[In the following essay, Kim discusses Chin's bleak portrayal of Chinatown and its inhabitants in several of Chin's short works and in Chickencoop Chinaman.]

By far the most prolific Chinese-American writer to emerge during the movements of ethnic identity and cultural awakening in the 1960s and early 1970s is Frank Chew Chin. Chin and the group of writers around him have been leading a movement to uncover, preserve, publish and perpetuate works of Asian-American literature and culture. Chin is an active promoter of Asian-American art, a social critic of sorts, and a writer of plays and stories.

Each of Chin's three pieces of short fiction, “Food for All His Dead” （1962）, “Yes, Young Daddy” （1970）, and “Goong Hai Fot Choy” （1970—from an unpublished manuscript entitled A Chinese Lady Dies） is organized around a young Chinese-American male's coming-of-age amidst the limitations and cultural confusion of his background. The central characters are essentially the same: Johnny and Fred, of the former two stories, are sensitive young artists who are outgrowing their families, Chinatown, and particularly Chinese women. But they are not sure they can survive outside the Chinese-American community. In the latter story, Johnny and Fred have evolved into the character Dirigible, who is frozen into inaction as he waits for his mother, and by extension, Chinatown, to die. Ultimately, Dirigible is developed into the main figure in the play Chickencoop Chinaman, Tampax Lum, the Chinese-American who searches for a new identity beyond the narrow Chinatown world from which he has recently escaped.

Chin's Chinatown is a barren, corrupt, and declining place where mothers and fathers are dying of wasting diseases, and their children are crippled, afflicted with weariness, and stifled by boredom. The Chinese people are portrayed as bugs, spiders, frogs, tipped-over mechanical toys, and oily fish gasping on dry land. The community itself is likened to a funeral parlor, an obsolete carnival, or a pathetic minstrel show.

In “Food for All His Dead,” the main character, Johnny, shares a “terrible secret” with his father—that the old man is dying of consumption. The secret is even more terrible to Johnny than to his father, since Johnny seems to be the only one in Chinatown smart enough to know that Chinatown itself is dying. “Everyone's dying here,” he tells his uncomprehending girlfriend （62）. He can no longer communicate with his father or the people of Chinatown as equals, now that he alone knows the “secret.” Like fish on the sand, he thinks, the Chinese in America are dying: he fears the “surges of nervous life” in his dying father and in the dying community. The terrible knowledge imposes on Johnny the necessity of “lies and waiting.” The father he used to admire has become “no longer like his father or a man,” but like some ghastly creature, “no longer real as a life but a parody of live things, grinning,” something that probably should be crushed to a quicker death:

The man was a fish drying and shrinking inside its skin on the sand, crazy, mimicking swimming, Johnny thought, but a fish could be lifted and slapped against a stone, thrown to cats. … （57）

In “Goong Hai Fot Choy,” Chinatown is expiring beneath a glittering mask, a ritual face. When the protagonist, Dirigible, walks alone in Chinatown at dawn, he sees a deserted wasteland among the empty display windows and dry fish tanks. The streets are obsolete, “kin to the idly creaking Ferris wheel and the dead merry-go-round” （33）. Chinatown is a cheap and boring carnival that has been closed. Everything is useless, deserted, frozen, dead, cold, or sleeping, as Dirigible gazes into the empty shop windows:

The wildcats were frozen in fierce expressions, looking into a pool which used to contain water and display fish. The inside of the window was dirty. Dead flies and moths spotted the dust at the bottom of the dry pool. He heard the voices of the crowd that wasn't shouting through all the streets after him. He saw the windows their voices weren't echoing off of. He saw all the space no one was occupying. （33）

Dirigible's mother, as was Johnny's father in “Food for All His Dead,” is slowly dying. But as Chin portrays Dirigible's mother, emblematic now of Chinatown and Chinese traditions in America, she is completely despicable, not to be regretted when she passes. She is a playfully senile living corpse, “a cadaver acting charming and sexy.”

In “Goong Hai Fot Choy,” the people of Chinatown are like mechanical wind-up toys. There is a strange anonymity there, where life is likened to a dead Ferris wheel, where words and expressions are “inorganizally emotional,” where faces turn on emotions “like a Christmas tree lighting up.” People are akin to lonely, outdated machines. Chinatown events are a series of funerals, attended by overheated old ladies among Oriental rugs, lace doilies, and “mildewed memories” （36）. The people of Chinatown are buried and preserved beneath ivory masks: each time they watch the funeral processions from the sidewalks, there is a shrinking away from the warm surfaces of their skins until they are mere remnants of themselves, until they are “ivory” like the death mask worn by Dirigible's mother.

