Frank Chin is an apparently fading figure on the Chinese American literary stage he has helped construct. Such an act of fading is typified by the institutional ignorance and the consequent under-read status of his works. The phenomenon is instructive: it exemplifies the tenacity of the hegemonic process in effacing the oppositional; it illustrates the need for the counter force to rethink its strategies; and it becomes the occasion for this piece of writing to fade in what seems to have been faded out.

Playwright, essayist, and short-fictionalist, Chin emerged in the late 1960s when the Third World strike at the University of California at Berkeley and the subsequent Asian American student movements resulted in the formation of two of its native intellectual groups, the political and the cultural. The former group of Chinese Americans identified themselves with the other minorities in the United States and was determined to wage war against their common enemy, the economic and political oppression of American imperialism, while the latter group undertook the task of correcting the racist stereotypes of colonialism and aimed at a reconstruction of Asian American images （Nee and Nee 1972:355–360）. It is with the latter that Chin is closely associated; though he may not participate in the community project of anti-poverty and exploitation, his involvement in the founding of the Combined Asian Resources Project （CARP） and Asian American literary formations marks him as a writer and editor of conscious political resistance. His personal constitution interlocks and interacts with the recovery and the production of Chinese American literature in such a way that an evaluation of his role as a historic agent becomes indispensable.

Chin realizes that Chinese Americans have been made atrocious victims not only of legislative exclusion, resulting in drastic population reduction, but also of historic erasure, the consequence of which is the designation of their minor position or rather non-identity. Since denying minorities their historical involvement, their sufficiency as human subjects, and their right to participate in civil and political society has been the control mechanism of racist dominance, Chin's project is a war against such denial; in JanMohamed's phrase, “negating the negation as a form of affirmation” （JanMohamed 1987）. Chin challenges the hegemonic deployment of the Chinese American, contends its oppressive signifying practices, and codifies a self identity. This paper will trace these stages of Chin's negative construction and ponder on their impact on Chinese American literary formations.

I

In his quest for the indigenous history of his ethnic community, Chin notes that the absence of the Chinese American from general American history books is a direct outcome of the 1882 exclusion law which was designed to “drive us out of the country, to kill us.” The completion of the transcontinental railroad signaled the death of the use-value of the Chinese American even as “cheap labor”:

Out of our despair, we took to burning our letters from home, burning the pages of our diaries and journals as we wrote them, burning tickets, receipts, bills, burning everything with our names, everything written in our hand and throwing the ashes into the sea, in the hope, that, at least, that much of us would get home to China. America had taught us, finally that China was our home and inspired the invention of this little Chinese American ceremony （Chin 1972a:62）.

The act of incineration is a gesture of desperation in the face of racial exclusion. Chin has us realize here that Chinese immigrants are deprived not only of their legitimate geographic belonging, but also of their temporal existence. In burning the records they themselves have kept, Chinese Americans are forced to denounce that part of their life which is anchored on American soil. The explicit genocidal attempt of the dominant coupled with such helpless suicidal compliance of the oppressed leads to the painful elimination of the linguistic trace, hence the social death of the ethnic group. The Chinese American becomes then an entity that can neither claim its predecessor with a positive historical identity nor expect a future in progeny.

The disastrous impact of this history is nowhere more pungently felt than in Chin's generation of writers, who take it as their duty to write about Chinese America when writing itself is considered to be exclusively white and especially non-Chinese American. Two forms of such attitudes co-inhabit the community. The first is one of blind resistance by associating writing with white domination as an instrument of oppression that the oppressed does not share. The second is one of assimilation, “look[ing] upon writing as the proof,” as some humanistic redeeming feature, that the Chinese American is “nearing white” （Nee and Nee 1972:394–395）. Both reactions are programmed by cultural colonialism that intends to reinforce writing as white property and privilege, thereby effacing the minority subject position.

