In the title [China Men] Hong Kingston uses the pejorative, the patronizing "Chinamen," but she separates the words, perhaps to indicate that this designation is different. These men will not be dealt with pejoratively but heroically as the "binders and builders" of Hawaii and the States. This is a book of men, of male ancestry, a counterpart to The Woman Warrior, which was the search for self through the untold and told tales of the Chinese family, through the naming and exorcising of ghosts.

That which must be fought through in both books is imposed silence…. The Woman Warrior ends triumphantly with the author speaking out and with reference to the legend of a woman poet….

China Men commences with the angry silence of the father, a laundry worker in the land of Gold Mountain (all immigrants call the States "golden"). The daughter chronicler writes, "I think this...