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China Men is a book by Maxine Hong Kingston. It is a follow-up to The Woman Warrior, but with a focus on the history of the men in Kingston's family. In fact, Kingston wrote the books as one and would like them to be read together; she decided to publish them separately in fear that some of the men's stories might weaken the feminist perspective of the women's stories. The collection becomes what A. Robert Lee calls a "narrative genealogy" of Chinese settlement in the United States, along the lines of the Anglo-American stories of the first colonies, but traced back across the Pacific Ocean. To tell their stories, many of which Kingston heard only through the talk-story of the women in her family, she mixes the known history of her family with hypothetical imaginings and with the legal history of Chinese America. Her book presents a picture of a United States still changing in its reciprocal influence with China. At the same time, the title reflects a deliberate rejection of American racism against the Chinese: whereas the term "Chinaman" was a common slur (such as in John Chinaman), the Chinese referred to themselves as the "China Men" of the title: tang jen.

Some of the main characters in the book include Kingston's great-grandfather Bak Goong, who worked on the sugar plantations in Hawai'i; her grandfather Ah Goong, who worked for the railroad construction companies; her father BaBa, an American-born laundryman; and her unnamed brother, who receives no honor for fighting for the USA in Vietnam. These characters are at times presented more as archetypes than as individuals, and at times there are competing versions of the story, as if the characters represent all the possible forefathers of the Chinese American population; as Elaine H. Kim points out, the father character "immigrates to America in five different ways, by way of Cuba, Angel Island, or Ellis Island [...] He could have entered the country legally, or he could have come as a paper son or by some other avenue. He is both "the father from China" and "the American father."


 * Stories


 * Themes

Kingston is interested in presenting Chinese American history from its own perspective, presenting us with the men's views of American culture—the strange language with its incomprehensible alphabet, the violence and rigidity of missionary Christianity—and of their new communities, often made up of a mixture of Chinese regional backgrounds that would never have happened in China but nevertheless immensely protective of each other and willing to mix their different Chinese traditions together.

Kingston has stated that her characters are trying to "claim America", so that even though they are prevented by those in power from settling down in the States and starting families, they are nonetheless "marking the land", such as by laying down the railroads with their numbered sections and by planting fruit trees. As Kim points out, they may be victimized by racism, but they are described by the narrator "as semi-mythical heroes", in terms of both their physical appearance (muscular "young gods [...] long torsos with lean stomachs") and in their heroism ("revolutionaries, nonconformists, people with fabulous imaginations, people who invented the Gold Mountains"), and they stand up for themselves in the face of all sorts of physical and legal violence. Many of the men succeed in setting down roots in America; in fact, those who give up are forgotten, all but erased from the family history. At the same time, the American-born younger generations (such as her brother), are equally adept at claiming America for themselves, even in the face of a series of wars against Asian cultures.

Scholar Jinqi Ling has pointed out that in her attempts to reconnect with her male ancestors, Kingston (and her narrator) often fulfills the role of creator and poet that was forbidden her ancestors. Although he mentions Ling focuses on BaBa, her father, who is described as a natural poet-scholar but whose artistic gifts were left out of the imperial examination system in China, ignored by his students in Canton, and irrelevant in the United States, which he enters only through deception. Once in America, his circumstances fare even worse, as he loses both his jobs, friends and money in the States and his remaining land in China. Kingston desires not only to understand her father but to give voice to the experiences and sufferings he was never given the opportunity to express because of his circumstances.

The Fifth Book of Peace is a book by Maxine Hong Kingston.

Gunga Din Highway is a 1994 novel by Frank Chin.

The Chickencoop Chinaman is a 1972 play by Frank Chin. It was the first play by an Asian American to be produced on Broadway.

Tam Lum, a Chinese American filmmaker working on a documentary about a black boxer named Ovaltine, has arrived in Pittsburgh to visit Ovaltine's father, Charley Popcorn. In Pittsburgh, he stays with his childhood friend, the Japanese American Kenji, who lives in Pittsburgh's black ghetto with his girlfriend Lee and her son. In Act I, Tam has just arrived and is catching up with Kenji. In Act II, the two men meet with Charley and bring him back to the apartment, where Lee's ex-husband has shown up to take her back. These scenes are intercut with fantasy sequences, such as one in which Tam meets his childhood hero, the Lone Ranger. Tam Lum: a filmmaker who grew up in Chinatown but has adopted the inflections of black speech in honor of his hero, Ovaltine Jack Dancer, a black boxer about whom he is making a documentary
 * Story
 * Characters