In his classroom experiments, Chin traces the responses in the original linguistic reification of his ethnic community: “The either-or thing is right in that scientific name we go by, ‘Chinese,’ hyphen, ‘American.’” When asked to divide the self into such an arbitrary dichotomy, his students automatically assign all the adventurous, creative, and original qualities to their “American” part while attributing everything old fashioned, inhibiting, and dull to their “Chinese” part. Chin sees this as yet another instance of the dominant race instilling a schizophrenic uncertainty in the formation of the ethnic self. The question of division is an extension of the trite East-West construction that encourages the split self, and “what you break down, you break according to the lines of the stereotype,” which aims to perpetuate the subjugation-submission power relation （Nee and Nee 1972:394–395）. Chin aptly names this the reign of “racist love” and points out:

The general function of any racial stereotype is to establish and preserve order between different elements of society, maintain the continuity and growth of western civilization, and enforce white supremacy with a minimum of effort, attention and expense. The ideal racial stereotype is a low maintenance engine of white supremacy whose efficiency increases with age, as it became “authenticated” and “historically verified” （Chin and Chan 1972:66）.

The hegemonic process that underwrites the social notches of the minority group is mercilessly exposed. The naturalization of the social hierarchy, Chin cautions us, lies at the base of white control. But the success of the reign results in part from the manufactured consent of the Chinese American. “[T]his tyranny of culture by the whites,” Chin observes, “has managed to produce a Chinese-American character that is without an ego, that has no self-respect, that has internalized almost fatal suicidal doses of self-contempt” （Nee and Nee 1972:385）. He goes on to say,

This self-contempt itself is nothing more than the subject's acceptance of white standards of objectivity, beauty, behavior, and achievement as morally absolute, and his acknowledgment of the fact that, because he is not white, he can never fully measure up to white standards.

It is, in short, “an expedient tactic of survival” （Chin and Chan 1972:67）.

The desire to survive has exacted a costly toll. When the exclusion law of 1882 was finally rescinded in 1943—due to the political exigency as well as expediency of America's and China's becoming allies in the war against Japan—Chinese American writing emerged not so much as an expression of its own sensibility but as a showcase model of the American dream. Among a handful of writers Chin disapproves of, the example of Jade Snow Wong stands out. Fifth Chinese Daughter was a tremendous commercial success and Wong was sent to Asia as a cultural emissary of American democracy. What is little known, however, is the fact that two-thirds of Wong's original manuscript was omitted from the published version （Kim 1982:60, 71）. When Chin raised the question of what was left out, Wong replied, things “too personal.” And she continued, “it takes maturity to be objective about one's self” （Chin et al. 1974）. Wong's situation illustrates two major circumscriptions of minority writing. On the one hand, we witness overt censorship through the machinery of editors and publishers. On the other hand, we note an “automatic” acceptance of white standards of writing and the inherent ethnic deficiency in the attainment of white objectivity and beauty. The difficulty of getting by external gatekeepers, and particularly the unconscious assimilation of the “universality” of writing, cripple the normal growth of an ethnic literature. Cultural hegemony maintains itself not so much by imposing white writing upon the minority but by soliciting white writing from the objectified minority.

The material purged from Wong's manuscripts through ideological apparatuses is, one recalls, “personal.” We witness here the greatest generic oxymoron ever: the ethnic writer can hardly print anything creative or “novel” because the validity of their feeling is not universal; neither can they publish their personal emotions because the autobiographical genre designed for their lot demands the omission of subjective valuations. In other words, the individual experiences of an ethnic entity will never be valorized unless they are approved by the dominant culture. It comes as no surprise that Wong's autobiography contains little more than an infantry of Chinatown restaurants and curiosity shops, a desirable representation of the Chinese American as a model minority devoid of subjectivity.