In “Food for All His Dead,” the people of Chinatown are also depicted as subhuman. The crowds in Portsmouth Square remind Johnny of “oily things and bugs floating on a tide”; they stand in “puddles of each other” （56）. Groups of old Chinese women “round-backed in their black overcoats” look like “clumps of huge beetles with white faces,” and Chinese music emerging from grease-and-urine stained hallways sounds like “birds being strangled” （63）. His girlfriend, Sharon, wears an expression like a “wide frog's stare,” her hand is “dry feeling, cold and dry like skin of tissue-paper covered flesh” （62）, and her eyelashes make him think of shrunken, twitching insect legs （66）. Although Chin may have wished only to present an unexoticized picture of Chinatown, what he has accomplished is considerably more than that: the Chinatown he depicts is repulsive, decaying, filled with subhuman creatures.

Chin's sympathies clearly are with the protagonists, who feel vastly superior to Chinatown's people. Johnny already has lost touch with his Chinatown roots. Chinatown seems too narrow for him:

I'd like to get outta here so quick, Sharon; I wish I had something to do! What do I do here? What does anybody do here? I'm bored! My mother's a respected woman because she can tell how much monosodium glutamate is in a dish by smelling it, and because she knows how to use a spittoon in a restaurant. Everybody's Chinese here, Sharon. （64）

No one in Chinatown is equipped to understand Johnny's complex thoughts or his identity crisis. His father doesn't understand English well, and Sharon doesn't even understand the literal meaning of his words. She tells him, “You talk so nice,” and he corrects her usage:

“I'll walk for you dan, okay?” She smiled and reached a hand down for him.

“You'll walk with me, not for me. You're not a dog.” （61–62）

Johnny's self-conscious anguish is beyond Sharon's realm of experience, but he talks anyway, practicing his verbal virtuosity on her, feeling comfortably superior, even though she cannot understand him.

He enjoyed the girl; she listened to him; he did not care if she understood what he said or knew what he wanted to say. She listened to him. （62）

The dialogue is masterfully asymptotic:

“… I knew more then than I do now.”

“What d'ya mean? You smart now! You didn't know how to coun' or spall, or nothin', now you in colleger.”

“I had something then, you know? I didn't have to ask about anything; it was all there; I didn't have questions, I knew who I was responsible to, who I should love, who I was afraid of, all my dogs were smart.”

“You lucky, you had a dog!” The girl smiled. （65）

To Johnny, Chinese identity has become restrictive, even repugnant, because he has been made aware of the worlds that can be experienced outside Chinatown. Besides, he cannot decide as easily as the others what being “Chinese” in America is. Johnny asks the newsboy on the street, who has remained within Chinatown and whose sense of identity has never been threatened, “Are you really Chinese?”:

“What're you ting, I'm a Negro soy sauce chicken?”

“Don't you know there's no such thing as a real Chinaman in all of America? That all we are are American Indians cashing in on a fad?”

“Fad? don' call me fad. You fad yourselv.”

“No, you're not Chinese, don't you understand? You see it all started when a bunch of Indians wanted to quit being Indians and fighting the cavalry and all, so they left the reservation, see?”

“Inian?”

“And they saw that there was this big kick about Chinamen, so they braided their hair into queues and opened up laundries and restaurants and started reading Margaret Mead and Confucius and Pearl Buck and became respectable Chinamen and gained some self-respect.”

“Chinamong! You battah not say Chinamong.” （64）

The dialogue loses even its momentary interest for Johnny when he sees the boy's confused and uncomprehending face. The passage illustrates the distance between Johnny's new perspectives and modes of expression and those of the people of Chinatown.

Ultimately, Johnny is compelled to leave his family and his decadent community. After his father's death, the world seems green and young to him.

