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Introduction: Frank Chin's Donald Duk
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18636 |
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BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1991 |
377 Words |
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Book World this month features the first published novel of Chinese American writer Frank Chin. Born in 1940 and educated at the University of California at Berkeley, Chin was immersed in the political and literary scene of the sixties. He gained national prominence in the early seventies when his plays--the first by a Chinese American author to hit the New York stage--raged against the prevailing stereotypes of the Asian male. His considerable skills and dramatic power drew praise, but his bitter anger and polemics irritated many. Since then Chin has produced little fiction himself, but has devoted his energy to retrieving classical Chinese texts in a quest for authentic Chinese heroes. He has also been highly critical of those Chinese American authors whose work, he feels, reinforces stereotypes, exoticizes Chinese American customs and culture, or distorts Chinese traditions and folklore.
Chin's latest work, Donald Duk, is a bildungsroman about a twelve-year-old Chinese American boy who hates his name, feels his family doesn't deserve him, and despises living in San Francisco's Chinatown. Even worse, it's Chinese New Year, and Donald hates everything Chinese. He'd rather be Fred Astaire. Little does Donald know that a series of dreams to rival those of Ebenezer Scrooge are about to transform his truculent disposition.
In the excerpt, chapters one through three sweep us into the life of an angry young man. The excerpts of chapters four and ten provide samples of Donald's dreams of the building of the transcontinental railroad as he learns about his heritage and history. In the commentaries that follow, literary scholar Amy Ling discusses Chin's literary development. Shawn Wong, a novelist and scholar, comments on Chin's role as a
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