China Men is not a sequel to The Woman Warrior but a companion piece, an amplification. It revolves, again, around the author's family, who operated a laundry in Stockton, California. Both parents were born in China, and their first two children died there. Six others, born later in the US, are Americanized on the surface—casual, impatient, disconcertingly direct—but beneath the surface, haunted by a sense of being different. (p. 32)

It becomes apparent fairly early in China Men that this is a less particularized account than The Woman Warrior. The ancestors stand for many other ancestors, for the entire history of Chinese emigration…. The author's father entered this country either as a stowaway or as a legal immigrant; both versions are recounted in full, as if they really happened….

But inevitably, the particular triumphs over the general. China, to Maxine Hong Kingston, is "a country I made...