Kenji: Tam's Japanese American childhood friend, who is hosting him during his stay in Pittsburgh

Lee: Kenji's girlfriend, of uncertain ethnic extraction and with children by several different fathers; ex-wife of Tom

Robbie: Lee's son

Charley Popcorn: an elderly black man, presumably Ovaltine's father, but now running a porno theater

Tom: a Chinese American author, now writing a book entitled Soul on Rice; Lee's ex-husband

Hong Kong Dream Girl, The Lone Ranger and Tonto: characters who appear in fantasy/dream sequences

American Place Theatre, 27 May 1972. Directed by Jack Gelber; scenery by John Wulp; costumes by Willa Kim; lighting by Roger Morgan. With Randall Duk Kim, Sab Shimono, Sally Kirkland, Anthony Marciona, Leonard Jackson and Calvin Jung in the lead roles.
 * First performance

Although the play won the 1971 East West Players playwrighting contest, the reviews of the New York production were mixed. Positive reviews came from Edith Oliver at [The New Yorker]] and Jack Kroll at Newsweek, but neither Clive Barnes nor Julius Novick of The New York Times liked it. A middle-of-the-road review came from The Village Voice's Michael Feingold, who liked the characters, the situations, and much of the writing, but felt that the monologues were "hot air, disguised as Poetry". Audiences were critical too, as author Betty Lee Sung points out that many members left midway through.
 * Reception

The play is a direct attack on the John Chinaman stereotype that continued to affect Chinese American men and an attempt to investigate what Chin perceives to be the cultural emasculation of Asian American by racist stereotypes. The main character of the play, Tam Lum, is a Chinese American filmmaker who, as a boy in search of heroic Chinese American models listened to the Lone Ranger radio shows and believed that the Ranger wears a mask because he is in fact a Chinese man intent on bringing "Chinaman vengeance on the West". Seeing the men of his parents' generation as unheroic—he used to care for an elderly dishwasher who wore his underwear in the bath out of fear of being watched by old white women—Tam uses Ovaltine as his model for masculinity; but he finds out later that Ovaltine had made up his stories about Charley being his father, and he also learns that the old man he cared for (whom everyone else assumes is his father) was in fact extremely dignified and loved to watch boxing matches. As scholar Jinqi Ling notes, Tam's inability to see [the dishwasher's] dignity represents not only the historical and cultural effects of racism on Asian American men, but also the role of language and story in capturing and passing on a new, heroic Asian American masculinity. As scholar Elaine H. Kim notes, Tam is only good for his ability to out-talk people, and even though he has given up his self-delusions and let go of the idea that he could be like the black men he admires, he will remain so until he is able to connect his masculinity to his heritage; in the meantime, he is, as Kim says, "still experimenting".
 * Themes

The character of Tam is in many ways the continuation of such earlier Chin characters as Johnny from "Food for All His Dead", Freddy (later renamed Dirigible) from "Yes, Young Daddy" and Dirigible from "Goong Hai Fot Choy". As in those stories (some of which are available in revised versions in The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.), he looks outside of Chinatown—and outside Asian America—for models. But everywhere he looks, the models of fatherhood are absent or ambiguous: he rarely mentions his own children; his best friend Kenji seems to be refusing to acknowledge having a child of his own; Ovaltine has fabricated stories about his father (who was in fact only his manager). The only male character in the play who seems eager to embrace fatherhood is Tom, a Chinese American who has bought into the model minority myth of Asian American while, at the same time, arguing that Tam needs to accept that they are Chinese rather than Americans. Chin has described Tam as the "comic embodiment of Asian-American manhood", a character designed to capture the experience of Asian American men—not just their circumstances, but their language, their symbols, their humor and their mythology. Yet critics such as Kim feel that Chin has not quite achieved his own goal, and that perhaps Chin has too readily accepted an oppressive definition of masculinity.

Chin's use of the Lone Ranger signifies his interest in the history and legends of the Old West, especially the contributions and sufferings of the Chinese immigrants who helped build the railroads and who became the first Chinese Americans; Chin considers their stories to be as important to Chinese American history as those of the Chinese classic about oppressed rebels who challenge the Emperor's authority, Outlaws of the Marsh. At the same time, his use of language represents his admiration for the Black Power movement and their fight against institutionalized racism and white dominance; his characters speak an English that is inflected with both Cantonese and black vernacular elements. David Leiwei Li points out that this language reflects Tam's rebellion against the Orientalist American construction of Asian American and wants "to claim a Chinese American language that is self-referential and that will relate to others", and that he begins to realize by the end of the play that he needs to turn to the history and stories about Chinese America, such as those stories of the Old West he had heard from his grandmother; in this way, Chinese American men will no longer be passively created by American Orientalism, but will gain the ability to create themselves. In her introduction to the printed edition of the play, Dorothy Ritsuko McDonald connects Tam's use of language with Chin's desire to capture "the rhythms and accents of Chinese America," in accordance with Tam's wish to be taken seriously as neither Chinese or assimilated American, but as a synthesis of the two: an American whose ancestors were not allowed into the mainstream of American history.

