In a broad sense, the social concerns of The Woman Warrior (1976) are continued in China Men, although the emphasis is more on the Chinese-American community, as represented by Kings ton's family history, than on the personal trials of the author herself. She considers the two "one big book," which she wrote "more or less simultaneously." The second book, however, is a more ambitious undertaking than its predecessor: "What I am doing in this new book," she declared in 1980, "is claiming America." Such a goal requires that her book span several generations of men who left China for "the Gold Mountain." She weaves tales of the bitter poverty and meager successes of the early emigrants with stories of those who followed and built the railroad in the west. Little by little, they took root here and adapted their traditions to the America of the late nineteenth and...