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Bad Boy, Godfather, Storyteller: The China Fictions of Frank Chin

A. Robert Lee

It makes no sense to me to be thought of as the first yellow writer of anything, much less plays, in the history of my people. To believe that I was the first to write was to believe Asian Americans were less than gutless all their history here. Frank Chin. “In Search of John Okada,” Afterword, John Okada. No-No Boy (1979: 254)

We were Chinamen in America – and the most suspicious kind of Chinamen. Frank Chin. “Confessions of a Chinatown Cowboy,” Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays. (1998: 71)

This book could not have been written without the help of Michi Weglyn, author of Years of Infamy…encouraging me, a Chinese, not Japanese American, to write this book. Frank Chin. Born in The USA: A Story of Japanese America, 1889-1947 (2002: xvii)

Chin in Public

Shoot-from-the hip Bad Boy. Ideological godfather. Fifth Generation and self-nominated US “Chinaman.” Berkeley graduate and veteran. Novelist. Playwright. Story Writer. Essayist. Anthologist. TV documentary maker. Comic book artist. In life, as art, Frank Chin offers nothing if not the liveliest repertoire, and always to include a love-hate reputation as controversial as almost any in contemporary letters. “Writing is fighting,” he cites Ishmael Reed (Writin’ is Fightin’, 1988), himself in turn citing Muhammad Ali, as the 80 A. Robert Lee

prefatory tag to Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays. It could not read more aptly. Chin signed on early as one of American writing’s best-known disturbers of the peace, the companion in spirit to a Norman Mailer, bell hooks, Richard Rodriguez, or Gloria Anzaldúa. Certainly he has had few peers within Asian American, and especially Chinese American, domains, embattlement itself at the polemical center of things. The two landmark collections, AIIIEEEE! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974) and The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature (1991), each with its banner essay, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and The Fake” (1-91), left little to doubt that Chin views China and its diasporic legacies as hedged in a dark circuit of pastiche, the perpetuation of what he calls “cultural fraud.” For him this amounts to “Christian Americanized Chinese” history, the west’s pre-emptive denigration of China as supposedly authoritarian and backward in contrast with America as openly democratic and modern. China-to- America autobiographical texts like Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendant (1943) and Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), and their literary ilk, he argues, all too incriminatingly have perpetuated the distortion. From the start, he proposes, this has been selective Chinese American identity, model-assimilationist by rote, passive, Christian, and with little or no history other than that of closed-to-outsiders Chinatowns. Chin’s Preface to the anthologies thus famously issues his call to arms against the America he alleges “has kept…Asian Americans off the air, off the streets, and praised us for being Asiatically no-show” (AIIIEEEEE!, xxxi). The USA, he elaborates in “Confessions of a Chinatown Cowboy,” invites the charge of “Christian white racist love” (75) with its duplicitous model minority talk and not so hidden desideratum of “loyal nonblack Charlie Chan mascot people” (AIIIEEEEE!, 76). Nothing short for him, and whether America’s Chinatowns or beyond, suffices but an end to racist distortion of “us as a visible Native minority” (93). Perhaps more than anything else, however, and in arising vein, it has been Chin’s attack on best-selling luminaries like Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and David Henry Hwang that most has provoked heat. Has not each been guilty, runs his charge, of consciously parlaying this travesty China into America, a mix of fortune-cookie