WE MET a bodhisattva last week. And her name was Maxine Hong Kingston.

With her long white hair and jade amulet, she was every bit the bright-eyed sage we’d always imagined the grand dame of Asian American letters to be. We were in awe. Awe, we tell you.

Not only was she a National Book Award and National Humanities Medal winner—and that night’s recipient of a Lifetime Achievement award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop—she wrote the very book we had named our little magazine after.

Should we bow, or ask her to sign our copy of Tripmaster Monkey? Would she be amused by our cheeky tribute or would she sue?

We gulped down our white wine and approached her with book in hand.

“This is a cool book!” she said. “Everyone talks about The Woman Warrior but that’s not a cool book, THIS is a cool book.” Cool, as in hip, man, groovy. Spoken like the Berkeley beatnik she once was.

“I was doing all sorts of things with Tripmaster Monkey,” she said. “I was exploring language and…”

“Consciousness?” we offered. The book was trippy in many ways.

“Exactly!” Maxine said. (We were now on a first-name basis.)

After she turned her radiant light from us, we looked down at her bold red signature—both letters and characters—and we felt a little giddy.

We had met the original Tripmaster Monkey herself. •