Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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. (July)

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.Kitty Chen Dean, Nassau Coll., Garden City, NY