In the title [China Men] Hong Kingston uses the pejorative, the patronizing "Chinamen," but she separates the words, perhaps to indicate that this designation is different. These men will not be dealt with pejoratively but heroically as the "binders and builders" of Hawaii and the States. This is a book of men, of male ancestry, a counterpart to The Woman Warrior, which was the search for self through the untold and told tales of the Chinese family, through the naming and exorcising of ghosts.

That which must be fought through in both books is imposed silence…. The Woman Warrior ends triumphantly with the author speaking out and with reference to the legend of a woman poet….

China Men commences with the angry silence of the father, a laundry worker in the land of Gold Mountain (all immigrants call the States "golden"). The daughter chronicler writes, "I think this is the journey you didn't tell me," and she proceeds to "talk story," to imagine-tell for her father. (p. 28)

As the book begins with the teacher father and his unappreciative students, it ends with the brother, a gentle fellow, a remedial-reading teacher to louts who rip books that he buys for the school library. This brother, like all the China Men, has to take his journey into the world of demons. All who are not their own are demons: immigration demons, employer demons, mortician demons, even garbage demons and movieusher demons. This brother goes into the demonic world of the war in Vietnam, careful, even in war, not to hurt another. When he returns he cannot tell his tale. His sister writes it for him, gives her brother throat and soaring song. (p. 30)