While the two texts are virtually identical in tone
and style, the author stated in a New York Times
interview that she considered them two halves of
“one big book.” China Men focuses on the lives of
male Chinese immigrants who performed hard
labor for the railroad, farming, and laundry in-
dustries in an attempt to lay a claim to America as
their own “home country.”
As in The Woman Warrior, the stories of the men
of Kingston’s family are interspersed with Chinese
folktales and legends. The first extended section of
the book, “The Father from China,” tells the story
of the narrator’s father, BaBa. BaBa is a favored
child of his family, a precocious baby groomed to
become a scholar. After his extensive education in
China, BaBa travels to the United States, but his
daughter-narrator has difficulty separating the
“true” story of his immigration from the many
versions she has heard, and the story is told twice.
In the first version, BaBa is smuggled through cus-
toms in a packing crate, and in the second he is de-
tained and interviewed extensively by immigration
officials in California. He takes on the name “Edi-
son” as part of an attempt to fashion an American
identity, and enters a laundry business with three
Chinese friends who have similarly renamed them-
selves Roosevelt, Woodrow, and Worldster. Edison
is eventually driven out of the laundry partnership,
and in his middle age turns brooding and churlish,
muttering curse words associated with female body
parts in front of his young children. Later sections,
entitled “The Great-Grandfather of the Sandal-
wood Mountains,” “The Grandfather of the Sierra
Nevada Mountains” and “The Brother in Vietnam,”
chronicle the similar stories of multiple generations
of “China men” who labored on the railroad or
were called into service by the American military.
Where The Woman Warrior is filled with
“ghosts,” China Men is populated by “demons,” the
primarily Caucasian government administrators
and bosses of various work sites at which groups of
Chinese immigrants labor for minimal payment,
sometimes under abusive circumstances. Though
the book is less concerned with gender than with
labor and economics, it is significant that the men
do not tell their own stories. The women must
preserve the men’s life-narratives, and in connect-
ing storytelling with womanhood, China Men is a
natural extension of The Woman Warrior. Indeed,
as the author herself has suggested, it can be con-
sidered the second half of a single long work.
China Men was included in the American Li-
brary Association’s Notable Book List for 1980 and
won the National Book Award for general nonfic-
tion in 1981.Bibliography
Buckmaster, Henrietta. Review of China Men, Chris-
tian Science Monitor, 11 August 1980, p. B4.
Gordon, Mary. Review of China Men. New York
Times, 15 June 1980, sec. 7, p. 1.
Pfaff, Timothy. “Talk With Mrs. Kingston.” New
York Times, 15 June 1980, sec. 7, p. 1. Reprinted
in Skenazy, Paul, and Tera Martin, eds. Conversa-
tions with Maxine Hong Kingston, 14–20. Literary
Conversations Series. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1998.
Slagter, Nicole. “Maxine Hong Kingston Under Re-
view: The Response to China Men.” In Barfoot, C.
C., ed. Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Ste-
reotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, 468–474.
Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 1997.
Eric G. WaggonerChiu, Christina (?– )
Largely on the basis of her one collection of short
stories, Troublemaker and Other Saints (2001),
Christina Chiu has been regarded as one of the
most promising literary voices among the latest
generation of Asian-American writers. Born in
New York City to immigrant parents from Shang-
hai, Chiu was raised in suburban Westchester
County. She completed a B.A. degree in East Asian
studies at Bates College and an M.F.A. in creative
writing at Columbia University. Chiu did not be-
come interested in writing fiction until she partici-
pated in a creative-writing workshop during her
senior year at Bates. Since graduating from Co-
lumbia, she has worked as a teacher at the Brook-
lyn Museum, an assistant editor at the Children’s
Television Workshop, a reference-book editor andChiu, Christina 45