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The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is a non-fiction book by Maxine Hong Kingston published in 1967. The work is a story of family, history and identity from the perspective of an 11-year-old girl growing up in the early 1900s during the Chinese migration to Canada. She later wrote about her thoughts on being part of an Asian family living in America following World War II. In addition to being a literary work, it is also considered a commentary on race relations between China and North America due to how it discusses racism against Asians vis-à-vis whites, as well as how Kingston felt that they both were losing their identities since they existed outside their homelands. The family of Kingston, including her widowed mother and two brothers, all pass through a series of changes in the years after their arrival in Canada. The novel is narrated by a fictionalized version of Kingston based on her life experiences. This version of Kingston is a child who sees the world through a mirror, and she often breaks out into song to express her emotions. Despite being from China, she grows up to be almost racially fluid, even distancing herself from the people around her because of it. In 1965, when she was 45-years old, Kingston returned to Canada to attend a national convention for Asian Canadians. The country’s National Council of Chinese Canadians (NCCC) had welcomed her with mixed emotions. Although she was there with them, Kingston did not feel like she was truly part of the group. As she put it in an interview for 41st Parallel, "What I experienced in Vancouver two years ago is what I felt...I wasn’t welcome in Chinese town...I didn’t feel comfortable around them because they were foreign to me." Here, Kingston is referring to how her experiences growing up surrounded by whites while living in America set her apart from the rest of the people at the convention. She had never known that feeling of being part of something or fitting into a particular group that everyone was a part of. While she understood that it was a group that often fought against racism, she believes that they were unable to fight against the racism they experienced. As she put it, "I don’t think there’s any solution because I don’t think you can go back to the old country and say, ‘I want to be Chinese here. I want to live in Chinatown, or in any place where Chinese are concentrated...I think you have to belong somewhere else." Although Kingston struggled with her identity after living so long away from her homeland, along with the feelings of not belonging anywhere at all, she did not let this stop her from continuing down the path of her life. The novel’s themes of identity, culture, language and even death are all intertwined by Kingston into one story. She became disturbed by the idea that her family’s history had been passed down to her through hearsay instead of first hand experience. As she put it in an interview with an anthology of graduation speeches, "Anyway, what I wanted to know was, Can you teach what you feel? When I went back to China with my mother and brothers...I told them this story about how my great-grandfather came over during the gold rush... cfa1e77820
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