Product Description

Thought-provoking, furious, hilarious, tough, outrageous, erudite, and compassionate all at once, 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 distinctly American terms. Here are six of the best essays, spanning the past forty years. Making his way across America 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 homefront, he encounters the new white racism along Interstate 5 during the Gulf War. Frank Chin is the author of two widely acclaimed novels, Donald Duk and Gunga Din Highway, and a collection of stories, The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co., for which he won the American Book Award.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #751730 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 431 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Whether he is writing about a trip to Cuba he took as a student during the 1960s, his visits with the inhabitants of the Chinatowns along the California-Baja California border, interviews with a white police officer in San Diego who has succeeded in reducing tensions between Cambodian and Laotian youth gangs there or his experiences at a writers' conference in Singapore, Chin tends to portray everyone, and everything, in this collection of six essays, in terms of race, ethnicity and cultural stereotypes. Chin heaps scorn not only on whites (Anglos) but also on Asians in Singapore (a city whose culture he disdains), and especially on Chinese American writers whom Chin accuses of having sold out to white American culture and values. Waving about classic texts, in particular Sun Tzu's The Art of War, he denigrates those who like Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. "They like the idea of falsifying Chinese culture in the name of art and Westernization. They are admitted and joyous white supremacists." Throughout, Chin, who prefers to be referred to as a Chinaman rather than a Chinese American, makes references to being someone without "a sense of home." The problems of the ethnically displaced and the merits of cultural diversity versus assimilation are important issues. The tone of Chin's arguments against the desirability and possibility of assimilation is emotional rather than intellectual, bitterly accusatory rather than rational. Unfortunately that will probably limit his book to preachifying to the converted.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Of these six essays, four discuss the Asian experience, particularly that of the Chinese in California; the other two discuss the author's trip to Cuba in 1962 and impressions of Singapore on a trip to a writers' conference in 1994. The personal stories of Asian gangs and those of early, hard-working immigrants have a resounding poignancy, especially since many are drawn from interviews. Yet the rantings about various topics (bigotry, storytelling, Chinese American authors, stereotyping, Singapore, malls, etc.) often seem mean-spirited and incomplete. In addition, they are often dated: who thinks of Chinese as Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu types these days? Chin, author of the novel Donald Duk (Coffee House, 1991) and the play The Chickencoop Chinaman, among other works, has a hip, fluent, fast-paced style, but we look forward to his next novel, not his essays.AKitty Chen Dean, Nassau Coll., Garden City, NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Frank Chin is destined to go down in Asian American literary history." -- Stephen H. Sumida

'Frank Chin is one of the great essayists of our time.' - Ishmael Reed

Customer Reviews

Frank Chin combs the landscape of Chinese American culture
There is no question that when it comes to specific, focused cultural criticism, Frank Chin has the task nailed down. I don't know the time frame spanned by these essays, but in terms of content they cover all the bases. Any student of Asian-American history and culture can profit from Chin's sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes frightfully serious analysis of several aspects of the Asian-American experience. Chin deals with immigration/migration; gang subcultures; folk history and mythology; and others. But the thing that makes this book so impressive, beyond its coverage, is Chin's writing style -- fast and loose, comfortable and razor-sharp. The jacket describes him as a "literary gangster" -- never have I heard a more apt description of an author. He wrangles words from the oral histories he obtains and makes them work for him. But he is a respectful gangster -- the subjects of his interviews seem open, warm to him and to his neverending questions. The text can get heavy at times, but this is a function of the content it taps. A very, very powerful book.

Bullet-Proof Buddhists: The Real Deal
Frank Chin's collection of essays is magnificent. The book is a course in itself on the authenticity of the Chinese-American experience in American culture. Chin's ideas are well researched, even scholarly in origin, but they are presented in ways that are eminently accessible. Each of the essays is provocative of the reader's thinking. I loved the essay on "Lowe Hoy & the 3 Legged Toad", for its exposition of strategy in Chinese social experience, and for its use of authentic Cantonese colloquialisms in his interviewees' speech.

A Pleasure To Read
I love the essays of Frank Chin. I just wished that the editor would put in "Racist Love" in this anthology. Anyway, this book is a treat because you'll have a commentary of Sun Tzu's ART OF WAR. Over and over again I've heard Chin mention how well ART OF WAR reflects Asian thinking. Well, it's now available to you guys, written by Frank Chin himself!