Placing minority writers in a passive, powerless mouth-piece position is a built-in function of white writing. During his days in Iowa, Frank Chin was often blamed for his failure to explore “the local color of Chinatown.” “You know,” remarked his instructor, “you're writing about the Chinese in a way that I don't think American people would be interested in,” to which Chin retorted, “Because they were just like people, right?” Chin was stunned to learn not only that he “had a point of view” about his people, but that his “point of view wasn't white,” for he depicted the individuality of the ethnic subject in ways that did not conform to mere “local color” （Nee and Nee 1972:379）. Like the paradox of the ethnic autobiography Wong got into, the generic assignment for the minority writer to “cook up” regional flavor for the cosmopolitan cultural connoisseur seems to be a division of labor. Such division reproduces once again the marginal position of ethnic writers in the literary system: they are asked first to offer the beautiful and exotic facade of the periphery and then kept there because their writing is limited and not permanent.

Aside from generic constraints, Chinese American authors suffer from a lack of authority over the English they use; their language is either defaulted or rejected. The expectation that they employ standard white English enforces such a status of dependency that their autonomy as writers is at stake. Against this kind of aesthetic as well as ideological dictatorship, Chin and his fellow writers argue:

The universality of the belief that correct English is the only language of American truth has made language an instrument of cultural imperialism. The minority experience does not yield itself to accurate or complete expression in the white man's language. Yet, the minority writer, specially the Asian-American writer, is made to feel morally obliged to write in a language produced by an alien and hostile sensibility. His task, in terms of language alone, is to legitimize his, and by implication his people's, orientation as white, to codify his experience in the form of prior symbols, clichés, linguistic mannerisms and a sense of humor that appeals to whites because it celebrates Asian American self-contempt. Or his task is the opposite—to legitimize the language, the style, and syntax of his people's experience （Chin et al. 1974:xxxvii）.

The assertion of cultural and linguistic integrity is interestingly couched in terms of the writer's role within his or her community. His success is measured against his specific agency in the ethnic community. “What I value most,” Chin says, “is what I am doing, trying to legitimize the Chinese-American sensibility. Call it my accident in time and space and all the talent, everything I have is good only for this … if Chinese-American sensibility isn't legitimized, then my writing is no good” （Nee and Nee 1972:386）.

II

The legitimization of a Chinese American sensibility for Chin is necessarily a “noise of resistance” to the racist order; it entails a breaking of the imposed silence and stereotypes and a redefinition of the ethnic identity （Chin and Chan 1972:65）. Chin's own literary production exemplifies his tenacious drive to combat the discursive modes of domination that encode the object position of the minority. In polemic or parody, two of his major literary strategies, Chin wages war against the hegemonic exercise of power in the form of the language. The Chickencoop Chinaman, Chin's first play, appropriately begins with an angry outburst from its protagonist, Tam:

My dear in the beginning there was the Word! Then there was me! And the Word was CHINAMAN. And there was me. I lipped the word as if it had little lips of its own. “Chinaman” said on a little kiss. I lived the Word! The Word is my heritage （Chin 1981:6）.

Ontological alienation is a direct product of the kind of linguistic dispossession from which the Chinese Americans suffer. They have always been enunciated into an existence to which they do not belong. The biblical overtone of Tam's speech indicates at once a tradition of cultural hegemony inherent in Judeo-Christianity and its language, and a history of the oppressed who have to live the curse, as it were, despite their will: “Chinamen are made, not born … Out of junk-imports, lies, railroad scrap iron, dirty jokes, broken bottles, cigar smoke, Cosquilla Indian blood, wino spit, and lots of milk of amnesia” （Chin 1981:6）. In the unfolding of Chin's textual space, Tam's volley of words has enacted an effective counter-memory that not only discloses the removal of Chinese American history and their subservient position, but in the very process of disclosure negates the discursive oppression and constitutes the ethnic self as subject. Tam has materialized as a multi-word magician who transforms the stereotype of the “tongue-tying” Chinese American into a defying figure of “backtalking, muscular, singing stomping full blooded language loaded with nothing but our truth” （Chin 1976:557）. It is small wonder that Chin's dramatic characters have been accused of failing to “talk or dress or act like Orientals” （Chin 1975, 1989）.

