China Boy by Gus Lee

First published: 1991

Type of plot:Bildungsroman

Time of work: The early 1950’s

Locale: San Francisco, California

Principal Characters:

• Kai Ting, the only American-born member of the Ting family
• Dai-li Ting (Mah-mee), Kai’s mother, who dies before he is seven
• Colonel T. K. Ting, Kai’s father, now a banker in civilian life
• Edna McGurk Ting, the Philadelphia society woman who becomes Kai’s stepmother
• Tony Barraza, a former professional boxer and one of Kai’s boxing coaches
• Uncle Shim, an old friend of the Ting family and Kai’s calligraphy teacher
• Toussaint LaRue, Kai’s best friend

The Novel

China Boy is the story of Kai Ting, the American-born son of a refugee Shanghainese family. Ending an odyssey across both friendly and unfriendly terrain, the Ting family finally settles in San Francisco.

China Boy opens with Kai’s retelling of how his family—including his mother, father, and three elder sisters—fled the civil war in China, and how they came to be situated in San Francisco, specifically in the Panhandle, a tough, largely poor neighborhood. It is in this “concrete crucible” that Kai does his growing up.

The almost six-year-old Kai is his mother’s favorite child and only son, and she pins large hopes upon him. Kai’s sisters are all considerably older than he is, and he assumes the natural position of coddled youngest child. His world revolves around his mother, whose passion, charisma, and overabiding sense of family weave for young Kai a protective cocoon. In fact, until he starts school, Kai has little sense of the world outside the Tings’ home. He has even less sense of other children his age and what it will take to cross the boundary between the protection of family and the dangers of a world populated with hostile strangers.

Tragically for Kai, his mother dies. While he could previously rush home from the schoolyard and the streets of the Panhandle to the security of home, Kai is now robbed of the balance from that reality. To compound matters, his father marries Edna McGurk, who steps into her new role of stepmother with reluctance but nevertheless with draconian ideas about how to rear suddenly inherited children. From an almost idyllic existence of Chinese food, ancestral stories, the Shanghainese dialect—or “Songhai”—and the loving, doting presence of Mah-mee, Kai is propelled, within the space of months, into a subsistence that is circumscribed by a relentlessly cruel stepmother, a strictly enforced new tongue, and the still-new experience of the tough streets of the Panhandle.

As “China Boy” in his predominantly black neighborhood, Kai immediately becomes the easiest target of boyish aggression and plain meanness. His tiny frame does not help him, and neither do his nearsightedness and his inability to communicate in the language of the street. His stepmother locks him out of the house until dinnertime, and Kai has no recourse but to live his daylight hours among his street-seasoned peers. Kai is constantly beaten up, but he does manage to make two friends. One is Toussaint LaRue, and the other is Toussaint’s mother. Mrs. LaRue represents for Kai the mother and all the mothering that he has lost.

After a particularly vicious attack on Kai, his father decides to enroll him at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) with the hope that Kai will receive some instruction in self-defense. At the YMCA, Kai’s eyes are opened to yet another new world. It is a world of aggression-driven boys, but in this environment, there are also grown men who take the time to help channel the aggression toward worthwhile ends. Puny, scared, ill-treated, and starved, Kai learns to box. He also learns to trust, especially in his coaches. Over the months, their collective instruction and their belief in their smallest student begins to show results. Kai puts on weight; Tony Barraza, the boxing coach, sees to it that the starved Kai is fed in the YMCA cafeteria. Kai is soon able to step into the ring in his beginner’s class and last three rounds with an opponent. He is far from being able to beat the street bullies, but he is gaining a sense of self and what he can accomplish. He also makes friends, and his English improves.

Despite his blossoming at the YMCA, Kai is quickly brought down to earth in an encounter with the meanest neighborhood bully. Kai is once again badly beaten up. At the same time, his home situation does not improve. His father is invariably away on business, Edna is unbearably cruel, and his sisters can do little to help him. On top of that, he is stricken with the realization that his memory of his mother is fast fading.

With his YMCA mentors behind him, and with the arrival from his sister, Megan, of a photograph of his mother as extra moral support, Kai faces the street bully again in a do-or-die effort. Kai again takes brutal punishment, but this time he gives as good as he gets. His triumph gives him the much-needed first step toward a credible place in his neighborhood. He has won the first, the most important, battle of his seven years.

The Characters

Dai-li Ting, Kai’s “Mah-mee,” appears only in the beginning of the book. Yet her presence is an important one, for it is primarily through her that Kai has a sense of who he is, who his ancestors are. She speaks her native Songhai with Kai and his sisters and instills in them the value of family togetherness, of a cultural past that is now remote but that can nevertheless be reenacted in some semblance in their now-American lives. Dai-li Ting is vivacious, unpredictable, idiosyncratic, passionate, and she loves her only son fiercely. She is the anchor in Kai’s world, and her brief appearance in the novel only serves to underscore his loss when she dies of cancer. With her death, Kai is stripped not only of love and protection but also of the most palpable reminder of his ancestral roots.

