China Men

The author chronicles the lives of three generations of Chinese men in America, woven from memory, myth and fact. Here's a storyteller's tale of what they endured in a strange new land.

The author chronicles the lives of three generations of Chinese men in America, woven from memory, myth and fact. Here's a storyteller's tale of what they endured in a strange new land.

The author chronicles the lives of three generations of Chinese men in America, woven from memory, myth and fact. Here's a storyteller's tale of what they endured in a strange new land.

Cochran reconsiders the nature and role of consumer culture in the spread of globalization and illuminates enduring features of the Chinese experience of consumer culture. The history of Chinese medicine men in pre-socialist China, he suggests, has relevance for the 21st century because they achieved goals that resonate with their successors today.

The author recalls her experiences growing up Chinese-American in California and her mother's stories of strong women warriors in her native China, and also discusses the history of Chinese men in America from those who worked on the transcontinental railroad to those who fought in Vietnam.

Men and Women in Qing China is an analysis of Chinese prescriptions of gender as represented in Cao Xueqin's famous eighteenth century Chinese novel of manners, The Red Chamber Dream or The Story of the Stone. Drawing on feminist literary critical methods it examines Qing notions of masculinity and femininity, including themes such as bisexuality, motherhood, virginity and purity, and gender and power. Its central aim is to challenge the common assumption that the novel represents some form of early Chinese feminism by examining the text in conjunction with historical data. The book will be especially important to those interested in issues of gender in China, the history of Chinese literary criticism and the application of feminist theory to the Asian text.

The numerous studies of Maxine Hong Kingston's touchstone work The Woman Warrior fail to take into account the stories in China Men, which were largely written together with those in The Woman Warrior but later published separately. Although Hong Kingston's decision to separate the male and female narratives enabled readers to see the strength of the resulting feminist point of view in The Woman Warrior, the author has steadily maintained that to understand the book fully it was necessary to read its male companion text. Maureen Sabine's ambitious study of The Woman Warrior and China Men aims to bring these divided texts back together with a close reading that looks for the textual traces of the father in The Woman Warrior and shows how the daughter narrator tracks down his history in China Men. She considers theories of intertextuality that open up the possibility of a dynamic interplay between the two books and suggests that the Hong family women and men may be struggling for dialogue with each other even when they appear textually silent or apart.

​This volume documents how families, communities and some groups (single men, young ‘scarce’ women, parents) adapt and adjust to recent demographic shifts in China and India. It discusses how demographic change interacts with other processes of change, including changes with respect to economic development and globalization, gender, class, caste, families, migration and work. The chapters offer micro-level analyses contextualized in larger processes of change and push further existing understandings of the consequences of the demographic imbalance between men and women in China and/or India, particularly from a gender perspective. As such this book will be of interest to scholars and students in population studies, sociology, international development, gender studies, and Asian studies.