Simultaneously heroes and villains, victims and victimizers, these larger-than-life ancestors struggle for self-determination on the frontier. Their struggle is repeated in twentieth-century urban landscapes by Kingston's father and brothers. Thus, the narratives of
China Men represent the variety of perceptions, ambitions, prejudices, and fears held by males of Kingston's family and ancestry, men who participated in Western expansionism and hybridization. Taken together, these stories provide a complex and frequently disturbing exploration of Chinese American masculine history as Kingston knows and imagines it--as she aesthetically and politically shapes it from family and community records and from oral tradition. In its inseparable ties to the history of the American frontier,
China Men is, in short, a groundbreaking narrative of the ethnic American West. But any analysis of Kingston as a Western writer must also give close attention to
The Woman Warrior, which insistently relies on the iconography, sweep, and spirit of the American frontier in its creation of a distinctive mythological heritage of the Asian American woman, and to Kingston's other major works, which, in their contrasting paradigms of the Western experience, round out her mythological perspective of the American West and the place of Asian Americans within it.
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