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|  |  |  |  | The Heath Anthology of
American Literature, Fifth Edition
Paul Lauter, General Editor
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Frank Chin
(b. 1940)
Frank Chin was born on February 25, 1940, in
Berkeley, California. His father was an immigrant and his mother a
fourth-generation resident of Oakland Chinatown, where Chin spent much of his
childhood. He attended the University of California at Berkeley and at Santa
Barbara and participated in the Program in Creative Writing at the University
of Iowa. Chin is a tireless and influential promoter of Asian American
literature, though his vision of it has often been criticized for its
exclusionary tendencies. He has written novels, short stories, plays, comic
books, and numerous essays; produced documentaries; worked as a script
consultant in Hollywood; taught college courses in Asian American literature; and
helped form the Asian American Theatre Workshop in San Francisco.
He
co-edited (with Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong) a
foundational anthology of Asian American writings entitled Aiiieeeee! (1974). A
second volume, The Big Aiiieeeee!, was published in 1991. Much of Chin’s
notoriety stems from the positions he and his colleagues take in the
introductory essays in those collections. One of their central concerns is the
emasculating effect of anti-Asian racism as epitomized by stereotypical figures
like Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu. Another controversial aspect of Chin’s
nonfictional writing has been his relentless criticism of writers such as David
Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan; in his view, these writers
falsify Asian and Asian American culture. Critics point out the misogyny and
homophobia that propel Chin’s polemics, but they also acknowledge the
significance of his pioneering work as a literary historian. Indeed many of the
writers that Chin and his colleagues champion—such as Louis Chu, John Okada,
and Hisaye Yamamoto—have been accorded a privileged place in Asia American
literary studies.
The
controversy generated by Chin’s polemics has tended to overshadow his fictional
and dramatic works. First staged in 1972, The Chickencoop Chinaman was one of
the first plays written by an Asian American to be produced in New York. A
second play, The Year of the Dragon, premiered two years later. Many of Chin’s
early writings contain an autobiographical element. They often revolve around a
male protagonist—usually a would-be writer—alienated from his family or from
his Chinatown community. This is the predicament shared by Johnny in Chin’s
first published short story, "Food for All His Dead" (1962), and by Fred in
The Year of the Dragon. Much of Chin’s early fiction was published in The
Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co. (1988), which won the National Book
Award and from which “Railroad Standard Time” has been excerpted. The writings
from this period tend to revel in masochistic self-loathing. The male heroes
find only momentary relief when they are able to articulate their agony in
elaborate monologues and when they gain tenuous access to a Chinese American
history of mythical dimensions—a history usually associated with the railroad.
A
shift can be detected in Chin’s writings around the mid-eighties: he begins to
forge a new vision of literary and racial authenticity based on a selective
reading of classic Chinese texts, including Romance of the Three Kingdoms,
Water Margin, and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. At the heart of the Chinese “real,”
Chin asserts, is an essentially martial view of the world: Life is War. His
recent works feature protagonists who embrace these values; furthermore, they
frequently allude to the figure of Kwan Kung, a warrior deified in Chinese
folklore. The novel Donald Duk (1991) recounts the coming-of-age of its
eponymous twelve-year-old protagonist: unlike the anti-heroes of Chin’s earlier
fiction, Donald is able to move beyond racial self-loathing by discovering the
history of the Chinese American laborers who built the railroad and the world
of Chinese mythology. The novel Gunga Din Highway (1994) features characters
who are more exuberant and virile versions of the tortured protagonists of
Chin’s early writings, for the male heroes of this later work have access to
the heroic tradition Chin identifies with Kwan Kung. In Bulletproof Buddhists
and Other Essays (1998) Chin finds evidence for the persistence of “real”
Chinese values in a wide range of cultural locations: in the rituals of
Southeast Asian youth gangs in southern California, in the Chinese American
communities along the California-Mexico border, and in the works of dissident
writers in Singapore.
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Daniel Y. Kim
Brown University
| Texts
In the Heath Anthology
Railroad Standard Time
(1960)
Other Works
The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon
(1981)
The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co.
(1988)
Donald Duk
(1991)
Gunga Din Highway
(1994)
| Cultural Objects
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| Pedagogy
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| Links
"The Dragon Is a Lantern": Frank Chin's Counter-Hegemonic Donald Duk (http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/49thparallel/backissues/issue6/DUK.HTM)
An article from 49th Parallel by David Goldstein-Shirley.
Feminists Censor Frank Chin, Again (http://www.ishmaelreedpub.com/chin.html)
A letter to Ishmael Reed by Frank Chin.
| Secondary Sources
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