In “Yes, Young Daddy,” the protagonist, Freddy, has left Chinatown for college. Freddy is young, verbal, “cool,” and he lives “so independent in his own apartment and everything.” When Fred's young cousin, who is bored and lonely in Chinatown, writes him a letter, he assumes temporarily the role of her “young daddy.” He corrects her grammar, tries to prepare her for eventual flight from Chinatown, and takes a trip back to Chinatown to visit her. But even his temporary return reinforces his feeling that he belongs away from Chinatown:

The vague familiarity, almost nostalgia, he found in the apartment house, the shadows in the corners, the worn rug with the pattern more walked out of it made Fred realize the long time he had been away. At one time he had known everybody in the house. … But he had left all that, and this part of his family. He did not regret leaving, for like the boy that was like all the boys that were in this house, everything was the same, familiar beyond recognition, stagnant. That was why he had left and forgotten his cousin, all this part of the family. …” “No,” he thought, reaching the second flight of stairs. “It's not comfortable at all to be back, even to be nice.” （193）

Fred now turns his back on his past. He cannot do anything for Lena. He cannot be her “young daddy,” cannot replace Lena's father, who has died. He does not want to be a hero for the young Chinese Americans he left behind:

“No more worrying about anybody but number one for me!” he thought, all to himself, not looking back to the house as he left, walking down the hill toward the light of Chinatown and the nearest bus home. （199）

“Home” is somewhere away from Chinatown.

Just as Fred is unable to accept the responsibility for the death of Chinatown or the future of its other children, and Johnny must leave Chinatown behind for greener pastures, Dirigible in “Goong Hai Fot Choy” awaits his mother's death in the hope that if she dies soon enough, he may be saved from the petrification that is overtaking him gradually. Now that he has realized that he is tending his dying mother—and his “mother culture”—like a gigolo, for a price, he feels self-contempt and must break away lest he become a fossil like the dead things around him. Dirigible feels little besides “weariness … shifting monotony … An elaborate, ornate impotence” （47）. As he shaves his face, he feels it becoming a mask of lather over festering sores. But he also realizes that he is the only living creature in all Chinatown, and that his very presence there makes the rest of Chinatown more dead:

Standing there unseen, alone with pigeons and riderless wood horses, watching everything, tensely doing nothing, nothing happening, was pointless. His being there to see in dead grey warming morning, to ignore the signs and fluttering beckoning flags, was to make everything this place and these things were for dead. (33）

Johnny, Fred, and Dirigible are too good for Chinatown and are also powerless to do anything but watch its death rales. They detest the self-deception of the people of Chinatown, who unlike them cannot see or refuse to see that Chinatown is in fact dying. Johnny's father continues to rant about the Chinese Revolution of 1911, Aunt Dee insists on powdering her face with a mask and thinking dirty thoughts, and Dirigible's mother observes the Chinese New Year even as she is falling into complete decay. Indeed Johnny, Fred, and Dirigible are depicted sympathetically not only because their communities are stifling and boring them, but also because there are no examples of Chinatown “manhood” for them to follow. Johnny's father is immersed in an impossible self-deception, knowing less, Johnny thinks, than his son does of life; Freddy cannot replace Lena's father, who died; and Dirigible participated in deceiving his father with his mother when he was a boy. The only “Chinamen” of any other variety in the stories are the grinning, nodding, mechanical-toy shopkeepers in “Goong Hai Fot Choy,” and these are like a parody of some racist dream （51）. The communities and the people in the stories are dying and are inferior to the sensitive young Chinese-American men who are trying to escape them.

All three protagonists are embodied in Tam Lum, the main character of the play The Chickencoop Chinaman, which is a forum for Chin's ideas on Chinese-American culture, identity, and manhood.

The play contains a series of lessons for Chinese-Americans: that Asian-American culture can be found neither by imitating whites nor by imitating blacks; that Asian-Americans should not be forced into either the “American” mold or the “Chinese” mold; that Asian-Americans should not allow themselves to be used as the “model minority.” Chin's opinions, as expressed elsewhere in essays, are all presented through the characters and situations in the play. Also, the two female characters in the play, the white-Chinese castrating bitch and the “Hong Kong dream girl” in her “super-no-knock, rust-proof, tit-stiffering bras” and Jackie Kennedy bouffant hairdo, are simply stereotypes trying to participate in the castration of the Asian-American male characters.

One would expect that the manhood Chin says has been attacked could be restored here, and that a culture to replace the bankrupt Chinatown one could begin to be built here. Instead, the play conveys an overriding sense of contempt for the Asian-American identity as well as for the pathetic futility of the male protagonist. Chinese-American identity is manufactured in a chickencoop, and Chinese Americans are “No more born than nylon and acrylic. … A miracle synthetic! Drip dry and machine washable.” Chinese American language is the “buck-buck-bagaw” of a rooster, the “talk of orphans.” Chinamen are “children of the dead” （I,1）. Chinese-American manhood or fatherhood of yore is recalled only in vague references to a “Chinatown kid” who used to frequent boxing matches and whose name no one can quite remember. Tam and his best friend, Blackjap Kenji, can only get together to sing a song imitating Helen Keller. Keller symbolizes the Chinese, who overcame birth defects and can see, hear, and speak no evil.

