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The Real Versus the Fake
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18644 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
3,119 Words |
| Author
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Shawn Wong
Shawn Wong is the author of the novel Homebase and coeditor of
four anthologies of Asian American writing. He is also
coeditor with Ishmael Reed of a two-volume collection of
American multicultural literature, The Before Columbus
Anthology of American Book Award Winners, 1980-1990, to be
published by W.W. Norton in January 1992. Wong is a professor
of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington in
Seattle. |
When Frank Chin's novel Donald Duk was published in February 1991 by Coffee House Press, I was shocked to read reviews referring to it as his first novel. In my mind, my friend and coeditor of three anthologies of Asian American writing had always been a novelist.
I first met Frank Chin in 1969, and ever since then I've thought of him as a novelist first, and playwright and essayist second. In the sixties, his unpublished novel, A Chinese Lady Dies, won the Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation for promising young California authors. The novel was rejected by more than twenty-five publishing companies. When Chin gave it to me to read, it was the first Chinese American novel I had ever encountered. I was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley and an aspiring writer. Reading A Chinese Lady Dies nearly destroyed my ambition to be a writer. It was all of Chinese America, everything real, significant, and substantial about the place we come from, inhabit, and occupy. What else was there left to say?
In one reading, Chin's novel was both the tradition and history of Chinese American writing and the future of Chinese American writing. Unfortunately, the future of American publishing didn't match my perception of our literary future. The novel was dense and complex and bopped along in a kind of word jazz that conveyed the first real and accurate sense of the Chinese American self that didn't speak to the stereotypes of our being foreign and alien in American pop culture. The Chinatown he described didn't hum to the neon and local color that critics say should have been in his or my writing to give it "place."
When Chin was a creative writing student at Iowa, R.V. Cassill told him, "You know, you're writing about the Chinese in a way that I don't think American people would be interested in ... Don't you think you should make them interesting to the audience?" His writing in A Chinese Lady Dies left everyone else on the "outside," foreign and alien, as in this description of a Chinese New Year celebration in San Francisco's Chinatown:
The air was very black for all the lights of the celebration. The rain was heavy. The rain was thorough. The shattered water came glistening fish-scales, down, gigantic noisy tin and silver dandruff crashing out of nowhere in a constant, hypnotic, illogical noise people ceased to hear, ceased to realize was working on their nerves like termites in the woodwork, he knew. Dirigible knew the rain was working on him. He knew the rain was working on everyone.
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