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1.2 A brief introduction of the author—Maxine Hong Kinston
Maxine Hong Kingston (1940—), one of the most famous American writers in 1970s, was born in Stockton, California, to first-generation Chinese immigrants. She is the first Chinese American writer who is included in the main stream of American literature. Her work plays a significant role in studying the character of minority race and multi-culture in America. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghost was her first book, which had been sold more than 450,000 copies since it was published in 1976 and was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (1976). This book was on the bestseller list of the New York Times in 1979 and was one of the top ten nonfiction works of the decade. Her second work China Men was published in 1980, which was awarded the National Book Award. In 1989, her third work Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book was also published, and was awarded PEN West Award in Fiction. It told a story based on the mythical Chinese character Sun Wukong. These three novels won a place for Kingston in the history of contemporary American literature, especially the contemporary American Chinese literature. In the preface of collections of Chinese American Literature, which is edited by Mr. Zhang Ziqing, Kingston’s works are described as the medium of history of American Chinese literature and the mainstream presumption, Chinese tale and American pop culture, also the medium of the author’s parents’ experience and author’s early experience, and they have artistically established a new tradition for Chinese American literature.
1.3 A brief introduction of China Men
China Men was wrote during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960-1970s. It showed Kingston’s concern for some issues of equality of Chinese Americans. It is an oppressed, enslaved race at that time which includes coolies, laborers, and political refugees. With the idea of arguing for the civil rights as well as human rights of those people, Kingston wrote a history of Chinese American immigrants more than a hundred years in the United States, tracked the wandering footprints and the lost memories of a race from Hawaii to Nevada, from New York to Alaska and from the Caribbean to the Pacific… all of which had roots in the villages in China.
The context of China Men was set in old China in 1850s. At that time, the Qing government was full of corruption and incapable of dealing with country affairs, so that the bulk of his people suffer privation and myriad hardships. As a result, those poor people with no money as well as those in middle class who used to have land and live a comparatively well-being life in coastal provinces such as Guangdong had no alternative but to leave their hometown and came into the America for a living. During that period, the USA’s economy was developing at an unprecedented speed and in need of a large numbers of labors for barren plantations which were to be reclaimed, remote area where railroads were to be built. However, the truth was that those Chinese immigrants who were longing for having a better life in a new land were cruelly oppressed and exploited by that country.
China Men which was published in 1980 was the second best seller of Maxine Hong Kingston after the Women Warrior. Although Women Warrior made Kingston well-known and was loved by a great many readers, China Men, however, was better as for Kingston, because this book had much more of her genuine spirit. China Men is highly valued by scholars all over the world since it contains a great many of adaptation and rewriting of Chinese literature and culture. In this book, the history of Chinese American immigrants’ hardships has been presented entirely in front of readers. The book tells about how Chinese workers immigrate to the so-called “gold mountain”—America to work as labors, build a railway in the early time and how they struggle their lives in the “Chinatown”. Stories of Chinese immigrants in this book cover a long historical period from the nineteenth century till recent times. Characters concerned in the whole work are the great grandfather, grandfather, the father from China ... the brother in Vietnam War, the total number of whom are about twenty.