China Men: Maxine Hong Kingston and the American Canon

Abstract

Maxine Hong Kingston's 1980 book China Men is a work that unequivocally engages major canonical issues-the notion of America/Americanness, for one, either in its ideological or aesthetic sense, particularly captures her imagination.' She is claiming in her Chinese American way and retelling the American myth as poetically and truly as William Carlos Williams's In American Grain (Pfaff 1, 25). Picking up where Williams's precursor text left off in about 1850, Kingston has unfolded in China Men more than a century of Chinese American experience and constituted an oppositional voice to official American history. Kingston deliberately blurs boundaries of history as master record of events and canon as container of privileged literary texts, for she sees an analogy in law of inclusion and exclusion operating in structuring of both history and canon that needs to be dealt with simultaneously: historical presence of a people is always intricately woven with its literary presence. China Men challenges problematic democratic nationalism of canonical paradigm and endeavors to write into existing canon possibilities of change within canon itself. Since America/Americanness is a geopolitical concept motivated by interests and materialized in canonical texts, historical as well as literary, Kingston has devised an agenda of what I call the discovery of origins -first establishing root and precedence of concept for later redesignation, then tracing formative hegemonic processes for adaptation and appropriation, and finally positing a set of advantageous relationships with available canon that will valorize her own text's position--only to anchor origin of America in her original formulation. This discovery procedure is a formal strategy hinged upon linguistic and textual mediation, subversion, and transformation. It is a discovery of given meanings and combinations of new meanings; it works out problems of culture in