The Railroad as Message in Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Frank Chin’s “Riding the Rails with Chickencoop Slim”

This essay examines how Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston deploy the railroad as a means of structuring Chinese American identity. In “Riding the Rails with Chickencoop Slim” (1977) and “The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains” from China Men (1980), Chin and Kingston figure the railroad as a sign of the presence and enforced absence of the Chinese. The railroad becomes, in other words, a kind of text that serves multiple purposes within their respective memoirs, generating more narratives and offering itself as a narrative to be read and interpreted. It also offers a way for the authors to reconsider some of the foundational tenets of the memoir as a genre.