[In the following review, Davis calls Chin's Donald Duk “a lively and masterful piece of storytelling.”]

The style and structure of Frank Chin's first published novel [, Donald Duk,] are more accessible than in most of the stories of The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R. R. Co. （1989） or in the plays （The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon） which first brought him attention as an angry young Chinese-American surrealist. However, the method and message are essentially unchanged in the story of Donald Duk, a Chinese-hating boy approaching manhood in San Francisco. Like many of Chin's characters, Donald immerses himself in old Hollywood films and carries on conversations with Fred Astaire; but he recovers in dream the heroic feats of his ancestors who built the Central Pacific Railroad and were deleted from white history, is recognized in kinship by the 108 heroes of The Water Margin, and comes to terms with Kwan Kung and with his father, who becomes the god of fighters and writers in what is set up to be a climactic performance of Cantonese opera. Instead, the end of the novel concentrates on Chin's recurrent theme: “Like everything else, it begins and ends with Kingdoms rise and fall. Nations come and go, and food.”

Chin seems in all his prose to write best about railroads, intellectual guerrilla warfare, and eating. His novel, however, presents a warmer picture of Chinatown life and a more hopeful vision of the possibility of development. Donald Duk can be read as an introduction to Chin's more difficult work or as an example of Asian-American narrative that takes a perspective very different from Maxine Hong Kingston's. More important, it deserves to be read on its own merits as a lively and masterful piece of storytelling.