China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston is the Other Side of the Story

 

“The hero's home has its own magic” (81)

Maxine Hong Kingston’s most famous work, The Woman Warrior, is only half of the story.

I loved her original memoir for its combination of myth and history, and for its beautiful, savage and vulnerable prose. But its glittering stories (essays?) are defined by their femininity. Kingston dredges up women buried by history and marginalized by Chinese and American culture, and they’re what gives The Woman Warrior its power.

A different tack is required for China Men, a memoir about Kingston’s male relatives. How would Kingston handle the depiction of masculinity? Would she keep the mythical elements that animated her first memoir? Would China Men rise to its example, or fall short?

In my opinion, they’re two sides of the same coin. I plan to purchase both from Everyman’s Library, which has complied the two books into one volume. That’s the way they ought to be read: their stories are equally beautiful, and both weave personal and cultural history into a rough, stunning origin story. Like The Woman Warrior, the title characters of China Men are flawed and sympathetic, marginalized by a xenophobic American society and often at war with themselves. It’s a joy—if examining an oppressive system can inspire joy—to observe the contrast between Kingston’s expectations for heroes and relatives, men and women. While it’s irresponsible to toast her as the sole authority on the Chinese-American experience, The Woman Warrior and China Men paint an epic portrait of a family and society that is, if not complete, then devastatingly specific.

“It’s not the Great Wall I want to see but my ancestral village. I want to talk to Cantonese, who have always been revolutionaries, nonconformists, people with fabulous imaginations, people who invented the Gold Mountain. I want to discern what it is that makes people go West and turn into Americans. I want to compare China, a country I made up, with what country is really out there” (87)

Kingston’s works (alongside Alex Haley’s Roots, which is also semi-fictional) provide a prototype for modern sagas like Homegoing that examine history through the lives of ordinary people. China Men assembles a wild bouquet of sources, from the austere chronicle of “The Laws” to the playful, heartbreaking legends retold in “On Mortality.” Every account is necessary, although their quality is slightly uneven. The strongest stories are “The Father from China” and “The Brother in Vietnam,” the first and last of Kingston’s portrait miniatures. The first is dazzling and mythical, while the second is sad and intimate. Both are gorgeous.

The astonishing clarity of Kingston’s writing is evident in China Men, just as it was in The Woman Warrior. I’m not sure if one is better or worse than the other. Maybe China Men doesn’t stand on its own, but it shouldn’t. The two books are inextricable. And now that I’ve read them both, I can’t imagine a better way for the story to be told.

“Once in a while an adult said, ‘Your grandfather built the railroad.’ (or ‘Your grandfathers built the railroad. Plural and singular are by context.) We children believed that it was that very railroad, those trains, those tracks running past our house; our own giant grandfather had set those very logs into the ground, poured the iron for those very spikes with the big heads and pounded them until the heads spread like that, mere nails to him. He had built the railroad so that trains would thunder over us, on a street that inclined toward us” (126)