China Men
by Maxine Hong Kingston
Summary
China Men is Maxine Hong Kingston's book of the fathers, the companion to The Woman Warrior she originally conceived as half of one work, and it tells how the men of her family claimed America. The great grandfathers cut sugar cane in Hawaii, forbidden to talk in the fields and shouting their longing into a hole in the ground; the grandfather Ah Goong hangs in a basket over Sierra cliffs setting dynamite for the transcontinental railroad, present at the golden spike and then driven out of town after town in the purges that followed; the father, a scholar in China, is smuggled or examined into America, both versions told because family memory offers both, and loses his New York laundry to swindling partners before beginning again in California; the brother ships to Vietnam in the war's ambiguous middle. Kingston tells it all in the mode she invented, family fact braided with Chinese myth and outright invention flagged as such, and dead center in the book she sets a chapter unlike anything around it: The Laws, a flat chronological recital of every American statute that excluded, taxed, and denaturalized the Chinese from 1868 forward, the legal skeleton under the stories. The men who built the railroad and cleared the cane fields are, the book insists, founding fathers of America, whatever the law said. China Men won the 1981 American Book Award for General Nonfiction in hardcover, the National Book Award under its short lived name, while The Woman Warrior had taken the National Book Critics Circle Award, and together the two books opened the door through which Asian American literature walked into the canon.
Historical Context & Significance
Kingston published China Men in 1980, four years after The Woman Warrior had won the National Book Critics Circle Award and made her the most widely read Chinese American writer of her generation, and the pair should be read as one argument about memory, gender, and belonging. The 1981 National Book Award came as the categories briefly multiplied, in General Nonfiction, hardcover. The Laws chapter did real historical work for general readers, since the Chinese exclusion acts were then barely taught; Congress would not formally express regret for them until decades later. The book's blend of documentation and myth, controversial then, became a founding technique of the American memoir that followed, and the railroad grandfathers Kingston reclaimed now stand in textbooks beside the golden spike photographs that excluded them.