SOURCE: Chua, Chen Lok. “Two Chinese Versions of the American Dream: The Golden Mountain in Lin Yutang and Maxine Hong Kingston.” MELUS 8, no. 4 (winter 1981): 61-70.

[In the following essay, Chua compares the idea of an ‘American Dream’ in both Lin's Chinatown Family and Maxine Hon Kingston's Woman Warrior and China Men.]

Early Chinese immigrants shared a version of the American dream indicated by their colloquial (and still current) Chinese name for America which translates as “Golden Mountain”—Kum Sum. This name derives, of course, from the historical moment of Chinese immigration: the worldwide gold rush to California. Three Chinese immigrated to California in 1848; by 1851, there were 25,000; and in 1884, half of California's farm workers were Chinese.¹ The phrase “Golden Mountain,” therefore, summarizes the dream of the first Chinese who came to America in the pursuit of frankly materialistic goals—to get rich quickly and to retire to their native villages. However, once on the land, and despite their homing instincts and the exclusionary laws erected by the United States against them, many Chinese settled in America, and the original dream of materialistic fulfillment underwent changes, taking on nuances and different ideals. Two Chinese-American authors, the sojourner Lin Yutang and the native-born Maxine Hong Kingston, illustrate how the original dream has been nuanced and broadened as successive generations of Chinese Americans evolved from sojourners to immigrants, from settlers to natives.

Lin Yutang's 1948 novel, Chinatown Family,² deals with the assimilation of the Fong family in New York during the 1930s. Lin depicts a conflict between the materialistic dream that motivated the immigrants and the Confucian ideal of the family. The novel examines this conflict through the perspectives of several ways of thought: Christianity, individualistic materialism, Confucianism, and Taoism.

Elsewhere, Lin has described the family as “the root of Chinese society”³ and a Chinese person as essentially “a member of the great stream of family life”⁴ (implying both a fixed and Protean identity through this Taoist metaphor⁵). But to seek wealth on the Golden Mountain is to be uprooted from this “communitas” of the family ideal and become a marginal person in an oppressive jural-political “structure.”⁶ For instance, Tom Fong, Sr., is separated from his family by exclusionary immigration laws when he comes to the Klondike. However, he does not lose sight of the family communitas. “He goes back to his wife every five or six years … [just as] eels travel half across the Atlantic … to spawn” (p. 197). Like many Chinese sojourners, Fong makes this repeated trans-Pacific odyssey to his Chinese Ithaca where his wife bears their children and his gold buys their family farm (pp. 7-8). But like other Chinese, Fong is “mobbed, robbed, … driven out of the West” (p. 7), and he eventually sets up a laundry in a New York basement. With this slim foothold on the Golden Mountain, Fong transplants his family to American soil through a series of illegal entries, hoping to synthesize the American dream of prosperity and the family ideal.

This dream of prosperity is humorously seen in Mrs. Fong's first visit to Macy's which is the materialist “heaven” (p. 29) come true. Rising to Ladies' Apparel on the escalator is like “being carried on a sedan chair to the clouds” (p. 30). Later the Fongs realize that “there is gold … on Mott Street” in Chinatown (p. 58) and agree “it would be good to own a restaurant there” (p. 58). This dream becomes materially fulfilled. But the price is Fong's “typical American death” (p. 204) in a traffic accident. The insurance from the death of this laundryman (analogous to that from Arthur Miller's salesman)⁷ realizes the materialist dream; the family rises from basement laundry to street-level restaurant: “It was a strange feeling, like walking on stilts” (p. 219).

Meanwhile, Fong's three sons prognosticate the future of the family ideal. Loy, the eldest, is filial, modelling himself on his hardworking father's example. However, he marries Flora, a Catholic girl from Little Italy. At first, the elder Fongs distrust her Christianity, a religion “hated” in China, “as a social … fact,” more for its gunboats than for its gospel (pp. 108-9). But the practical Mrs. Fong gives Flora's religion the benefit of the doubt and even asks the Virgin Mary for a grandson (pp. 122, 126). And when he is born and baptized, Mrs. Fong signals her gratitude, if not her faith, by a ＄50 donation and a “Buddhist” obeisance to the Virgin (p. 201). Flora and Loy thus become assets to the family ideal.

