China Men

China Men (1980) by Chinese-American novelist and memoirist Maxine Hong Kingston follows the lives of four generations of Chinese-American men from the 1850s to the present. While sold as a biography, China Men is not strictly nonfiction, and incorporates many myths and beliefs that contributed to each man’s formation. As with Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior (1976), which focused on the women of her family, China Men was critically acclaimed and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1981.

Its themes include the history of Chinese-Americans, the ambiguous line between myth and memoir, culture imperialism, the inevitable incomprehension of history, and giving voice to Chinese masculinity. The title comes from a common slur in the late 19th century where sailors, not wanting to learn the names of the Asian people they encountered, called everyone “China man John.” The work includes memoir-like reflections of childhood, as well as piercing essays on the possibility of feminism within Chinese cultures.

The novel opens to the author’s grandfather, Tang Ao, searching for “Gold Mountain.” This is an illusion to the fortune found in the U.S. He claims to have found Women’s Land instead of Gold Mountain. When he immigrated to the U.S. for work, he would be one of thousands of Chinese-Americans who worked to construct the railroad. This included dangerous labor like being drawn up high on a mountain to set explosives that would create the space for the future trains.



Kingston then relates an anecdote. As a young child, she and her siblings didn’t know what their father looked like. When they first met him at the airport, they mistook a stranger for their father, were redirected by their mother, then had to ignite their enthusiasm once again for their actual father.

Kingston’s childhood was certainly atypical compared to her white peers. For instance, her family treated ghosts as tangible realities. When one uncle can’t sleep saying he saw a ghost, the entire family sympathizes with him; mental illness in relation to ghosts is simply foreign to their culture.

Bak Goong, Kingston’s great-grandfather, was the first family member to leave China. (Like many figures from the 1850s-1890s, Kingston has difficulty confirming whether or not some of these men were blood relations or simply family friends.). He worked in sugar plantations in Hawaii before it was a U.S. state. Bak Goong was under the impression that through sugar he could become wealthy quickly. This was hardly the case.



Bak Goong was well aware of the increasing amount of legislation intended to keep Asians from settling down in the U.S. This included an arbitrary law that forbid Chinese men from bringing over their children or wives. From 1868 to 1958, Kingston evaluates a series of court cases that seemed determined to keep Chinese-American people as second-class citizens.

Baba, Kingston’s father, was not born in the U.S. He completed the Imperial Examinations and became a school teacher in a rural village. The job was depressing and his wife (Kingston’s mother) was too willful and vocal to give him the sort of self-satisfactory life he thought, as a Chinese man, he would receive.

Kingston’s mother would complete medical school in San Francisco. Kingston remains unsure if her father immigrated to the U.S. illegally or legally. In the official, legal version, he applied for a visa through customs, took a ship to the U.S., and opened up a laundromat in New York City. This business thrived until his partner cheated him out of the profits. In the illegal version, he hid in a shipping crate for weeks before arriving in northern California.



Baba would eventually open up a gambling house. As her father keeps to himself and doesn’t want to divulge his personal past, Kingston relies on stories from other family members, as well as rumors.

Kingston continues to rotate between stories involving her great-grandfather, grandfather, and father. Each of these men show various ways that Chinese-American men responded to racism, and the various paths they took to circumnavigate its pull.

Her brother is drafted into the Vietnam war. He is sent to Taiwan, a U.S. ally, and dies when the city is bombarded by North Vietnam.



The last two slender chapters of the novel portray men murkily recalling the past. One takes place in 1969. A man is celebrating his 106th birthday. He recalls, perhaps erroneously, travelling to Hawaii in 1885, and working in various fields.

The other story, “On Listening,” is a brief portrait of a male scholar in Filipino history trying to bring up what he knows about Chinese involvement in the Philippines. The author is at a cocktail party. He says that Chinese men often travelled the world in search of gold. The other people from around the world also relate their experience of Chinese men and agree that they were often in search of gold. Kingston humorously concludes that she had trouble understanding the scholar’s accent. Thus, even through attentive listening, an authoritative account of history is impossible.