother and her community.
Sixteen years after finishing Woman Warrior, Ms Kingston has moved on from the wounds of emigration, and further from her family's roots in Guangdong. She arrived in Hong Kong bearing a message of peace from Berkeley, California.
The book she is currently writing sounds distinctly New Age Californian. It is subtitled A Book of Peace. She told an audience at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) on Thursday how it was being written with the help of a community of war veterans, most still bombed out with PTS - post traumatic stress.