The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co. is a 1988 short-story collection by Frank Chin that collects many of the short stories he had published in the 1970s. It won the American Book Award. The collection deals with Chinese-American history by recalling the work of early Chinese immigrants in such jobs as "coolie, railworker and launderer".


 * Stories
 * "Railroad Standard Time"
 * "The Eat and Run Midnight People"
 * "The Chinatown Kid"
 * "The Only Real Day"
 * "Yes, Young Daddy"
 * "Give the Enemy Sweet Sissies and Women to Infatuate Him, and Jades and Silks to Blind Him with Greed"
 * "A Chinese Lady Dies" (originally published as "Goong Hai Fot Choy")
 * "The Sons of Chan"
 * "Afterword" (a parodical attack on Maxine Hong Kingston's best-selling book The Woman Warrior)

Many of the characters in these stories are, in Sau-ling Cynthia Wong's words, "elderly paralytics [who] appear to exist in a static twilight zone of living death"; she mentions the parents in "A Chinese Lady Dies", "Railroad Standard Time", and (from an early story not included in the collection) "Food for All His Dead". Wong notes that in Chin's fiction, immobility represents an unchanging and crippling Chinatown culture that must be escaped by the younger generation. As scholar Elaine H. Kim points out, Chin's metaphors for the community include "bugs, spiders, frogs, [...] a funeral parlor, and obsolete carnival, or a pathetic minstrel show." A related issue is the generational conflict between the Chinese immigrant parents and the American-born children—recall that the "elderly paralytics" were all parents. In "A Chinese Lady Dies", for instance, both the mother and the community are dying; the mother not only described as a cadaver but also actively attending all the local funerals. In "Yes, Young Daddy", Dirigible (whose nickname was, symbolically, "Dirge") has left Chinatown for college, but is drawn back into his Chinatown habits through a letter-correspondence with his younger cousin, Lena, whose father has died and who refers to Dirigible as her "young daddy" after he corrects her grammar and gives her dating advice. After a trip back to Chinatown to visit Lena, Dirigible realizes he can no longer worry about the people still in Chinatown; he must focus on himself. The narrators in these stories see through the façades of Chinatown life but are unable to do anything to help.
 * Themes

As in much of Chin's work, this problem is focused on the problem of masculinity, of young men feeling that the Anglo vision of Asians is always feminine and that there are no good male role models in the Chinatown communities. The male narrators of "A Chinese Lady Dies" and "Yes, Young Daddy" are surrounded mostly by women, with the fathers gone and the only other men around being the local storekeepers.

One of the ways Chin's characters escape the dead-end of Chinatown is by valorizing their ancestor's heroism in the face of oppression and poverty. The title of "The Eat and Run Midnight People" refers to the narrator's peasant ancestors in Canton Province, China: "...the get out of town eat and run folks, hungry all the time eating after looking for food". And the narrator of "Railroad Standard Time" knowingly romanticizes the life of a grandfather he never really knew.

Another way his characters escape the static nature of Chinatown culture is through motion. Many of Chin's characters are, in Wong's words, "addicted to mobility: [...] the exhilarating rush it provides, a solipsistic sensation of power and domination"; his characters are not interested in finding a better place to live, but rather in being altogether free from social constraints. Chin relishes the freedom celebrated in legends of the Old West, represented by the railroads that he references in the title of the collection, which were built with the help of Chinese immigrants who would never themselves be able to ride them. For Chin, the history of these immigrants in the Old West is as important for Chinese American history as the story of the oppressed rebels who challenge the Emperor's authority in the Chinese classic novel Outlaws of the Marsh, which he references in "A Chinese Lady Dies"; Chin's love of the Old West includes an strong-sense of retribution for Anglo racism, of "Chinaman vengeance on the West". The narrator of "The Eat and Run Midnight People", a former railroad brakeman, loved not only the freedom of movement provided by the railroad, but also the way his job allowed him to become part of the American project of conquering the West (e.g., Manifest Destiny), the kind of job that is sung about in folk songs like "I've Been Working on the Railroad".

