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CHINA MEN by Maxine Hong Kingston; Knopf; 308 pages...
With The Woman Warrior (1976), Author Maxine Hong Kingston left herself a hard act to follow. That book, her first, indelibly rendered the pain of growing up female and Chinese in the U.S., of being in effect a servant among the dispossessed. It bridged two vastly different cultures; its drawing of Chinese legends and customs was thorough and fascinating, while its evocation of the uncertainties of assimilation was quintessentially American. The Woman Warrior did, in short, what all great autobiographies do: it turned self-knowledge into...
That remarkable journey inward now has a fitting companion. Kingston's new book is a voyage out, an attempt to understand others by inhabiting them. The others are men, China Men, heirs to an ancient tradition of oppressing women. A scene early in the book sets Kingston off on her imaginative quest. As a young girl, the author watches her father at work in his laundry in Stockton, Calif. Trained as a scholar in China, he is subject to black moods and bitterness over his low estate. His angriest curses vilify women's bodies. The girl both understands...
...pattern emerges through the book's jumbled chronology. China Men go out in the world either to earn the right to come home to their women or to establish a new place suitable for them. One of Kingston's grandfathers fetches up in the 1860s in the Sierra Nevada, seeking work with the Central Pacific Railroad. He is hired on the spot, Kingston notes acidly, because "chinamen had a natural talent for explosions." Years of backbreaking, dangerous work follow, the continent is finally linked by rail, and then the grandfather and his fellow Chinese find they...
...Harvard golfers fell to the Rhode Island Rams yesterday in Kingston despite a respectable 407 team tally. The Rams produced a 397 total for the victory...