The second son, Freddie, is a contrast. Deeply submerged in the American melting pot, Freddie is a gladhanding, self-making insurance salesman; his outlook is individualistic and materialist. For instance, he infuriates his father by an unfilial attempt to sell him life insurance (p. 104). He rejects the familial chain of being in addressing Flora by her first name instead of “Daisow” (i.e., eldest sister-in-law), thus violating the Confucian “mingchiao or religion of names.”⁸ He marries a Chinese American girl who is a nightclub entertainer (p. 137). Her entirely materialistic values run to new cars (p. 216) and mink coats (p. 273), and their marriage quickly breaks up in mutual adultery. Therefore, although Freddie is fastest (and flashiest) in achieving the dream of wealth and status, he strays far from the family ideal.

The youngest son, Tom, Jr., the most rounded character of the book, is very sensible of the material attractions in America. He is enchanted by electricity, “the lightning over his head,” and charmed by “the flying demon” of the elevated train (p. 5). Predictably, he becomes a student at the Brooklyn Technological Institute (p. 275). However, he rejects Freddie's ethic of movie-hero aggressiveness. For instance, when bullies threaten Tom's laundry delivery, he finds an alternate route (pp. 79-80). But Freddy wants him to be aggressive: “Americans … don't respect … if you don't fight” (p. 79). Their father, however, agrees with Tom, encouraging him, in the Taoist metaphor, to flow “like water … seeking low places and penetrating everywhere” (p. 148).

Tom's instinctive Taoism becomes conscious when, at the age of nineteen, he meets and falls in love with Elsie Tsai. Elsie emblematizes all China, for she is born in Fukien and educated in Shanghai (like Lin Yutang himself) and has come to New York to teach Peking Mandarin to immigrant Cantonese. Elsie provides Tom with spiritual ballast by introducing him to the sayings of Lao Tse⁹ whose teachings strike Tom like a “dazzling light” (p. 230) different from that shed by the technological wonder of electricity. The engagement of Tom and Elsie signifies a synthesis of the most positive aspects of Chinese family ideal and American material opportunity: the student of technologies will wed the teacher of tradition and bearer of wisdom.

In this novel, then, Lin Yutang shows the members of an émigré family pursuing their American dream, rejecting the dross, overcoming obstacles of jural structures, building upon their Confucian past, adapting to the Christian present, surviving by the flexibility of their Taoist instincts, and cherishing the communitas of their family ideal.

In Maxine Hong Kingston's vividly recreated ancestral village, the boys say, “We'll go to sea and pick up … gold on Gold Mountain.”¹⁰ Kingston is hauntingly aware that her ancestors came to America dreaming of wealth. But her autobiographical Woman Warrior (1976)¹¹ and China Men (1980) proclaim that the ancestral dream has metamorphosed into a contemporary pursuit of identity¹²—of identity as woman, as writer, as American. In treating each aspect of identity, Kingston constructs a field of dialectical oppositions within which the questing self searches for a synthesizing center. Both books recall that her laundryman father used to mark their family's laundry with the ideograph for “middle” ([UNK], WW p. 137, CM pp. 14-15), for Chinese consider themselves “person[s] of the Middle Nation” (WW p. 136). But Chinese who come to America have misplaced their center and become “eccentric” (CM p. 15) “Chinese-Americans” (WW p. 5), marginals, hyphenated between the nostalgia and apprehensions of the homeland and the tug of assimilation. Similarly, Kingston's Maxine vacillates between the threatening identity of woman as slave-object and the aspiration towards woman as a Joan-of-Arc warrior. Equally, the writer Kingston, who straddles the genres of autobiography and fiction, of Asian talkstory and American memoir,¹³ is formulating her individual medium and voice. Kingston's point of departure, then, is a person displaced from the center in culture, gender, and genre; her task and achievement has been to create and define new centers within fields of complex opposing forces.

