["China Men"] is indeed a fierce book. It makes many demands. It is full of horrors, superstitions, occasional obscenities, but when one recovers one sees them as metaphors designed to burrow under preconceptions and blandness. It is all about the Chinese fathers—grandfathers, great-grandfathers—who, searching for the Gold Mountain, in order to prosper their families, turned east, left their villages, went out into the world, especially the United States, bringing their antiquity, their sagacity, and their legends with them….

It is the profound disparity between cultures which she has captured so magically. And the China men's efforts somehow to exorcise the disparity is the story of the fathers and grandfathers. The men, far more than the women, tried to forget the old ways as they felled redwood trees, built American railroads, dynamited tunnels through mountains, opened laundries and restaurants. But they too built their legends and sent...