e kept by the author from her material, from her characters, from her themes. There is a sense of ceremony and solemnity, of hidden meanings. The final lines of the book are no less mysterious than the opening lines: "Because I didn't hear everything. I asked him to repeat the story, and what he seemed to say again was 'They found a gold needle in a mountain. They filled a basket with dirt to take with them back to China.' 'Do you mean the Filipinos tricked them?' I asked. 'What were they doing in Spain?' 'I'll write it down in a letter and mail it to you,' he said, and went on to something else. Good. Now I could watch the young men who listen" (Kingston, 1980, p. 308).
We are left at the end as we were at the beginning, with the impression that we had been shown only glimpses of different pieces of a vast puzzle that is China, that is the Chinese, the Chinese-American, China Men. If we need to ask what it is we have been shown, what it is we have heard, what the meaning of all this is, then we would not understand even if we were told in more "clear" terms.
In other words, Kingston seems, in China Men, to be trying to paint an impressionistic portrait of the Chinese, the Chinese-American, the China Man, while at the same time making a social, cultural, historical argument that proclaims the rights of Chinese in America. The problem, if it is a problem, is that Kingston makes this argument in the same understated and solemn tone as the rest of the work, so that the reader might easily miss the passion and anger that dwell within that solemnity. As we read in Current Biography, China Men "point(s) up profound differences between American and Chinese cultures, and . . . interweave(s) legends, folklore, autobiography, and history. The historical material of China Men includes discriminatory laws regarding Chinese immigration. That . . . is one of the factors behind . . . Kingston's statement . . . 'What I am doing . . ...