But as Wong notes, the railroad is an ambivalent symbol for Chinese Americans, since it represents both the American dream of mobility, luxury and power but also the historical difficulties of the Chinese workers, who often had no choice but to take railroad jobs and who were never allowed the sort of mobility the railroad offered to Anglos. The narrator of "The Eat and Run Midnight People" also recognizes that the heroic songs about railroad workers are fundamentally silly and feels trapped by the restricted range of motion found on railroads: although they allow a great range of mobility, they do not allow much freedom of direction—their path is predetermined. The narrator longs for the free motion of birds' flight but also finds himself pondering death by falling as a way to escape the life of constant riding.

Scholar Rachel Lee has examined one story in which Chin examines the young/old conflict from the perspective of the older generation: "The Only Real Day," which focuses on Yuen, an immigrant who has fallen out of contact with this family back in Hong Kong and now works as a dishwasher in Oakland for a woman he finds too assimilated to American culture; his only contact with his friends comes once a week when he meets them in San Francisco for gambling night. His life is overly routine until he receives a letter from immigration that he cannot read; he must depend on Rose and her American-born son, Dirigible, to guide through an immigration system that he does not trust—he knows from experience that the authorities don't always play fair with Chinese residents and feels that he has no rights in this country. Yuen despairs about the state of the world, lamenting that there is little chance of new heroes arising in the same manner of those recounted in the classic Chinese novel Outlaws of the Marsh. Yuen attempts suicide, but ends up dying in the bath; Lee considers that Chin has deliberately created "a prolonged, Hamlet-like contemplation of one's lack of action" that also reveals the legacy of U.S. legal discrimination against Asians.

Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers is a 1974 anthology by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Wong and other members of the Combined Asian Resources Project (CARP). It helped establish Asian American Literature as a field by recovering and collecting representative selections from Chinese-, Japanese-, and Filipino-Americans from the past fifty years--many of whom had been mostly forgotten. This pan-Asian anthology included selections from Carlos Bulosan, Diana Chang, Louis Chu, Momoko Iko, Wallace Lin, Toshio Mori, John Okada, Oscar Peñaranda, Sam Tagatac, Hisaye Yamamoto, Wakako Yamauchi, many of whom are now staples in Asian American literature course. Because of this anthology and the work of CARP, many of these authors have been republished; at that time, however, they received little attention from publishers critics because they didn't subscribe to popular stereotypes but depicted what Elaine H. Kim calls the "unstereotyped aspects of Asian American experience".

The anthology is also notable for its opening essay, "Fifty Years of Our Whole Voice", which laid out a list of concerns facing Asian American writers--orientalism, monolingualism, ghettoed communities, class issues, etc.--that have become important for Asian American scholarship. The essay also lays out the editors' understanding of what constitutes "a true Asian American sensibility": namely, that it is "non-Christian, nonfeminine, and nonimmigrant." These stances have been controversial, especially after the rise of Asian American women's literature (Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, et al.) and the change in Asian American demographics in the 1980s, when more Asian American writers were immigrants (e.g., Bharati Mukherjee) and/or from other Asian cultures (e.g., Korean, Indian, Vietnamese). An expanded edition, The Big Aiiieeeee! was published in 1991 and added such authors as Sui Sin Far, Monica Sone, Milton Murayama, Joy Kogawa and others. Although it included one Korean author (Kogawa), it was even less representative of the variety of Asian cultures now active in the United States (it no longer contained any Filipino works), and it remained firm on its insistence on certain qualities as essential for determining "true" Asian American identity. These ideas are forcefully presented in Chin's introductory essay, "Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake", in which he argues that Kingston, Tan, David Henry Hwang and other popular Chinese American writers are not authentically Asian American, but rather follow the tradition of such mid-century Chinese American authors as Yung Wing and Jade Snow Wong, who wrote autobiographies (which Chin claims is "an exclusively Christian" genre) that accept "the Christian stereotype of Asia being as opposite morally from the West as it is geographically."

The "Aiiieeeee!" of the title comes from a stereotypical expression used by Asian characters in old movies, radio and television shows, comic books, etc. When the editors tried to find a publisher, they had to turn to a historically African-American press because, as Chin states:"The blacks were the first to take us seriously and sustained the spirit of many Asian American writers.... [I]t wasn't surprising to us that Howard University Press understood us and set out to publish our book with their first list. They liked our English we spoke [sic] and didn't accuse us of unwholesome literary devices."