If polemic confrontation is for Chin one counterhegemonic formation, parodic dissemblance is the other. When Chickencoop Chinaman Tam meets his friend BlackJap Kenji, their greeting ritual soon turns into a parodic type of signification:

KENJI （as Helen Keller）: Moowahjeefffurher roar rungs!

TAM （as Helen Keller）: Moowahjeefffurher roar rungs?

KENJI （as Helen Keller）: Moowahjeefffurher roar rungs.

TAM and KENJI （continuing）: My dear friends! …

KENJI （as Helen Keller）: Aheeeha op eeehoooh too ooh wahyou oooh.

TAM （as a Bible Belt preacher）: Yeah, talk to me, Helen! Hallelujah! I hear her talking to me.

（TAM jumps to his feet shuddering with fake religious fervor, KENJI supports with Hallelujahs and repetitions.）

TAM: Put your hands on the radio, children, feel the power of Helen Keller, children. Believe! And she, the Great White goddess, the mother of Charlie Chan, the Mumbler, the Squeaker, shall show you the way, children! Oh, yeah!

KENJI: Hallelujah!

TAM: Helen Keller overcame her handicaps without riot! She overcame her handicaps without looting! She overcame her handicaps without violence! And you Chinks and Japs can too. Oooh I feel the power, children. Feel so gooooood! I feeeeeel it! （Chin 1981:10–11）

Chin conglomerates Christian conversion with the cultural symbol of self-perfection, equates physical deficiency and ethnic experience, and juxtaposes passive endurance of oppression with the racist positioning of the Asian “model minority” so that the parodic conversation between two members of the ethnic communities constitutes both an epistemic violence of pervasive ideological persuasions and a merciless critique of its practices. By the same token, Chin engages a symbolic exchange between himself and his childhood hero, the indomitable “Lone Ranger,” only to find the mythical figure of justice yet another white supremacist in disguise （Chin 1981:31–38）. The parodic contestation of mythology has occasioned the stripping away of its power as the regime of truth.

The dismantling of the regime of truth involves a historicization of its pretentious claims. The happy and content Chinese American living in the colorful and joyful Chinatown is another ideological construct that Chin endeavors to demystify:

The railroads created a detention camp and called it “Chinatown.” The details of that creation have been conveniently forgotten or euphemized into a state of sweet confusion. The men who lived through the creation are dying out, unheard and ignored. When they die, no one will know it was not us that created a game preserve for Chinese and called it “Chinatown” （Chin 1972a:60）.

Chin's geological scrutiny of origin calls our attention to the particular phenomenon of historical exclusion turned into a modern instance of the glamorous periphery. The work of racist love that barred the entry of Chinese women and prohibited Chinese American men from the practice of miscegenation so as to produce a dying bachelor society is now redesigning its instrument by presenting Chinatown not as an urban ghetto but an exclusive glass menagerie where the showcase minority dwell.

That Chinatown is a special hegemonic creation of the Chinese American sociogeographic space informs Chin's staging of The Year of the Dragon. The drama focuses not on Chinatown as an exotic setting but on the burden and dilemma it poses as an existential space for the Chinese American there. Fred Eng, the protagonist, is both a Chinatown tourist guide and a writer. This particular dual occupation plays out one of the most intensive dynamics of an ethnic other that Chin has provided. As a tourist guide, Fred accommodates the forces that determine his role while distancing himself through critical self-awareness from the circumstances that tend to dope him. He lives the fiction of white fantasy, posing as a blend of the best of East and West, and puts on a phony Chinese accent to sell that perennial pack of lies to an interested audience. Fred subsists, ironically, upon the museum mentality of the metropolis that marks the dependent economic structure of its periphery. To Ross, his white brother-in-law, a quintessential oriental monger, Fred ever so succinctly parodies the metropolitan designs of power: “Hell, Chinatown's your private preserve for an endangered species, and you're the park ranger” （Chin 1981:85）. The sardonic remark underlies Fred's confinement within the very social relationships of Chinatown zoo, but his conscious faking of his role as tourist guide shows his fictionalizing potential to counter the supreme fiction of racism. However, his creative energy will find no outlet other than this, “cuz no one's gonna read the great Chinese American novel,” but if “I'll write a Mama Fu Fu Chinese cookbook,” Fred says, “that'll drive people crazy … It's gonna be the first Chinese cookbook to win the Pulitzer Prize” （Chin 1981:83）. The will to write and to define a self identity has been circumscribed by the trivializing function always already designated.

