Three scenes from the Curtis Choy documentary What’s wrong with Frank Chin? it will surely give anyone a break. The first of these occurs as the camera slowly pans through Chin’s file boxes containing the data he has collected on every Chinese-American actor who has ever played a role in a Hollywood movie. In the second, authentic footage from Chin’s 1970s wedding to writer and illustrator Kathleen Chang shows the couple, as well as poet Lawson Inada (acting as a preacher, equipped with a “$1 license to marry people”), wearing elaborate and traditional clothing. masks that Chin himself made, and shows Chin reading an account by Chinese railway workers at Union-Pacific as part of the ceremony. (This is one of Chin’s constant themes; perhaps the best of all his works is an American Book Award-winning collection of stories called The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco RR Co.). In the third, Chin criticizes his opposition to a meeting on the issue of reparations for Japanese Americans (Chin was largely responsible for the US government granting reparations, and for the day many Americans of Japanese origin now celebrate as Remembrance Day). Whether one agrees with Chin or not, and there seem to be plenty of Japanese Americans who don’t, it’s hard not to be moved by the urgency of his condemnation. The guy is absolutely on fire as he makes his case. And when he says that he went back and researched a speech given by an army colonel in 1943 (this was all before the internet!) we understand that he is absolutely a man. driven in a way that very few of us are. Clearly, this is the same kind of passion he shows when he speaks to the public with his relentless attack on writers like Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, what he calls “the fake.” in his novel duke donald the protagonist, twelve-year-old Donald, is an example of a “fake” young man: he wants to turn his back on his Chinese heritage and fully assimilate. For Chin, assimilation, or what he believes American society considers assimilation, amounts to a crime. duke donald reiterates the themes expressed in the three vivid scenes of the film noted above, and also marks a change in Chin’s tone from the contentious and even hostility found in the storybook and plays that preceded him. they won for the first time. notoriety in the literary and cultural scene. This novel is funnier, more playful, more of an invitation to the reader to consider the points and reflect compared to the earlier works that hit the reader over the head with their own ignorance, prejudice, and stupidity.

It’s Chinatown in San Francisco, the present (1990 or so), and it’s the beginning of the Chinese New Year celebration. Donald is approaching his twelfth birthday, a momentous occasion because there are twelve years in the Asian lunar zodiac; he is thus completing the first cycle of his life. But Donald has the idea that “everything Chinese in his life looks horrible.” He describes himself as American to anyone who asks, refusing to acknowledge the obvious fact that he is of Chinese descent. The way he finally begins to recover is through the dreams he has throughout the novel: he dreams that he is a railroad worker. When the Golden Spike ceremony is planned, when it is known that not only the Governor of California will be present, but photographers from all over the world, a railway boss comments with disgust:

“I promise you, Mr. Durant, there won’t be a heathen in sight at tomorrow’s ceremonies… The final nail will be driven, the telegram sent, our photograph taken to preserve a great moment in our nation’s history, however the Chinese. Admire them and respect them as I do. I’ll show them who built the railroad. White men. White dreams. White brains and white muscles.”

As a result of witnessing these events in his dreams, Donald begins to change, becoming interested in embracing his heritage and his race. Towards the end of the book he has this conversation with his father:

“The Chinese. The Chinese who built the railway. I dream that I’m laying the tracks with them when I sleep, and no one knows what we did. No one, just me. And I don’t want to be the only one who knows, and it makes me angry to be the only one who knows.” You know, and everything I dream about makes me angry at white people and hates them. They lie about us all the time.”

“No, don’t hate all whites. Just liars,” Dad says.

In the film, Chin speaks very eloquently about the terrible way in which the whites made sure that no Chinese appeared in any of the photographs of the railway. And the accounts of contemporary historians certainly support Chin, particularly HW Brands in The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream and Stephen E. Ambrose in Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869. Ambrose actually studied Chinese-English phrasebooks as early as 1867. He notes that the phrases “How are you?” and “Thank you” are not in any of them.

Essentially, the novel only has this one theme, overcoming the denial of one’s roots and racial identity in favor of being ‘American’, but as in all of Chin’s writing, this is especially true of the long novel. Gunga Din Road – it is an undeniable fact that Chin himself is American to the core, so immersed in American culture, folklore and, in particular, the movies, that one has to wonder if he is not one of the brightest examples of real multiculturalism (I would despise the term) that we have.

So if the book is somewhat thematically limited, what can readers take away to learn and enjoy? In a word, fun! Donald’s journey from being a self-hater who accepts negative white attitudes about Chinese-Americans to a proud Chinese-American has him crossing paths with quite a few interesting characters along the way, one of which is the family of the. His father, King Duk, owns one of the best restaurants in Chinatown. His namesake, Uncle Donald, is a visiting Cantonese opera star. Mom is supportive and often tries to control Donald’s twin sisters, Venus and Penelope, who are cute literary creations, often speaking as if they are commentators rather than participants. (The sense of play and fun that Chin has with this is palpable.) Crawdad Man and his son, Crawdad Jr., a Vietnam veteran named Victor Lee, a pair of old twins who frequent the streets of Chinatown at night, the Frog Twins, and a dance teacher who bills himself as the Chinese Fred Astaire round out the cast. Each exists within the fabric of the fiction to reinforce Donald’s main lesson in a situation that is often humorous. I think this is the sign of a really developed intelligence: using humor to make a deadly serious point. And because Chin insists on baffling the non-Chinese reader at first by including customs and traditions of the culture into the story without explaining them, he engages the reader in experiencing how the white power structure has humiliated and degraded his people since the days of the railways. This kind of thing is always a fine line: I’m not sure non-Chinese, non-Indians, non-African-Americans can always empathize. Sympathizing, yes, but empathy is hard, kind of like a man trying to understand what it’s like to be pregnant. Chin gives him a lot of effort.

In closing, I’d like to comment briefly on what I perceive as Chin’s intensity and integrity of purpose. I sometimes read that Chin’s attacks on other writers are actually rooted in malice or jealousy. This statement is wrong. Certainly Chin’s books don’t sell as well as Tan’s or Kingston’s; however, we don’t even need to discuss the point intellectually to dismiss it. All we need to know is that a major Hollywood director, Wayne Wang, approached Chin about filming his play. the year of the dragon, and Chin rejected the idea on the grounds that he didn’t want Hollywood messing with his story. This rejection of potentially millions of dollars in royalties is not the action of someone who does not believe in himself: Chin practices what he preaches. So his integrity is intact. So is the intensity of it. At the beginning I mentioned Chin’s archive collections on Asian-American actors. The reason this came up is because, unbelievably, no Asian-American actor has played Charlie Chan in movies. Chin’s long novel Gunga Din Road it’s about this ridiculous, appalling state of affairs, and in it, his research on the actors is put to full use. This investigation was truly a massive academic project, as a reading of the novel amply demonstrates. No one would label this as “fake”; again, Chin’s intensity is also intact. Whatever Chin’s merits or demerits, love him or hate him, he is the rare kind of author of imaginative literature, someone who truly leaves his impact on the times.