Colonel Ting is Kai’s military-hero father, now a bank officer in civilian America. He abhors the degeneration in his homeland that led finally to civil war, and he is concerned primarily with becoming and being American. He is taciturn, rigid, and an iconoclast among the Chinese community in San Francisco because of his disavowal of most things Chinese. To his son, he is distant and unapproachable, and his presence does nothing to soften the blow of Mah-mee’s death. Colonel Ting is the typically uncommunicative father, and it seems that the best he can do for his son is to enroll him at the YMCA, thus giving Kai over to a group of surrogate fathers.

Edna McGurk, the second Mrs. Ting, is more than Kai’s tormentor. Unbearably intolerant and cruel, and unable or unwilling to reach out to her stepchildren, Edna is also Kai’s constant reminder that she is not Mah-mee, that everything Mah-mee represented should be consigned to a forgettable past. Edna’s cruelty to her stepchildren dramatizes Kai’s bereavement and his lonely, unprotected status.

Tony Barraza is Kai’s favorite coach at the YMCA. A former boxer, he now devotes his time to the molding of young bodies and minds, and as he takes Kai under his wing, he is the surrogate parent that Kai so badly craves. He offers Kai guidance, friendship, and a chance to make something of an impossibly deprived childhood.

Uncle Shim is a reminder of happier days for Kai, for this old family friend, who is Kai’s calligraphy teacher, was a constant visitor when Mah-mee was alive. Together with Mah-mee, Uncle Shim represents the connectedness to Kai’s cultural heritage. His visits become infrequent as a result of Edna’s desire to purge all things “Asiatic” from the Ting household, but Kai manages to track him down. The meeting between Uncle Shim and Tony Barraza in the YMCA cafeteria brings together the two separate worlds represented by the two men. While Tony is the American personification of action and street smarts, Uncle Shim is the personification of Chinese tradition, passivity, and the philosophizing of life’s unexplainable cruelties.

Toussaint LaRue, or “Toos,” is Kai’s only friend among his neighborhood peers. Toos makes the overture of befriending Kai, the “ratshitchinkface” alien; his kindness is a gritty act in the Panhandle. Toos’s moral strength is grounded in the strong bond between him and his mother, and he becomes Kai’s street teacher and steadfast friend.

Critical Context

China Boy is Lee’s first novel. It is at least semiautobiographical; like Kai, Lee himself is the only American-born member and only son of an immigrant Shanghai family. Also like Kai, Lee has a stepmother, whom he credits with having taught him English.

China Boy was published in 1991, in the midst of heightened literary activity among Chinese Americans and among Asian Americans in general. The book also arrived in the midst of continued debate in the Asian American literary community. Some Asian American writers, notably playwright Frank Chin, claim that much Asian American writing panders to white imagination and represents a self-orientalizing. Others, including novelists Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, insist that the integrity of Chinese American writing demands that the myths and half-truths that have been perpetuated in the name of “things oriental” still need to be addressed. In any case, China Boy draws as much from the “child-meets-world” American tradition of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, and Carson McCullers as it does from the redefining, ever-evolving American tradition represented by the continuum of Han Suyin, Jade Snow Wong, Louis Chu, and Kingston.

Bibliography

Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Kim’s work is a seminal one, the first scholarly, full-length study of Asian American literature. The approach is chronological, providing a much-needed context for the discussion. Includes an extensive bibliography referencing both Asian American literature and Anglo-American portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans.

Lee, Joann Faung Jean. Asian American Experiences in the United States: Oral Histories of First to Fourth Generation Americans from China, the Philippines, Japan, India, the Pacific Islands, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1991. Lee amasses oral histories of Asian Americans across class, age, and geographical lines. The accounts are lively and frank and together underscore the diverse nature of being Asian American. See especially “Growing Up in Mississippi,” Sam Sue’s account of growing up as a second-generation Chinese American marginalized by both whites and blacks.

Simpson, Janice C., and Pico Iyer. “Fresh Voices Above the Noisy Din.” Time 137 (June 3, 1991): 66-67. Analyzes China Boy in the context of other works by contemporary Chinese American novelists, including Amy Tan, David Wong Louie, and Gish Jen.

Simpson, Janice C., and Pico Iyer. “From Ghetto to West Point: Gus Lee’s China Boy Becomes a Man of Honor.” Time 143 (March 28, 1994): 66. In this review of Lee’s Honor and Duty, the sequel to China Boy, Simpson compares the two novels and concludes that China Boy is the more powerful and affecting. Offers insight into the main character of both books, Kai Ting.

So, Christine. “Delivering the Punch Line: Racial Combat as Comedy in Gus Lee’s China Boy.” MELUS 21 (Winter, 1996): 141-155. So explores the use of ethnic humor to reinforce and question the American myth of total assimilation in Lee’s China Boy. She examines the tensions between different minority groups, such as Chinese Americans and African Americans, and demonstrates how Lee’s humor posits the possibility of an assimilated multicultural society, while also admitting that complete assimilation is probably impossible.

Stone, Judy. “Gus Lee: A China Boy’s Rite of Passage.” Publishers Weekly 243 (March 18, 1996): 47-48. Lee discusses his upbringing in a poor, mostly African American neighborhood in San Francisco as well as his success as a writer. Offers valuable insight into how Lee’s background influenced his work as a novelist.

Tsai, Shih-Shan Henry. The Chinese Experience in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. A well-documented account of the history of Chinese in the United States. Includes photographs, maps, drawings, and social and historical data; also included is a bibliography that covers works pertinent to Chinese American history and sociology.