Maxine Hong Kingston illuminates the experience of everyone who has ever felt the terror of being an emotional outsider. It seems to me that the best records of the immigrant experience and the bittersweet legacy it bestows upon the next generation fascinate us because of the insights they provide into the life of the family, that mystified arena where we first learn, truly or falsely, our own identities. It should therefore not be very startling—as it was to me—that this dazzling mixture of p...

China Joe is the white man's scapegoat, but he is also Kingston's collective hero [in China Men]. The great-grandfather indentured to clear the Hawaiian jungle is a proud, determined man, a leader among the other Chinese there. His work in the canefields and the lashings he receives are rendered in sharp detail. But in Kingston's account his individuality seems to fall away, and we are left with a story more like a folk tale or an epic legend than an account of one man's life. It...

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 exorcis...

Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir of a Chinese-American girlhood presents … the female side of growing up in a tradition, perhaps any tradition. Women perform for any society the service of maladjustment that Kingston here brilliantly performs for the society of Chinese immigrants in California. She … (unlike most Chinese-Americans) fulfills an American pattern by moving away from an ethnic tradition the distance required to memorialize and cherish it…. (p. 19) Like many other women,...

["China Men"] is indeed a fierce book. It makes many demands. It is full of horrors, superstitions, occasional obscenities, but when one recovers one sees them as metaphors designed to burrow under preconceptions and blandness. It is all about the Chinese fathers—grandfathers, great-grandfathers—who, searching for the Gold Mountain, in order to prosper their families, turned east, left their villages, went out into the world, especially the United States, bringing their antiquity...

Kingston reveals to readers the very different world inhabited by her immigrant parents—the world of legends, folklore, customs, and manners of China. She writes, simply and movingly, of the pain of an American-born child who inevitably rejects the expectations and authority of her family in favor of the values of the new land and of her own bond to her mother—a survivor, a woman of enormous strength and vitality. In a rich, poetic, original style, Kingston captures the struggle, the conflict,...