Though the institutional suppression of Chinese American writing is not in the foreground of the play, Chin makes a more subtle analysis of how the hegemonic denial of ethnic writing can foster a slavish mentality among the ethnic community that itself automatically gives up writing. Pa, for instance, asks his son-in-law Ross, instead of Fred, his English major son, to edit his New Year speech; the distrust of his son's language reveals a typical inbred self-contempt that disclaims Chinese Americans' verbal culture. The conventional scenario of father and son dispute in the play opens another dimension in that Pa's demand of Fred's filial piety and rejection of his voice metaphorize the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized （Chin 1981:137）. One recalls that the hegemonic exercise of control underdevelops the minority in such a way that the group in question is always considered child-like, desperately in need of parental guidance. Fred's rebellion can then be best construed as an act of resistance to the authoritarian father figure of the dominant. The scathing satire of this enforced tutelage in the play as well as in the modern mythology of Charlie Chan and his number one sons marks one of Chin's most persistent efforts at counterdiscourse （Chin 1989）.

III

Chin's program of Chinese American literature has evolved with changing social and cultural contexts.¹ One notable shift of emphasis is manifest in his recent outlook on Chinese culture and its impact on the social and cultural formations of the Chinese American. In the 1970s when Chin and his group embarked on the journey to make their literary presence, the order of “racist love” relegated the Chinese American to either models of assimilation or absolute foreigners. The wish to forge an identity strictly on Chinese American terms necessitated Chin's adamant disassociation from both Anglo-American and Chinese cultures, the stereotypical illusion of a split personality or the mish-mesh blend of the “best” of East and West. Though this oppositional stance came as an imperative response to hegemony, its praxis of total negation was not immune to the ahistorical scripture it set out to subvert. That is, negation could be entrapped, made dependent on the hegemony either by merely opposing it or by abandoning the representations it so apparently tainted. In light of this, Chin's current celebration of Chinese culture signifies his conscious departure from the hegemonic norms of inscription to return to the ground of Chinese American historical specificity.

In his Seattle Weekly essay, “Our Life Is War,” Chin declares his continuous battle against white domination but cites Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese military theorist, as saying “What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy” （Chin 1983）. The prominence given to Sun Tzu indeed informs us of Chin's strategic rethinking of his agenda, and his programmatic application of Chinese cultural traditions is everywhere visible. Such use for Chin, however, is not a nostalgic escape but an invigorating absorption that at once provides historic anchorage and directs present reality. Therefore, the Chinese tradition he invokes is a “heroic” one. Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, and Monkey's Journey to the West are what “every Chinese kid has grown up reading and studying as a manual of personal ethics and strategy and tactics for a thousand years” and they are “available in English translation, comic books, coloring books, trading cards, figures, toys, puppets and operas in Chinatown right this instant” （Chin 1986）. In short, they are part and parcel of the Chinese American living culture and their people's code of forming alliances and expressing loyalties. Chin reminds us that it is just these classic Chinese texts that have been models of organized resistance in Chinatown, the stronghold “against the Christian missionaries, wild-eyed social Darwinists, racists and a hostile state” （Chin 1983:35）.²

The reconstruction of Chinese tradition in the Chinese American grain is a double-edged sword that redefines Chinese culture and Western culture. Chin's claim is both Calibanic and Kwan Kung straight:

