| China Men | |
|---|---|
1st edition |
|
| Author(s) | Maxine Hong Kingston |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | short-story cycle; historical fiction |
| Publisher | Knopf |
| Publication date | 1980 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 308 |
| ISBN | 0394424638 |
China Men is a 1980 book by Maxine Hong Kingston. It won a 1981 National Book Award for General Nonfiction. It is a follow-up to The Woman Warrior, but with a focus on the history of the men in Kingston's family. In fact, Kingston wrote the books as one and would like them to be read together; she decided to publish them separately in fear that some of the men's stories might weaken the feminist perspective of the women's stories.[1] The collection becomes what A. Robert Lee calls a "narrative genealogy" of Chinese settlement in the United States, along the lines of the Anglo-American stories of the first colonies, but traced back across the Pacific Ocean. To tell their stories, many of which Kingston heard only through the talk-story of the women in her family,[1] she mixes the known history of her family with hypothetical imaginings and with the legal history of Chinese America. Her book presents a picture of a United States still changing in its reciprocal influence with China.[2] At the same time, the title reflects a deliberate rejection of American racism against the Chinese: whereas the term "Chinaman" was a common slur (such as in John Chinaman), the Chinese referred to themselves as the "China Men" of the title: tang jen.[1]
Some of the main characters in the book include Kingston's great-grandfather Bak Goong, who worked on the sugar plantations in Hawai'i; her grandfather Ah Goong, who worked for the railroad construction companies; her father BaBa, an American-born laundryman; and her unnamed brother, who receives no honor for fighting for the USA in Vietnam.[2] These characters are at times presented more as archetypes than as individuals, and at times there are competing versions of the story, as if the characters represent all the possible forefathers of the Chinese American population; as Elaine H. Kim points out, the father character "immigrates to America in five different ways, by way of Cuba, Angel Island, or Ellis Island [...] He could have entered the country legally, or he could have come as a paper son or by some other avenue. He is both 'the father from China' and 'the American father.'"[1]
Note: In the table of contents, the stories are given two different formats. There are six stories listed in all-caps, and 12 stories listed in italics. This formatting highlights what Kingston's construction of the structure: "China Men is like a six-layer cake and the myths are like icing."[3] As E.D. Huntley explains, the layers refer to the six all-capped stories, "the stories of Kingston's ancestors", and the myths/icing are the italicized stories and include "traditional tales, revisions of myth, fantasy, and reconstructions of history, tracing the immigrant journey from China in the nineteenth century to the Asian American community in the late twentieth-century United States."[3] The following list replicates the distinction in formatting between the "layers" and the "icing", replacing the all-caps with bold.
Kingston is interested in presenting Chinese American history from its own perspective, presenting us with the men's views of American culture—the strange language with its incomprehensible alphabet, the violence and rigidity of missionary Christianity—and of their new communities, often made up of a mixture of Chinese regional backgrounds that would never have happened in China but nevertheless immensely protective of each other and willing to mix their different Chinese traditions together.[1]
Kingston has stated that her characters are trying to "claim America", so that even though they are prevented by those in power from settling down in the States and starting families, they are nonetheless "marking the land", such as by laying down the railroads with their numbered sections and by planting fruit trees.[1] As Kim points out, they may be victimized by racism, but they are described by the narrator "as semi-mythical heroes", in terms of both their physical appearance (muscular "young gods [...] long torsos with lean stomachs") and in their heroism ("revolutionaries, nonconformists, people with fabulous imaginations, people who invented the Gold Mountains"), and they stand up for themselves in the face of all sorts of physical and legal violence.[1] Many of the men succeed in setting down roots in America; in fact, those who give up are forgotten, all but erased from the family history.[1] At the same time, the American-born younger generations (such as her brother), are equally adept at claiming America for themselves, even in the face of a series of wars against Asian cultures.[1]
Scholar Jinqi Ling has pointed out that in her attempts to reconnect with her male ancestors, Kingston (and her narrator) often fulfills the role of creator and poet that was forbidden her ancestors. Although he mentions Ling focuses on BaBa, her father, who is described as a natural poet-scholar but whose artistic gifts were left out of the imperial examination system in China, ignored by his students in Canton, and irrelevant in the United States, which he enters only through deception. Once in America, his circumstances fare even worse, as he loses both his jobs, friends and money in the States and his remaining land in China. Kingston desires not only to understand her father but to give voice to the experiences and sufferings he was never given the opportunity to express because of his circumstances.[4]