|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
A Kinder, Gentler Frank Chin
| Article
# : |
18643 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
3,576 Words |
| Author
: |
Amy Ling
Amy Ling was a visiting professor of Asian American literature
at Harvard and Trinity College in Hartford, and in the fall
will be professor of English and director of Asian American
studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. |
Donald Duk, Frank Chin's first published novel, is a much-awaited new work from the man who rose to national prominence two decades ago as Asian America's first militant Yellow Power advocate, pioneering dramatist, and literary anthologizer. Though a collection of Chin's short stories, The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co., appeared last year, most of the slender volume contained revisions of work written in the 1970s. As an editor of Aiiieeeee!, one of the three early anthologies of Asian American literature, and as the first Asian American playwright in seventy years (Onoto Watanna's Japanese Nightingale was produced on Broadway in 1903), Chin has played a considerable role in Asian American literature. A retriever of lost texts, he is a founding father of Asian American literary studies; a gifted writer, he is one of the genre's significant creators.
Chin's first play, The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972), startled audiences with the verbal pyrotechnics of its protagonist, Tam Lum, whom Chin described as a "multi-tongued word magician" and into whose mouth he put such dazzling speeches as the following:
I am the natural born rag-mouth speaking the motherless bloody tongue. No real language of my own to make sense with, so out comes everybody else's trash that don't conceive. But the sound truth is that I AM THE NOTORIOUS ONE AND ONLY CHICKEN-COOP CHINAMAN HIMSELF that talks in the dark heavy Midnight, the secret Chinatown Buck Buck Bagaw.
I am the result of a pile of pork chop suey thrown up into the chicken coop in the dead of night and the riot of dark birds, night cocks and insomniac nympho hens running after strange food that followed.
Even in this short passage, underlying the hip lingo, the black humor, and the cool, tough pose one may sense a bitter, self-denigrating attitude--one may even call it painful contempt--which expands outward from Tam's concept of himself through his parents to the entire Chinatown community and culture. In searing, iconoclastic fashion, throughout this surrealist, experimental play, Tam blasts sacred cows, childhood heroes, everyone from Helen Keller to the Lone Ranger.
In his second play, The Year of the Dragon, a more realistic piece, Chin's protagonist, Fred Eng, a tourist guide for Chinatown, is twisted with anger, disgust, and hatred for his family, because of the demands his relatives have placed on him and their lack of understanding of his own artistic needs. He hates Chinatown for its
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