The women of Woman Warrior are of two dialectically opposed types. On the one hand, there is the legendary but unnameable paternal aunt, the “No Name Woman,” a horrible example. She has an illegitimate child during her husband's absence. She is castigated by her villagers, expunged from familial commemoration, isolated from nature.¹⁴ She drowns herself and her baby in the family well, effectively poisoning the water. The polar opposite to this identity is the celebrated, legendary Fa Mu Lan (the Chinese Joan of Arc). Her mysterious enfance and initiation give her a Taoist union with nature (p. 27), she leads a popular army of villagers, (p. 36), she is the pride and avenger of her family (p. 34). Unlike No Name Woman's drowning well, Fa Mu Lan has a magic water gourd which reveals her life's events (p. 31). Both these women—the anonymous and the eponymous—are talk-story word constructs fused in Maxine's imagination. They are balanced by two women who existed in Maxine's experience: her mother, Brave Orchid, type of Fa Mu Lan, and her maternal aunt, Moon Orchid—type of No Name Woman.

Brave Orchid is a shaman. Her “unusual” (CM p. 30) father gives her a good education; she outwits her husband into foregoing the ceremony of “kowtowing-to-the-husband” (CM p. 32). After her husband leaves to seek his fortunes in America, she earns a degree in midwifery (WW p. 57), meanwhile establishing a reputation as an exorcist, a shaman, by casting out a poltergeist called the “Sitting Ghost” from the women's dormitory. Brave Orchid becomes a barefoot medicine woman curing the sick, exorcising spirits with chanting, even intimidating an orangutan with her shouting. Then, with the beginning of World War II, Brave Orchid, now aged 45, rejoins her laundryman husband in New York to bear and bring up six children. Surely Brave Orchid is a flesh and blood counterpart of the Fa Mu Lan archetype.

Moon Orchid, in contrast, is of the “lovely useless type” (WW p. 128). In the episode, entitled “At the Western Palace,” she is the analogue of the Empress of the East (p. 143), remaining in China for thirty years while her husband lives the American Dream by becoming a neurosurgeon in California and covertly marrying a Westernized Chinese imagined as the Empress of the West. Moon Orchid, instigated by her sister Brave Orchid, tries to assert her rights. Unfortunately, Moon Orchid and her Eastern traditions are routed during the ensuing tragicomic confrontation at the Western Palace, i.e., the air-conditioned, nightmarish, clinic of brain incision in Los Angeles, the Western-most plastic city of the West. Moon Orchid then lapses into lunacy, having “misplaced herself” (p. 157), and eventually dies.

In these four women, heroic and humiliated, imagined and empirical, Kingston has mapped out her paradigm of female identity. Maxine, apparently, must work out her identity within these parameters. A shaman's chanting may lead a misplaced spirit back to its body; similarly, to shape her identity, Maxine must literally and figuratively find a voice, and this search dominates the final episode of Woman Warrior (entitled “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”). In this, Maxine Kingston completes her book, thereby finding the voice to talk her story, to name her ghosts.

When Maxine was a child, her mother had cut the frenum of her tongue—perhaps to free it, perhaps to curb it (p. 164). In any case, Maxine was an unusually quiet child. She could not understand the assertive and erect capital “I” in the American language, to her so unlike the equivalent Chinese ideogram.¹⁵ However, an uncanny episode in which Maxine tortures another voiceless Chinese girl in order to make this surrogate self speak shows her awareness of the importance of voicing herself (pp. 173-82).

Without a voice, Maxine risks being forced into the mold of the victimized No Name Woman or Moon Orchid. This threat is objectified in a ghoulish retarded boy whom Maxine fears to be her family's choice to marry her (p. 194). He trails her, sits on crates at their laundry with his boxes of pornographic pictures (p. 197). Significantly, his description is reminiscent of Brave Orchid's “Sitting Ghost” and orangutan: “the hulk, the hunching sitter” (p. 200). And just as Brave Orchid chanted and shouted to exorcise monsters, so Maxine says: “One night … my throat burst open. I … screamed … at my mother and my father ‘I want you to tell that hulk, that gorilla-ape, to go away … Not everybody thinks I'm nothing. I'm not going to be a slave’” (p. 210). With this moment of finding and giving voice, of heroic assertion, Maxine exorcises “the huncher,” who then mysteriously disappears.