You, dear reader of English, aren't used to a Chinaman act in “your” language … Forget it. Your Language is mine. I speak in the Chinaman “I” here, and write a Chinaman act. I don't mean to be impolite in my taking your language and dashing the moral universals you've built into it. But betrayal is in the heart of your English. You speak the “I” of “Revenge is mine sayth the Lord.” Mine is the Chinaman “I.” Whatever language a Chinaman speaks, it is always Chinaman, and the personal pronoun I, in any language, means “I am the law” … Chinese civilization is founded on history. Specifically the five classics, selected by Confucius the historian, are the basics of Chinese civilization … Religion as the foundation of civilization is a silly and offensive sissy notion in Chinese thought … Greek myth is the key to the white mind. The epic tradition of Homer and the Bible. All tragic. Tsk tsk tsk. Boo hoo and hilltop glory be. The perpetual power, the submissive individual … The rebellious individual smacked down by the state … If Prometheus were Chinese he would have stolen fire from the gods, burned their capital, after warning the citizens to evacuate the city, then cut off the heads of the gods who displeased him and stuck the heads on poles over their palace, then burned it down to the ground. （Chin 1985:110–111）.

Chin's maneuver is a complete revisioning of Chinese American culture; if his earlier refutation of the hegemonic stereotyping still bears the burden of the oppressor, his present assertion of the heroic tradition not only reverses the situation of “yellow writers … tell[ing] their yellow literary time by a white clock” but also poses a critique of Western tradition with a Chinese American measure.³ He now combines his disruption of Aristotelian unities, Christian universals and social Darwinian unidirectional progress narrative with his demand of the dominant to be literate in Asian American culture, breaking and relinking the semiotic chain.⁴

The renewed interest in cultural history has also resurfaced one perennial concern of Chin's, i.e., the definition and parameter of Chinese American literature. This obvious canonical debate hinges on three pivots: generic, representational, and institutional. First, the establishment of a heroic Chinese American tradition in which “the fighter writer uses literary forms as weapons of war,” Chin argues, makes autobiography irrelevant in Chinese American writing since it is a literary style based on Christian confession “that celebrate[s] the process of conversion from an object of contempt to an object of acceptance”; “a Chinaman can't write an autobiography because it's not in our nature to hate ourselves.” Those who do, however, are “converts,” “spies, for white racist religion, out to Happy End us” （Chin 1985:112, 122, 124）. Second, the popularity these writers of “Ornamental Orientalia” enjoy, in Chin's view, derives precisely from their “faking” of Chinese America （Chin 1985:111, 119–120, 123）. Third, their success with white publishers is a natural “payoff” of their “selling out” （Chin 1985:122–123）.

While dismissing autobiography, Chin promotes “raging satires, polemic and slapstick comedies” as viable Chinese American generic alternatives （Chin 1985:126）. Doubtless, these literary devices have been proven effective in minority cultural independence; however, Chinese American literary strategies should not be limited to self-binding variables. The relentless necessity to negate is always a fine line to walk—its execution requires caution, for it runs the double jeopardy of being just a mirror-opposite of the writing whose tyranny it disputes and of writing into a corner territorialized for him or her. A Calibanic claim of language should therefore include a critical appropriation of generic possibilities. This critical recuperation embedded in the overall recovery of a heroic Chinese American tradition is promising in its confrontation with colonial discourse. The programmatic emergence of the tradition, we recall, arises from the specific need of our time. It results from Chin's adjusted project of cultural insertion and his invested hope in the changing Asian American diaspora.⁵ The nature of such a diaspora should dispel nativist illusions of recovering the source of tradition; the authenticity of experiencing the common cultural heritage lies exactly in the diversity of specific mediations through which the tradition is reproduced to enable change of current status. The will to change should be accompanied by an awareness not only of the mechanisms of institutional forgetting and distortion via publishing but also of the inability of such mechanisms to cover its holes. In a time when the availability of minority presses is still restricted, cultivating insurgency within the hegemonic structures, the publishing industry being one of them, could be an alternative mode of resistance. Capitalistic commercialism could, with strategic reworking, be turned into a form of minority distribution agency.

