In 1991, a firestorm swept over the Oakland-Berkeley hills and devoured Maxine Hong Kingston's nearly completed manuscript, The Fourth Book of Peace. A Quaker friend tells her, "If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation." Hong Kingston begins her new book, the Fifth Book of Peace, with these words.

Hong Kingston had been writing the Fourth Book of Peace as fiction. "It had to be fiction," she writes, "because Peace has to be supposed, imagined, divined, dreamed."

She wrote her next book, The Fifth Book of Peace, mostly as nonfiction. "After the fire," she writes, "I could not re-enter fiction. Writing then was for my own personal self . . . okay to be formless, no art, no good English."

But the book is formed, it is art, it is beautiful English and Chinese and dreams and present moment.

The book is divided into sections: Fire, Paper, Water, Earth. The first sections are nonfiction. The next section, Water, is fiction, a re-creation of the novel that was burned. The last section is nonfiction again, expertly integrating the lessons of loss, community and communication, and revealing a new path toward peace.

Written as manuals to peace, the original three Books of Peace were said to have come into existence when Chinese civilization began. Before writing the fourth and fifth Books of Peace, Hong Kingston searched desperately for the others, to no avail. Hong Kingston is not sure if they really ever existed, though, or if they are rumor. They haunt her imagination, or memory, possibly from the talk-story of her Chinese immigrant mother.

She tries to find verification of them with scholars and experts. Finally, a former Chinese minister of culture tells her that it is up to her to write them herself. She does this, founding The Fifth Book of Peace on the idea of creating community and communication to create peace.

The first, nonfiction section of the book is written with the anguish and exquisite detail that characterizes all of Hong Kingston's writing. As she drives home from her father's funeral, she first hears of the fire that is destroying the Fourth Book of Peace. In the midst of the devastation and ashes and death, she writes, "I know why this fire. God is showing us Iraq. It is wrong to kill, and refuse to look at what we've done, and refuse to count the people we killed."

In the middle section, Water, she pays tribute to her lost book, a novel that rewrote the Vietnam War to end in peace. Her protagonist, Wittman Ah Sing (his name derived from the American Civil War peace patriot, Walt Whitman) moves to Hawaii with his wife and son to dodge the draft. His story is told in flowing, water-like language, expressing the idealism and failures of the 1960's peace movement.

In one scene, Wittman comes across a dozen peace marchers.

"They were the smallest demonstration he'd seen," she writes, "the bravest and maybe the first Viet Nam peace march in Hawai'i." As Wittman joins them, a military wife meeting her husband on R&R crosses the street towards them."

Her suffering and his idealism clash in a stunning display.

"She pointed at them but did not jab or touch them. Her nose was streaming, and she did not wipe it. She was inside that nightmare where nobody understands, and she could not talk them into understanding."

Wittman struggles with loaded situations throughout this section of the book. And ultimately, Hong Kingston writes, Wittman has yet to keep his promise to his son, "that he would end war."

She addresses Wittman's valiant but disappointing efforts for lasting peace in the final section of the book, Earth.

In this section, Hong Kingston writes of integrating the lessons of loss and community and communication into a real writer's workshop for war veterans. By giving the veterans a creative way to express their suffering, she paves the way to a new kind of peace.

The veterans' stories are shocking and real, and their personal conflicts with war compelling. In the writing process, many find peace within themselves, often after years of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Hong Kingston weaves their writing into her own narrative deftly, avoiding clichés and focusing on transformation. She herself has transformed.

She writes, "I helped build a sangha (the Buddhist term for a peaceful community)and made myriad happy endings to the Viet Nam-American war," something she had originally tried to do in fiction.

The Fifth Book of Peace, a hybrid of memoir, fiction and anthology, is an amazing testament to the existence of peace, even in the midst of war.

The book is a communal effort, beautifully orchestrated by Hong Kingston and pieced together with open eyes. She doesn't romanticize, doesn't ignore the failures of past peace movements, but bravely searches for new possibilities.

Ashley Simpson Shires is a freelance writer living in Boulder. Her work has been published in literary journals, including the "American Literary Review" and the "Paterson Review."

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