All is Connected to All (Beyond Normative Perception): Maxine Hong Kingston and the Psychedelic Politics of the Counterculture

Résumé 0

Few moments in history are so intensely associated with widespread drug use as the 1960s in the United States. The American counterculture scene is unimaginable without its defining attitudes towards and sustained practice of smoking marijuana and “dropping acid,” i.e. taking LSD (other drugs were used but none became as foundational to the counterculture lifestyle and ethos as these two). Yet, regrettably, these psychedelic experiences produced relatively little memorable literature as much of the creative energy of the drug movement went into the visual arts, music, guerrilla theater and experimental performance art. Although the Beats (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs) engaged with drug use in their literary work of the 1950s, they referred mainly to heroine, marijuana and amphetamines. In the 1960s, the few authors of what we could call a literature of psychedelic experience are Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Tom Woolf (writing about Ken Kesey), and the anthropologist (and possibly hoaxer) Carlos Castaneda (writing of peyote). Yet there is another writer who has produced a rich and sustained literary archive of West Coast counterculture and its fascination with psychedelia. Maxine Hong Kingston has been read and studied since the mis-1970s as a foundational figure of Chinese American literature and studies, and a key author of American women’s literary autobiography, but she has never been read as a literary hippie or major voice of the 1960s counterculture. This essay aims to challenge that oversight, showing how Kingston's novels constitute a profound and extensive account of psychedelic experience as it was lived and understood in the Bay Area of the 1960s.