As a coda to this triumph, Kingston tells the excruciating story of the second-century Chinese poetess, Tsai Yen, who was captured by foreigners and married to one of their chieftains. After having two children, Tsai Yen was then ransomed back to China to marry a Chinese so that her father, whose only daughter she was, would have descendants. Tsai Yen, who assimilated into a foreign culture and yet remained Chinese, whose songs touched foreigners and Chinese, is aptly symbolic of the Chinese-American writer astride two cultures. And Tsai Yen, who was a slave and matriarch aptly converges the spectrum of women's experience. Finally, the form of Kingston's book which combines Chinese talk-story with American memoir is a cross-cultural synthesis of genres. Out of Woman Warrior's dialectical oppositions of culture, gender, and genre, Maxine Hong Kingston has sung a center for herself, out of herself, with a voice found in a new world.

This new world, Kingston insists in China Men, is one in whose making Chinese shared. Whereas the search for self and center in Woman Warrior focused on the woman and the artist, China Men focuses upon the Chinese-American identity. This identity seems to be located within four margins: along one perspective lie the politico-cultural polarities of China and America; along the other are the socio-economic polarities of abjectness and heroism. Without going off these edges, the Chinese-American must locate an identity.¹⁶

There is abjectness in the ancestral Chinese village which Kingston mythicizes into a kind of Yoknapatawpha. There the father fails utterly at teaching school as his students run amok (pp. 33-41). Great Grandfather Bak Goong steals away to Hawaii to dodge the draft during the “dangerous and sick” Taiping Revolt (p. 92). Yet there is heroism in these men in China too. Maxine's father earns the degree of “Righteous Worthy” during the Imperial Examinations in a feat of intellectual stamina (pp. 26-8). Kau Goong, a six-footer, is an “incarnation of a story hero” (p. 43).

Similarly, there is abjectness as well as heroism in America. There is, for instance, the terrified stowaway and illegal immigrant, who might have been Maxine's father. Or the new arrivals humiliated at Angel Island immigration station, undergoing months of arbitrary questioning, sometimes committing suicide (p. 38). Or the China men driven out en masse from Alaska (pp. 160-62). Or the fear of deportation that haunts the book (e.g., pp. 13, 29, 178, 299). Or the humiliation of the Great Grandfather, horsewhipped on a Hawaiian sugarcane plantation (p. 101). But, on the other hand, there is the Paul Bunyan-like heroism of China men like the paternal Grandfather who helped tunnel and blast the Central Pacific railroad through the Sierra Nevada Mountains (pp. 132-135). Or again, there is the quiet, persevering heroism of Maxine's father who was swindled out of a partnership in a New York laundry and exploited mercilessly by a casino owner, yet manages to establish his laundry in Stockton, California. Humiliated or heroic, such tillers of the soil, builders of railroads, and exemplars of industry are also makers of America.

Just as Maxine must center herself in Woman Warrior, so it is Maxine's unnamed youngest brother, “the brother in Vietnam,” who must do likewise in the uneasy world of China Men. By this time, China has become Communist and anti-American. In the chapter entitled “The Making of Americans,” Kingston makes us aware of the mishaps that can push this brother over the edge. There is mad cousin Sao, for instance, who singlemindedly established his American-ness fighting in WW II but whose remorse at abandoning his mother in Communist China becomes obsessive and awakens the family's fears of deportation (pp. 171-8). There is also Uncle Bun, who finds wheatgerm and Communism so attractive that the family again feels imperilled (p. 196). He turns paranoid about America, believing that the garbage is being collected to feed him; unable to purge his paranoia, Uncle Bun has to return to China.

