China Men

Blurb

China Men is a 1980 collection of "stories" by Maxine Hong Kingston, some true and some fictional. It is a sequel to The Woman Warrior with a focus on the history of the men in Kingston's family. It won the 1981 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Kingston wrote The Woman Warrior and China Men as one and would like them to be read together; she decided to publish them separately in fear that some of the men's stories might weaken the feminist perspective of the women's stories. The collection becomes what A. Robert Lee calls a "narrative genealogy" of Chinese settlement in the United States, along the lines of the Anglo-American stories of the first colonies, but traced back across the Pacific Ocean. To tell their stories, many of which Kingston heard only through the talk-story of the women in her family, she mixes the known history of her family with hypothetical imaginings and with the legal history of Chinese America. Her book presents a picture of a United States still changing in its reciprocal influence with China.