Family: the real prize of the 89th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards

The assignment: fly to California to interview author Maxine Hong Kingston. Kingston asked me instead, “Will you be able to come to Hawai’i?” My “yes” could not have been faster.

Maxine Hong Kingston is the Lifetime Achievement Award Winner for the 89th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, a Cleveland jewel and the only juried national book prize dedicated to authors whose craft is focused on race and diversity. Kingston is a barrier-breaker for women writers and Asian American writers and for her style of writing that fuses nonfiction and fiction, which she said confused publishers for years.

For three years now, I’ve produced documentaries featuring the winners of this prestigious book prize. It’s been a blast interviewing them and visiting their homes, but Kingston took the fun to another level with her Hawaiian curveball.

Kingston lives in Berkeley, California. She asked me and fellow producer Natalia Garcia to meet her in Hawaii instead because she spends much of her summers there to visit her grandchildren.

“I’d love for you to film me holding my grandkids,” she said in an email inviting us to her son’s home in Honolulu.

A shot of Kingston with her young grandkids in front of tropical vegetation in the backyard of a house in a hilly, Honolulu neighborhood? That’s producer gold.

But we got a lot more than just that shot from her grandkids. Kingston’s granddaughter Hana Měi jumped around the yard with so much energy and got a huge kick out of being our “production assistant” for the day — tapping on microphones and looking through the viewfinders of our cameras. She begged and pleaded to be interviewed just like her grandmother, which of course we wanted to see as well.

“Do you know that your name is Japanese and Chinese and Hawaiian?” Kingston asked her granddaughter.

“Yeah, I already know that,” the six-year-old replied with the sass of a teenager.

It was hilarious watching the calm, cool and collected Kingston, 83 years old at the time with long, white hair, play with her ball of energy granddaughter who cartwheeled and danced from room to room.

The disproportionate energy rapport these two had was unmatched – Penn and Teller-esque.

“I’ll never forget you, grandma.”

“I’m never going to forget you either.”

It was hard to hold back laughter when Hana replied with, “Even though you’re dead?”

“Even when I’m dead, yes,” Kingston said without skipping a beat.

It was certainly a charming scene, but this is what Kingston wanted us to see. She could have touted all the awards she had won throughout the years and although we talked in-depth about the struggles she overcame and the themes of her writing, her family is what she wanted to talk about the most.

“In all my writing, I am preserving my family’s history. I want my stories to live on for generations and forever. I also thought, I’m 83 years old and the grandchildren are four and six. Are they going to remember me?” Kingston said. “They’ll forget me. And then I remembered, I’ve got these books.”

Seeing how much joy Kingston’s family brings her melted my heart. While she was proud of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, it was clear that to her the real prize is the family she gets to share the success with.

You can see the full interview with Maxine Hong Kingston (and Hana Měi), plus other winners of the book prize in the 89th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards documentary, which airs on WVIZ twice on January 20 at 4 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., on January 26 at 6:30 p.m and on January 29 at 5:30 p.m. It will be available in other PBS markets across the country later this year.

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