We meet Maxine's youngest brother when he is a newly graduated high-school teacher of draft age during the Vietnam War. His experience of teaching in California is as dismal as his father's in China. An earlier description of his birth also parallels that of his father's.¹⁷ And these parallels underscore the difference that the father left his native land whereas the son chooses not to; for, despite the temptation to evade the draft by going to Canada, this brother decides to hold firm to his American identity, a birthright inherited from the toil and triumphs of his forebears. He joins the Navy where he hopes to be least directly involved in the war. But he is ordered to Asia. His encounters with Asians, however, clarify his identity both as ethnic Asian and American individual. In Korea, the Koreans greet him as a fellow Asian but also value his American difference, calling him lucky (p. 294). In Taiwan, he is “for the first time in a country of Chinese people …, the old planet his family left light years ago” (p. 294). He fears that these Chinese will despise his lack of linguistic and traditional savoir faire and call him a “Ho Chi Kuei” (p. 295), as his elders in America contemptuously label American-born Chinese. (See also WW p. 204). Instead, the Taiwanese also esteem his American identity, saying, “Lucky. You're lucky” (p. 296). (Kingston is probably punning ironically on this phrase because the audible difference between the pejorative “Ho Chi” and the Chinese for “good luck” is slight.) The brother then realizes that Taiwan is not “the Center” for him (p. 301). The Center is not even in Hong Kong, where his relatives supposedly live, because when he searches for them, their address, significantly, does not exist (pp. 302-3).

Furthermore, the brother's tour of duty reveals to him that he is an unquestionable American. The Navy wants to send him to language school and become an interrogator. They run a security check, and the Pentagon gives him “Q Clearance … Secret Security” (p. 298). By doing so, “the government was certifying that the [whole] family was really American, not precariously American but super-American” (p. 299), beyond doubts of exclusionary quotas, beyond questions of the possible illegal immigration of the father, beyond fears of deportation.

At the beginning of Woman Warrior, Kingston had asked “Chinese-Americans” (i.e., Chinese-hyphen-Americans): “What things in you are Chinese” (p. 5). Near the end of China Men (p. 296), the Taiwanese ask her brother: “What are you?” And he replies: “Chinese American”—without the hyphen. No longer defined by a compound word, the brother is substantively American and Chinese by adjectival modification. His marginality recedes. With her account of the newest generation of China men, then, Kingston is laying claim to the identity of Chinese as Americans whose centers of being are no longer even marginally in Asia,¹⁸ who will not desert across borders, but who are Americans willing even to fight an immoral war in Asia. Kingston's logic is unblinking: if Chinese Americans have been involved in the making of the American past, they are surely to be implicated in the failures of the American present.

Although our consideration has been limited to Lin Yutang and Maxine Hong Kingston, their themes have been explored by many other worthwhile Chinese-American writers. For instance, Louis Chu's comic novel, Eat A Bowl of Tea (1961; rpt. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), criticizes the family communitas so dear to Lin and sees it as an oppressive structure; Chu advocates instead the pursuit of happiness through an Adam-like freedom from ancestry. Again, Frank Chin's play Chickencoop Chinaman (1972), like Kingston's books, deals excitingly with the quest for a Chinese-American identity. But through these three books of our two authors, we see that Chinese Americans, in their pursuit of the better life, of the continuity of family, and of individual and ethnic identity, are centering themselves in the dreams of America and in the realities of Americans without reservations. Although Golden Mountain is one Chinese name for America, another is “May Kuo,” which translates as “beautiful nation,” a locus amoenus.

Notes

1. Betty Lee Sung, The Story of the Chinese in America (1967; rpt. New York: Collier Books, 1975), pp. 21, 22, 36.

2. New York: John Day. The page numbers in my text refer to this edition.

3. My Country and My People (1935; rpt. New York: John Day, 1939), p. 175.

4. Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (New York: John Day, 1937), p. 188.

5. Like Wordsworth's child who is father of the man, an individual's fluid identity is also defined synchronically in societal terms and diachronically in generational context. For water imagery in Taoism, see Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power (New York: Grove, 1958), pp. 56ff.

6. I borrow these terms from anthropologist Victor Turner, Drama, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 231-270.

7. Death of a Salesman coincidentally opened at the Morosco Theatre in New York on 10 February 1949.

8. Lin, My Country and My People, p. 178.

9. It is significant that a woman initiates Tom into Taoism. As Waley says in The Way and Its Power, “In the whole of creation it is the ‘female’ element alone that has access to Tao” (p. 57).