At first, when Tam speaks aggressively and wittily, it seems that he will be the embodiment of the new Chinese-American manhood Chin wants to be midwife to. But the play ends with Tam, “like a mad elephant, blowing his nose in the dark,” chopping green onions with a Chinese cleaver. He has rejected the “petrified cheerios,” the Aunt Jemima pancakes, the “Chung King chopped phooey” （II, 4）, and the myth that Asians could be like Blacks, but he has found little to replace the Lone Ranger, Helen Keller, and Ovaltine Dancer in his mythology. The “Chinatown Kid” who was “scared but not chicken” is not his father but a nameless dishwasher who was “afraid of white old ladies peeking at him through the keyhole.”

Tam, the central character who seems so promising as the embodiment of Asian American male identity, turns out to be a disappointment. He backs down when Lee attacks him, saying “Everything you say is right. I'm a good loser. I give up” （I,2）. When Tam does try to fight Charley Popcorn, he misses the punch and falls flat on his face:

TAM: I'm the Chickencoop Chinaman. My punch won't crack an egg, but I'll never fall down. （II,4）

Till he can regain his heritage, his identity, and his masculinity, Tam is good mostly for talk, which he wants to inject with “some flow, some pop, some rhythm” （II,4）. He tries to seduce the Hong Kong Dream Girl with talk:

HONG KONG DREAM GIRL: You sure have a way with words, but I'd like it better if you'd speak the mother tongue.

TAM: I speak nothing but the mother tongue. … But I got a tongue for you baby. And maybe you could handmake my bone China. （I,2）

But she giggles and runs off. When Lee attacks him, he retorts the only way he can, by answering: “Wanna fuck?” He can't beat even Old Charley Popcorn, but he is “Notorious for spinnen a fast mean thread / often life's wooden spool” （II,4）.

The play ends with Tam as a midget like Dirigible—a frozen, hopeful midget—but a midget all the same. Although he is eager to find his own history, style, masculine identity and language now that he has shed innocent self-deception and false heroes, Tam is not complete. He is still experimenting. Chin calls Lum a “comic embodiment of Asian-American manhood” （“Chinese and Japanese-American Literature,” 34, 35）, but Chin takes him so seriously at times that he seems almost tragic. Although Chin contends that Tam Lum is a comic figure and the play a comedy, beneath the wit of his verbal jousts peer some of the images of death, decay, and impotence of the earlier stories, with their scenes totally devoid of beauty or the possibility of love.

The worlds Chin has created are peopled by repulsive cripples and synthetic orphans. One is never quite sure whether or not to laugh at Chin's “comic manifestations of Asian-American manhood”; we are carried away on jarring metaphor, sparkling image after sparkling image, to what is essentially devastation and chagrin as we are faced with Asian-American “manhood,” squirming helplessly, pinpointed by Chin's ornate language.

Chin says that he wants to promote the creation of an Asian-American mythology and a language that is not alien or hostile to the Asian-American sensibility but that will be a “backtalking, muscular, singing stomping full-blooded language loaded with nothing but our truth” （“Backtalk,” 5）. The task of the Asian-American writer, he asserts, is:

to legitimize the language, style, and syntax of his people's experience, to codify the experiences common to his people into symbols, clichés, linguistic mannerisms, and a sense of humor that emerges from an organic familiarity with the experience. （“Chinese and Japanese-American Literature,” 23）

The talk of Chin's “comic” male characters, even the ones he seems to take quite seriously, is often witty and ornate but seldom the “singing stomping full-blooded language” Chin admires so much in his fellow Asian-American writers Okada, Inada, and Chu. A verbal man like Tam Lum is fighting with “backtalk” that too often emerges as “outtalk,” clever phrases and images with less feeling and meaning than ornamental grace. At other times, characters are used as mouthpieces for Chin's thinly disguised lectures on Chinese American history, identity, and manhood.

TAM: I mean, we grow up bustin our asses to be white anyway. … what made the folks happiest was for some asshole some white off the wall J. C. Penny's clerk type with his crispy suit to say I spoke English well—

LEE: You're talking too fast for me. I can't …

TAM: （Continuing through Lee's interruption）. And praisin me for being “Americanized” and no juvenile delinquency. “The strong Chinese family … Chinese culture.” And the folks just smiled. The reason there was no juvenile delinquency was because there was no kids! The laws didn't let our women in …

LEE: What's this got to do with anything?

