but lamenting that she “forgot to tutor me the last
secret phrases” (line 13). Chin’s use of mothers
in her poetry is nuanced. In these references she
can explore the universal tensions of the mother-
daughter relationship, questions about cultural
identity and loyalty, pain caused by the patriarchy,
and the maternal sources of poetic inspiration.
Marilyn Chin’s poetry continues to evolve as she
alternately draws upon Chinese literature and cul-
ture, American popular culture, the experience of
immigration, and family relationships.
Bibliography
Chin, Marilyn. Dwarf Bamboo. New York: Greenfield
Review Press, 1987.
———. The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty. Min-
neapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1994.
———. Rhapsody in Plain Yellow. New York: Norton,
2002.
Moyers, Bill. The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets.
New York: Broadway Books, 1995.
Ann Beebe
China Boy Gus Lee (1991)
Thinly disguised as a novel, China Boy is GUS LEE’s
autobiography of his turbulent childhood and
rites of passage in San Francisco in the 1950s. The
family lives in the Panhandle, a ghetto populated
with poor blacks. Kai Ting’s father, T. K. Ting,
once an outstanding Nationalist army officer in
China, becomes an unsuccessful banker in Amer-
ica. His mother, beautiful and learned, dies early
of cancer, leaving her two youngest children, Janie
and Kai, in the cruel hands of their stepmother,
Edna, a blond Philadelphia socialite who exercises
an overbearing control of the family, making T. K.
Ting miserable.
Deprived of love and home security, Kai, frail
and once spoiled as the only son, is forced to stay
in the street where he is the target of bullying. His
father decides to send him to the Y.M.C.A to be
trained to fight. The Y.M.C.A proves to be a trans-
forming experience for Kai. The staff members,
who come from all different ethnic backgrounds,
not only provide Kai with love, care, and lessons of
life, but also train him to be a competent fighter.
Kai finally beats the most feared of the bullies, Big
Willie. The victory also gives him courage to stand
up to his stepmother, Edna.
Named one of the New York Times Best 100
Books for 1991 and an American Library Associa-
tion Best of the Last 50 Years, China Boy tackles in
a humorous and compelling way such key themes
in Asian-American literature as race relations,
masculinity, cultural heritage, and hegemony. Lee’s
interweaving of these themes culminates in the
question of the peculiarity and universality of Chi-
nese-American identity; as Lee states, “My struggle
on the street was really an effort to fix identity, to
survive as a member of a group and even succeed
as a human being.” While bullying is described as
brutal, the root cause of it, Lee seems to suggest, is
the poverty, human tragedies, and traumatic ex-
periences of living in the inner-city ghettoes. The
Y.M.C.A is presented as an ideal place of unity of
different races, where the hierarchy is determined
by a fair play of physical strength and personal
charisma. Ironically, Kai’s inheritance of black and
Y.M.C.A culture is contingent on the ruthless de-
nial of his Chinese heritage by Edna. The assimi-
lation she demands of the family in the form of
domestic violence is in effect the blatant cultural
hegemony exercised through her power as a white
upper-class woman. T. K. Ting acquiescently sacri-
fices his masculinity in submission to the process
of assimilation to the white mainstream, while Kai
eventually challenges the oppression by assuming
a counter-hegemonic black speech.Bibliography
Lee, Gus. China Boy. London: Robert Hale, 1992.
Shen, Yichin. “The Site of Domestic Violence and the
Altar of Phallic Sacrifice in Gus Lee’s China Boy.”
College Literature 29, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 99–113.
Yan YingChina Men Maxine Hong Kingston (1980)
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON’s China Men was planned
and partially drafted even before the publication
of her first book, The WOMAN WARRIOR (1976).44 China Boy