10. China Men (New York: Knopf, 1980), p. 40. The page numbers preceded by CM in my text refer to this title and edition. Kingston has said elsewhere that “‘Chinamen’ … is used … as neither denigration nor irony. In the early days of Chinese American history, men called themselves ‘Chinamen’ … the term distinguished them from the ‘Chinese’ who remained citizens of China, and showed they were not recognized as Americans. Later, of course, it became an insult. Young Chinese Americans today are reclaiming the word because of its political and historical precision, and are demanding that it be said with dignity and not for name-calling.” (See her “San Francisco's Chinatown: A View from the Other Side of Arnold Genthe's Camera,” American Heritage, 30, No. 1 [December 1978], p. 37.)

11. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Knopf, 1976). The page numbers preceded by WW in my text refer to this title and edition.

12. Cf. Woon-Ping Chin Holaday, “From Ezra Pound to Maxine Hong Kingston: Expressions of Chinese Thought in American Literature,” MELUS, 5, No. 2 (Summer 1978), p. 18: “It [Woman Warrior] … is about an ambiguous identity, and living in an interface between cultures.” Holaday's study stresses Kingston's relationship to Chinese culture, saying that in Kingston's search for identity, “she has to define, comprehend and accept her Chinese heritage” (p. 18). On the other hand, James A. Hijiya in “Roots: Family and Ethnicity in the 1970's,” American Quarterly, 30 (1978), p. 555, says that Kingston “shows ethnicity as a burden which must … be discarded … she deliberately severs her Chinese roots.”

13. Katharine Newman in “Hawaiian-American Literature Today,” MELUS, 6, No. 3 (Summer 1979), points out that, although Woman Warrior won the New York Critics Circle award for nonfiction in 1977, “it (among other things) is an immigrant novel” (p. 48). Patricia Lin Blinde in “The Icicle in the Desert,” MELUS, 6, No. 3 (Fall 1979) calls Kingston's bridging of “factual and fictive” a “transgeneric mode” (p. 63). Suzanne Juhasz further theorizes in “Towards a Theory of Form in Feminist Autobiography,” International Journal of Women's Studies, 2 (1979), that “Kingston's style develops from the notion that fantasy, the life of the imagination, creates female identity; … [hence] she makes autobiography from fiction” (p. 62). Finally, in an interview with Susan Brownmiller, Kingston says of Woman Warrior, “I do think it's closer to fiction” (Mademoiselle, March 1977, p. 210).

14. Her estrangement from nature overcomes her after the villagers' attack and the family's villification: “She ran out into the fields … and pressed herself against the earth, her own land no more. … The black well of sky and stars went out and out and out forever. … An agoraphobia rose in her …” (p. 14, emphasis mine).

15. The Chinese word for “I” is [UNK], and it also is a very assertive word if one considers its etymology. The word is formed from two radicals. The left radical is [UNK] and comes from [UNK], a stylization of the primitive sign for human being [UNK]. The right hand radical comes from [UNK] which derives from the primitive sign for a sword (or metal, money, or power) [UNK]. Hence, to say “I” in Chinese is to imply the assertion that one is a human being with a sword, hence a swordsman or swordswoman. One wonders if Kingston had this etymology in mind and was, therefore, being ironical.

16. Taking a different point of view, Linda Ching Sledge's “Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men: The Family Historian as Epic Poet,” MELUS, 7, no. 4 (Winter 1980), pp. 3-22, is an excellent study which combines textual exegesis with literary theorizing to analyze this book as an epic of “ethnic family history” (p. 3).

17. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., notices this parallel in “Chinese Ghost Story,” New York Review of Books, 27, no. 13 (August 14, 1980), p. 42.

18. Cf. Timothy Pfaff, “Talk with Mrs. Kingston,” New York Times Book Review, 15 June 1980, p. 1: “‘What I am doing in this new book is claiming America,’ declares Maxine Hong Kingston.”

This essay was first presented as a paper at a special session on the American Dream during the 1981 convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association held in Quebec City, Canada, 9-11 April. The author will publish a more fully developed treatment of this subject in the forthcoming Vol. 4, no. 1, issue of Ethnic Groups (New York and London), 1982.