Frank Chin

On the eve of the Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown, twelve-year-old Donald Duk attempts to deal with his comical name and his feelings for his cultural heritage.

A Novel

Donald Duk

Shawn Wong

Lawson Fusao Inada

Jeffery Paul Chan

"In the eyes of white America, "Aiiieeeee!" was the racist cry from Asian Americans, their singular expression of all emotions-it signified and perpetuated Asian Americans as inscrutable, foreign, obedient, self-hating, undesirable, and one dimensional. With this anthology, first published in 1974, Frank Chin, Jeffery Chan, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong outlined the history of Asian American literature and boldly drew the boundaries for what was truly Asian American and what was white puppetry. Showcasing fourteen uncompromising works from authors such as Carlos Bulosan and John Okada, the editors introduced readers to a variety of daring voices. Forty-five years later, the groundbreaking anthology remains a vital collection that still sparks controversy. In the seventies, it helped to establish Asian American literature as a serious and distinct literary tradition, and today, the editors' forceful voices still reverberate in contemporary discussions about American literary traditions. Now back in print with a new foreword by literary scholar Tara Fickle, this third edition of the book is an essential anthology that demonstrates how Asian Americans fought for-and seized-their place in the American literary canon"--

An Anthology of Asian American Writers

Aiiieeeee!

Gunga Din Highway

“America doesn’t want us as a visible native minority. They want us to keep our place as Americanized foreigners ruled by immigrant loyalty. But never having been anything else but born here, I’ve never been foreign and resent having foreigners telling me my place in America and America telling me I’m foreign. There’s no denial or rejection of Chinese culture going on here, just the recognition of the fact that Americanized Chinese are not Chinese Americans and that Chinese Americans cannot be understood in the terms of either Chinese or American culture, or some ‘chow mein/spaghetti’ formula of Chinese and American cultures, or anything else you’ve seen and loved in Charlie Chan.” —from “Confessions of a Chinatown Cowboy”

Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays

Two plays about the stereotypical Asian-American who is quiet, hardworking, and removed from the white community

Two Plays

The Chickencoop Chinaman ; And, The Year of the Dragon

An Anthology of Asian-American Writers

This unique oral history presents the Japanese American saga as told by those who lived through it. Frank Chin details the lives of first and second generation Japanese Americans before World War II with a rich kaleidoscope of images drawn from interviews, popular songs, novels, and newspaper articles. The heart of his story is the tragedy that followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Japanese American citizens lost their homes and property and were forced into internment camps. The author deftly weaves interviews and testimony from the Japanese American Citizen's League (JACL) with opposing, in-depth conversations with those who resisted the JACL's support for U.S. policy. This shameful episode in American history resonates deeply today as we witness similar erosions of civil rights in the name of wartime security.

A Story of Japanese America, 1889-1947

Born in the USA

Frank Chin is perhaps the most instantly recognizable voice in Chinese American writing today. A self-proclaimed "transcendent Chinaman pagan heathen barbarian," Chin searches out (or stumbles on) the right people and situations, vividly recording the outcome in distinctively American terms. Here are six of his best essays, spanning the past forty years. Making his way across the U.S. to Cuba, Chin is arrested as an American spy some time between Castro's revolution and the missile crisis. He meets Ben Fee, the man who integrated San Francisco, and is introduced to Southeast Asian gangs and culture in San Diego. He discovers Chinese bachelor society along the California-Mexico border and travels to Singapore, where he speculates on the fear and suppression of Chinese culture among Chinese Singaporeans. Back at the home front, he encounters the new white racism along Interstate 5 during the Gulf War.

In the early 1970s, Frank Chin, the outspoken Chinese American author of such plays as The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon, wrote a full-length novel that was never published and presumably lost. Nearly four decades later, Calvin McMillin, a literary scholar specializing in Asian American literature, would discover Chin’s original manuscripts and embark on an extensive restoration project. Meticulously reassembled from multiple extant drafts, Frank Chin’s “forgotten” novel is a sequel to The Chickencoop Chinaman and follows the further misadventures of Tam Lum, the original play’s witty protagonist. Haunted by the bitter memories of a failed marriage and the untimely death of a beloved family member, Tam flees San Francisco’s Chinatown for a life of self-imposed exile on the Hawaiian island of Maui. After burning his sole copy of a manuscript he believed would someday be hailed as “The Great Chinese American Novel,” Tam stumbles into an unlikely romance with Lily, a former nun fresh out of the convent and looking for love. In the process, he also develops an unusual friendship with Lily’s father, a washed-up Hollywood actor once famous for portraying Charlie Chan on the big screen. Thanks in no small part to this bizarre father/daughter pair, not to mention an array of equally quirky locals, Tam soon discovers that his otherwise laidback island existence has been transformed into a farce of epic proportions. Had it been published in the 1970s as originally intended, The Confessions of a Number One Son might have changed the face of Asian American literature as we know it. Written at the height of Frank Chin’s creative powers, this formerly “lost” novel ranks as the author’s funniest, most powerful, and most poignant work to date. Now, some forty years after its initial conception, The Confessions of a Number One Son is finally available to readers everywhere.

Frank Chin

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