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Synopsis
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.
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. (July)