TAM: … and our women born here lost their citizenship if they married a man from China. And all our men here, no women, stranded here burned all their diaries, their letters, everything with their names on it … threw the ashes into the sea … hoping that that much of themselves could find someplace friendly. I asked an old man if that was so. He told me it wasn't good for me to know such things, to let all that stuff die with the old.

LEE: You taking me to school?

TAM: He told me to forget it … to get along with “Americans.” Well, they're all dead now. We laugh at 'em with the “Americans,” talk about them saying “Buck Buck bagaw” instead of “giidyp” to their horses and get along real nice here now, don't we?

LEE: Oh, Tam, I don't know. （I,2）

In “Food for All His Dead,” Johnny suspects the problem:

… I hear myself talking all this stupid stuff, it's sort of great, you know? Because I have to listen to what I'm saying or I'll miss it. （63）

In “Goong Hai Fot Choy,” Dirigible says, “I'm constantly surprised at what I have to say when no one is listening to me in the same room” （41）, and Tam Lum in Chickencoop Chinaman keeps talking, even though he is tired of talking, because “everytime I stop it's so goddamned awful!” （II,4）. Chin's characters no doubt feel the need to cover up the awful silence of racism with talk, any kind of talk.

The Chinese American identity Chin forges through the language and characterization of Fred, Dirigible, and Tampax Lum is incomplete, adolescent, changeable, prone to self-absorption. The Chinese James Dean characters in Chin's stories and plays are the only personages that emerge clearly; all the other characters are mere types. Johnny's parents are not developed; Dirigible's mother is a symbol; in fact, the women in Chin's works always belong to one of two types: they are either dumb broads or castrators.

Part of the reason that even the central characters are not fully developed, of course, is that the other characters are mere stick figures and symbols. Chin might argue that the blurring is entirely appropriate, since, for example, Lee and Kenji are facets of the Asian-American identity just as Tam is. But the development of the characters in Chickencoop Chinaman other than Tam Lum is uneven enough to interfere even with the portrayal of the protagonist.

At the present time, Chin's basic contempt for his characters, a contempt which is mixed with compassion for Tam Lum and his kindred heroes, indicates that Chin has not overcome the devastating effects of racism on Chinese American men. Therefore, his art leaves readers with the impression of bored misanthropy and shallow complaint rather than feeling or protest. Chin flails out at the emasculating aspects of oppression, but he accepts his oppressors' definition of “masculinity.” The result is tension between contempt and desire to fight for his Asian-American characters. Chin's struggle is an existential one. As long as it remains an individualized battle, he will not move beyond this tension.

Chin's preoccupation with death and decay, his sexism, cynicism, and self-indulgence show that he is still suffering from the very plague that he is attacking. That the main characters in his stories are afflicted with metaphysical alienation and elitist feelings is no wonder, since Chin makes them large and drawn in detail compared to the mechanical toys that people their worlds. But Chinatown is not in fact dying, and Asian-Americans are as big as life, bigger than Johnny and Fred and Dirigible and Tampax Lum, who represent only a small part of Asian-American concerns.

Asian-American “manhood” will not be projected by yelling at racism. When the invective against racist stereotyping is done, the time comes for the new, positive image to emerge. Asian-American “manhood” will be defined by Asian-American men who go about their business in a “manly” way. And Asian-American identity will be defined by Asian-Americans themselves. Frank Chin “backtalks” about what isn't masculine and what isn't Asian-American. The next stage must be a clarification of what these things are.

Bibliography

Chin, Frank, “Backtalk.” News of the American Place Theatre, May, 1972.

———. “Yes, Young Daddy,” Ethnic American Short Stories, ed. Katherine D. Newman. New York, 1975.

———. “Chickencoop Chinaman, Act I.” Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, ed. Frank Chin, Jeffery Chan, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong. New York, 1975.

———. “Chickencoop Chinaman, Act II.” Yardbird Reader, Vol. III, ed. Frank Chin and Shawn Wong. Berkeley, 1975.

———. “Chinese- and Japanese-American Literature.” Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, ed. Chin, et al. New York, 1975.

———. “Food for All His Dead.” Asian-American Authors, ed. Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas. Boston, 1972.

———. “Goong Hai Fot Choy.” 19 Necromancers from Now, ed. Ishmael Reed. New York, 1970.

———. “Yes, Young Daddy.” Ethnic American Short Stores, ed. Katherine Newman, New York, 1975.