On the Gold Mountain

By Paul Gray

CHINA MEN by Maxine Hong Kingston; Knopf; 308 pages; $10.95

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 art.

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 and is bewildered. She addresses him in memory: "We knew that it was to feed us you had to endure demons and physical labor." But she adds: "What I want from you is for you to tell me that those curses are only common Chinese sayings. That you did not mean to make me sicken at being female."

The scene shifts abruptly back to another tune and country. Her father is born, the youngest of four boys. Her grandfather, considered addled by the villagers, tries to exchange his infant son for a girl baby. On feet maimed by binding, the mother hobbles off to retrieve her child, raging all the while at her husband: "Dead man, trading a son for a slave. Idiot." It is this indomitable woman who had forced him to leave the village and seek work in America, to become a Sojourner on the Gold Mountain: "Make money. Don't stay here eating."

A 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 are no longer welcome on the Gold Mountain.

A great-grandfather goes to Hawaii at about the same time to clear the land and plant sugar cane. He resents the rule that forbids talking on the job: "How was he to marvel adequately, voiceless? He needed to cast his voice out to catch ideas." Lonely, overworked, far from their families, the China Men dig a large hole in a rich Hawaiian cane field, kneel around it and chant. " 'I want my home,' the men yelled together. 'I want home. Home. Home. Home. Home.' " Then they cover up the soil, trusting that the cane, when grown, will seed the air with their lament.

The poignancy of that moment is the fruit of stunning historical reconstruction coupled with the imagination of a novelist. Ransacking what she has heard from her family and read in books, Kingston becomes a succession of her male relatives, grandfathers, father, uncles and younger brothers. In the process, she tests a theory that she had developed as a girl:

"I did not think" that men had feelings; it was women who missed people, minded the distances, the tune, and cared about whether or not they saw someone again."

Slowly she disabuses herself of this notion. The final link in her chain of reasoning is her youngest brother. Facing the draft, he enlists in the Navy, prepared to desert the moment he is required to inflict pain or death. He goes to Viet Nam and sees the Orient for the first time, reversing the trip made by so many of his forebears. And he comes home, not to China but to California, where, as an uncle had once shouted, "we belong." At the very end, Kingston resolves to "watch the young men who listen."

They, and everyone else, should listen to her. Her voice, alternately angry, calm, sardonic and compassionate, spins healing magic. The term chinamen is a literal and figurative slur, a squeezing to gether of words for the purpose, intended or not, of diminution. China Men puts the pause back where it belongs. Maxine Hong Kingston, a woman warrior indeed, stares down her men in equal combat; ultimately, this granddaughter, daughter and sister helps them win the respect their dignity deserves. --Paul Gray

Excerpt "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. We lived on a special spot of the earth, Stockton, the only city on the Pacific coast with three railroads...

Grandfather left a railroad for his message: We had to go somewhere difficult. Ride a train. Go somewhere important. In case of danger, the train was to be -- ready for us. "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.