Thinking (Like a) Gold Mountain: Shawn Wong’s Homebase and Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men

This chapter examines the ways in which two Chinese American writers, Maxine Hong Kingston and Shawn Wong, enlisted environmental strategies to further the Asian American cultural-nationalist project, specifically its effort to “claim America” for Asian Americans in the 1970s and 1980s. My ecocritical analysis of Kingston’s China Men and Wong’s Homebase revolves about two key concepts: the notion of land empathy and a certain process of land incorporation that I have termed “inlanding.” The two books differ in their relationship to Asian American cultural nationalism: while Homebase tends to adhere to nationalist concerns in its use of environmental tropes, China Men is more ambiguous, since the obvious nationalist master narrative in the book is complicated by an emerging environmentalist subtext.