Celebrating Lunar New Year with Maxine Hong Kingston and Special Guests

We welcome back renowned Bay Area author Maxine Hong Kingston, along with new guests Kathy Leung and Nicole Wong, to commemorate Lunar New Year and the Year of the Fire Horse. The panelists will share the traditional, contemporary, and uniquely personal rituals that make up their New Year celebrations, explore the myths and qualities associated with the Horse, and offer predictions for the year.

Co-sponsored by the Chinese Historical Society of America and The Ruby.

About the Panelists

Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, and The Fifth Book of Peace, among other works. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald award. She was given the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton, and the National Medal of Arts by President Obama. She worked for many years as a senior lecturer in creative writing at UC Berkeley. Kingston lives in Oakland, California.

Kathy Chin Leong is an award-winning journalist who has been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Sunset Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. She is the author of San Francisco’s Chinatown, with Dick Evans. As a second-generation ABC (American-born Chinese), she grew up in San Francisco’s Sunset District and spent nearly every weekend in Chinatown visiting her grandmother and helping her mother shop for groceries.

Nicole Wong is a writer and producer based in Oakland, California. She has over a decade of experience working with companies and community organizations that tell stories about the Asian American experience, such as Hyphen magazine and the Center for Asian American Media. The Mahjong Project is her effort to preserve a small piece of her family history and bring more people into the joy of playing the game while also encouraging others to contemplate unique family traditions in their own lives.The Mahjong Project hosts pop-up mahjong nights around San Francisco and Oakland and collects stories and anecdotes about mahjong at www.themahjongproject.com (Instagram: @themahjongproject

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