As a girl, Maxine Hong Kingston wanted to be a heroic swordswoman when she grew up.

Instead, she became famous in literary and academic circles for her groundbreaking, genre-bending memoir, "The Woman Warrior."

The "warrior" of the book, Fa Mu Lan (from the same story that was defanged and fluffed up for the 1998 Disney movie, "Mulan"), is a brave fighter who takes over an army, slaughters her enemies and avenges her family in ancient China.

And, while growing up in California in the 1940s and '50s, little Maxine Ting Ting Hong, the daughter of immigrant parents, wanted to be just like her. Thus, the mythical Chinese heroine takes a major role in the story of an American-born girl trying to find her place between two cultures that could not be more different.

"When I wrote 'The Woman Warrior,' I was writing it as a feminist story," said Kingston a few days ago, in an interview from her home in Oakland, Calif. "I had to invent a new style to write the story -- I wanted to tell the myths and histories of an old country that are brought to this new country -- with the stories being changed and the people being changed.

"I felt very much a pioneer in changing the American language."

The book will be her topic when she comes to Kleinhans Music Hall Wednesday night at 8, as part of Just Buffalo Literary Center's Babel series. Subtitled "Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts," the book came out in 1975, as the woman's movement was reshaping how the world worked and America's melting pot was at full boil.

According to Michael Kelleher, artistic director for Just Buffalo, Kingston's memoir became one of the "most heavily ordered and read textbooks in university studies -- Asian studies, women's studies, cultural studies."

He added, "That's what we strive for in picking the books we do pick [for the series]. She's such an interesting author, because she fits in in a lot of different ways."

She is also the first American-born author to be part of the Babel series.

Kingston's Fa Mu Lan, a heroine of history and legend, falls in love and has a child but remains a warrior general, chopping off heads and avenging her family in the China of a thousand years ago.

Kingston has shown similar fearlessness in confronting bigotry, oppression and indifference throughout her life. In her 60s, she was arrested in antiwar protests in Washington, D.C. But, since 1993, she also has spearheaded a writing project for veterans to help them communicate their experiences -- some of them unspeakable, others unbearable -- on battlefields from World War II Europe to Vietnam and more recent conflicts. The result is a hefty collection of their works called "Veterans of War; Veterans of Peace."

She also has won such major literary honors as the National Book Critics Circle Award (for "The Woman Warrior") and the National Book Award (for "China Men"), along with being presented a National Humanities Medal in 1997 by President Bill Clinton for her contributions to art and culture. (She was quoted at the time as saying, "I feel happy that my country appreciates me. I'm very glad that there isn't an issue or a situation I can improve by turning down the medal.")

Readers and fans who come to hear Kingston talk about her work Wednesday may be surprised at the package that contains this life force: Kingston is 70 now, white-haired, very petite -- she is almost always the tiniest person in any group photos -- and wonderfully energetic.

Rather than speaking in the voice of a sage Chinese elder, Kingston brings to the conversation a liveliness and keenness reflective of time logged in an enthusiastic classroom. (She has spent years lecturing at the University of California, Berkeley.)

On her visit to Buffalo, she says, "I think I will show the readers of 'The Woman Warrior' what becomes of [her] and read the poem of 'The Fifth Book of Peace' (her 2003 book)."

That book is a retelling of the original legend of Fu Mu Lan, told in verse to reflect its oral "talk-story" tradition. "It is not just a war chant," Kingston said. "It's a 'coming home from war' chant."

Listeners may notice the deliberate rhythms of her writing, intended to express the sound of the original Chinese. Kingston said she recently experienced another writer's effort to do something similar, when she joined in a reading at Berkeley celebrating the recent publication of Mark Twain's autobiography.

"What a beautiful job [Twain] does with the American language, with its dialect and slang!" she said. "I was very inspired by that when I was writing. I saw myself writing an American language influenced by the dialect and rhythms of another language -- trying to find the English words but with the emotion of the original Chinese."

That continues to be important in her latest work, "I Love a Broad Margin in My Life" (the title is a quote from Henry David Thoreau), which comes out in January 2011. "It's a 225 page poem," Kingston said. "I travel to six villages in present-day China ... (because) where we're going to find something really interesting is to get out into the countryside, to villages that have not been 'globalized.' "

The voices of Chinese villages join those of others in her writing. An ongoing purpose to her work is to open communication -- for women, Chinese Americans, veterans, anyone with stories they are keeping inside. And, though she is a writer, she is an even bigger fan of face-to-face connections.

"I feel that all this Twittering and social Facebook is better than nothing," Kingston said, "but we really must have some time when we are physically in the same space and able to look directly into each other's eyes and perhaps touch each other."

Because, she says, everyone has a story to tell. "When you take an ordinary life and go deeply into one's own history," she says, "that's when the most incredible myths and stories come up."

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Maxine Hong Kingston will speak at 8 p.m. Wednesday at Kleinhans Music Hall, part of the Just Buffalo Literary Center's Babel series. Tickets are $35; $25 for those who show a Buffalo & Erie County Library card; $10 for students; available at the door. For more information and a downloadable reader's guide, go to www.justbuffalo.org/babel.

mmiller@buffnews.com null