Some readers categorize Maxine Hong Kingston as a great Asian-American writer, a classification that is ultimately too narrow for her body of work. However, the subject matter of Kingston's novels and autobiographies espouses the Asian immigrant experience, as the following characters suggest: immigrant laborers in California and Hawaii, railroad laborers, and Chinese doctors. In natural harmony with her choice of subject matter are the personal sensibilities of a first-generation American writer who endeavors to explain her mother's alien sensibility and her relationship with her silent, angry father. Kingston's Asian influences are present in another type of work, Chinese myths in the guise of "talk stories". A character in her novel Tripmaster Monkey is based on Sun Wu Kong, a mythical Chinese figure. In response to this work, Herbert Gold notes that the author "invigorates her novel with an avid personal perspective, doing what the novel is supposed to do – she brings us the news of the world and makes magic of it."