China Men is not a sequel to The Woman Warrior but a companion piece, an amplification. It revolves, again, around the author's family, who operated a laundry in Stockton, California. Both parents were born in China, and their first two children died there. Six others, born later in the US, are Americanized on the surface—casual, impatient, disconcertingly direct—but beneath the surface, haunted by a sense of being different. (p. 32)

It becomes apparent fairly early in China Men that this is a less particularized account than The Woman Warrior. The ancestors stand for many other ancestors, for the entire history of Chinese emigration…. The author's father entered this country either as a stowaway or as a legal immigrant; both versions are recounted in full, as if they really happened….

But inevitably, the particular triumphs over the general. China, to Maxine Hong Kingston, is "a country I made up." Equally, she makes up her history, her family mythology, coloring it with an artist's eye. Both of her books are nonfiction,… but in a deeper sense, they are fiction at its best—novels, fairytales, epic poems….

What make the book more than nonfiction are its subtle shifts between the concrete and the mythical. Edges blur; the dividing line passes unnoticed. We accept one fact and then the next, and then suddenly we find ourselves believing in the fantastic. Is it true that when one of the brothers was born, a white Christmas card flew into the room like a dove? Well, possibly; there could be an explanation for that, but…. (p. 33)

The Woman Warrior was startling because of its freshness; it wasn't a book that called to mind any other. China Men, of course, lacks that advantage, but it's every bit as compelling as its predecessor. It's a history at once savage and beautiful, a combination of bone-grinding reality and luminous fantasy. (p. 34)