[In the following excerpt, Lesser calls Chin's The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R. R. Co. an “angry funny, sexy, deeply moving romp through one man's Chinatown.”]

After Stanton's measured Midwestern music, Frank Chin sings a jazzy, tumbling rhythm out of the Chinatowns of San Francisco and Oakland, careening along the rails of The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R. R. Co. （1988）, which collects eight stories about an immigrant experience very different from that of the second– and third-generation Irish in The Country I Come From. With a ranting effusiveness, a dark poetry, an agile, furious sliding between the tracks of realism and visionary reality, playwright Chin jolts us into his new world: a world that's “a mass of spasms and death throes, warm and screechy inside, itchy, full of ghostpiss”; where, every night over maj-jong, old men joke and dream of the lo fan （white） women's big armpits; where “rows and rows of Chinamans” sit for hours in “those neon-and-stucco downtown hole-in-the-wall Market Street Frisco movie houses … learning English in a hurry from Daffy Duck”; where the only thing the young can say to their elders in Cantonese is “‘I don't know what you're talking,’” and “‘Too moochie shi-yet’” is all the old command in American.

Chin's first story opens with the remembered gift of a grandfather's nineteenth-century railroad watch from a mother to son, but within a half-dozen pages it's shuttled all over the map—to the man's desertion by his “blonde white goddess” wife and their children, to all the novels “scribbled up by a sad legion of snobby autobiographical Chinatown saps,” to Chinese food and Chinese funerals, and back to a grade school music teacher, “sighing white big tits in front of the climbing promise of … Every Good Boy Does Fine.” For the most part, Chin's idiosyncratic version of “Railroad Standard Time” moves too quickly, too crazily, to be contained by a conventional narrative. Even when a story tracks a specific event, it splices in other times, other layers of experience. A man in Las Vegas to search out an aging stripper, to whom he'd brought room service as a boy working at his mother's hotel-restaurant, is also on a top-secret mission to snuff out Charlie Chan; the son visiting his dying mother is watching his own imaginary “Movie about Me,” which in this case in a western.

The theme of the connection between movies and the way we see ourselves, and a recurring central character—Dirigible, “the boy of the unpronounceable name,” translated from the Chinese for Flying Ship—help knit the rangy stories into a whole. Chin's rapid-fire language and imagery, his shifting realities, sometimes make for slippery travelling, but it's worth holding on by a strap, or the seat of your pants. This angry, funny, sexy, deeply moving romp through one man's Chinatown is about as far as you could journey from the arid rigors of recent minimalist fiction. Chin is delivering the “news and soul-searching hard words, soft words, bad words on Chinese America.” It's no wonder that a heritage so rich and rank, a present so schizoid, would produce this breathless, irreverent breed of story. Dirigible's mother accuses him of having a “filthy sneaky dirty mind.” “What kind of son are you anyway?” she accuses. “Certainly not Chinese.” Here's what flashes through Dirigible's head: “I'm not Chinese, boys, they say I'm no good! ‘Whoa up there, Chinaman, what the fuck's goin on here?’ Confucius asks. I'm having me one identity crisis, Confucius. They hide their daughters from me. They don't invite me in to supper. ‘Identity crisis, my ass,’ Confucius says. ‘Don't you know there's no such thing, boy? Don't be a sucker for Christian tragedy.’” But what he says to his mother is this: “‘Your son, Ma. I'm all yours.’”