Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men

The Chinese Immigrant Experience in California

In Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men, she recounts the experiences of her Chinese immigrant family in California, mixing her personal memories with fact and myth to create an account that, while not technically altogether historically accurate in terms of every fact and detail, is nevertheless representative of the experience of Chinese immigrants as a whole in California. Kingston's book is more than a memoir but not quite a history book, either. Instead, it provides a perspective on historical facts that illuminates the effects of the history, the impact of it on the hearts and psyches of Chinese immigrants particularly the men in response to their treatment by Americans. Kingston describes facets of this impact, and others she only hints at, but she makes it abundantly clear that the Chinese immigrant experience in America in California, in particular has been not only fraught with hardship but characterized by dissociation from themselves and from each other.

An analysis of the author's story, in conjunction with historical research, points up the fact that life in early California changed Chinese immigrant men. Not only were they grievously disillusioned about what they would find in America, thinking that the "Gold Mountain" was a place where gold was plentiful rather than the place of hard labor and low pay that it actually was, they were received as outcasts ra

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had no value beyond the monetary gain they represented to their employers. In the winter of 1866 one of the most severe winters on record Chinese workers on the Transcontinental Railroad were lowered from the top of the cliff in wicker baskets into shafts in the snow to work in dark tunnels for long hours each day to build the railroad; snow slides buried many of them, and "loss of life was heavy." In fact, "Over a thousand Chinese had their bones shipped back to China to be buried." In addition, although 90% of the railroad workers were Chinese, Chinese workers are mysteriously missing from the official photographs taken at Promontory Point, where the golden stake was ceremonially driven to connect the east and the west by railway. The Chinese were missing not only from the photographs but also from "all official historical records�Chinese American railroad laborers threaten to disappear irretrievably�." The Chinese were a silent majority a secret majority, allowed no recognition, no identity, and, essentially, no real life. Kingston recalls, speaking to her father, "You screamed wordless male screams that jolted the house upright and staring in the middle of the night," a memory that suggests the terror that accompanied

Category: Literature - M