The questions of genre, tradition, and institution Chin raised above are particularly relevant to his envisioning of the role of the minority writer in relation to his writing and the community of which she or he is a self-appointed spokesperson. Underlying these is the urgent issue of responsibility, that the writer does not simply write but is obligated to write to mobilize social change. There is little question that Chin is everywhere motivated by this sense of moral integrity. However, in his fervent espousal of this moral sense, he is partially blind to the multiplicity of contemporary Chinese American reality and becomes equally susceptible to the temptation of what Sylvia Wynter calls a “dictatorship of the Minoriat” （1987:237）. A deterritorialization of cultural domination must not be preceded by a reterritorialization within the marginalized group. What we need is an “axial reality,” to use Radhakrishnan's concept, where “the trajectory of radical ethnicity can be seen in the convergence at the point where ‘axis' replaces identity” to “enable the generous production of non-authoritarian and non-territorial realities/knowledges” （1987:218）. Chinese American writers will have to form a collective subjectivity that at once embraces an inclusive solidarity and celebrates a heterogeneous production. Let us work for the day when the variety of Chinese American culture is sufficiently recognized on its own terms and the wealth of our literature becomes a cherished resource for a better world.

Notes

1. Important but not central to this essay is one of Chin's earlier definitions of Asian American sensibility as “the style of manhood” （Chin et al. 1974:xlviii）. Though concurring with criticisms of this potentially phallocentric stance, I will argue that given the circumstances of the 1970s when Chin was staging his ethnic resistance, running such a risk could be understandable. A brief historicization will tell us the validity of his position. First, for almost a century, the Chinese American in the United States was predominantly male, yet the writing of this history was absent. Second, the male experience of Chinatown bachelor societies was largely ignored. While the female members of Chinese America were regarded as assimilable, hence often appropriated to play the acceptance sweepstakes, the males were either rejected or emasculated. The popular culture's image of effeminate Chinese American men was extremely damaging. The specificity of Chinese American “manhood”—even with its precarious essence and possibility of male domination—must be judged in terms of historical material conditions. For critiques of Chin's term, see Kim 1982:180–189 and Lau 1981:93–105.

2. For Chin's discussion of how Chinatown Tongs and Chung Wah Goon fight racism, see also his essays of 1985 and 1986.

3. Chin's phrase on time is from his “Letter to Y'Bird” （1977:42–45）. That time is both race and culture specific is a theme of his short story, “Railroad Standard Time,” in The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R. R. Co. 1989:1–7.

4. Chin observes in “This Is Not an Autobiography,” “I am so fluent in your [white] culture … But you don't know our lullabies and heroic tales, the myth and drama that twangs and plucks our sense of individuality, our personal relations with the authorities and the state. You should know” （1985:118）. His further critique of Western systems of thought is evident in his introduction to “The Big Aiiieeeee!” forthcoming from New American Library.

5. According to Him Mark Lai, immigrant Chinese comprised about sixty-four percent of the Chinese American population in 1980 （Lai 1988:xi–xiii）. Chin regards his ideal audience as being “either immigrants fluent in American English and history” or “American born who were knowledgeable about the basic works of a universal Asian childhood” （Davis 1988:91）.

References

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———. 1972b. “Don't Pen Us Up in Chinatown.” New York Times. October 8, 1, 5.

———. 1975. “Confessions of a Number One Son.” In Speaking for Ourselves: American Ethnic Writing, edited by Lillian Faderman and Barbara Bradshaw, 218–227. Glenview, Illinois: Scott.

———. 1976. “Backtalk.” In Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America, edited by Emma Gee et al. Los Angeles: University of California Asian American Studies Center.

———. 1977. “Letter to Y'Bird.” Y'Bird Magazine 1 （1）:42–45.

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———. 1983. Seattle Weekly, May 4, 28–32, 34–38.

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