[In the following review, Davis praises Chin's Gunga Din Highway.]

Frank Chin's ideal reader will have seen every movie at least from M to Wild in the Streets and be able to imagine some he makes up, like Charlie Chan in Winnemucca, Night of the Hollywood Living Dead, and, most important, Anna May Wong, featuring an all-Chinese bomber crew, ethnics as heroes; he would also be fully acquainted with Sun Tzu's Art of War, The Water Margin, all of Chinese mythology, and Cantonese opera, and would know enough about literature to recognize an extrapolation from W. H. Auden's “As I Walked Out One Evening” and an adaptation of Hemingway's “Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Knowing something about Chin's life and other writings would also be helpful.

Readers with few or none of these advantages need not feel abashed if they are willing to hold on for a ride [in Gunga Din Highway,] that takes them from the Mother Lode country of California during World War II to the coffeehouses of San Francisco in the 1950s, then to Seattle riots and a rock-flamenco-blues festival and a radical group in the late 1960s whose marching song extols Mao Tse-tung to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club song, then to off-Broadway and the ornamental orientalia of a woman writer who gets the Chinese creation story confused with Pandora's box in the 1970s, then to middle age and disillusion in the 1980s, and finally to bizarre genealogical revelations in the 1990s that do not really affect Ulysses Kwan, wandering descendant of the Chinese god of fighters and writers named after Joyce's novel, who has no home to go to. It is a good ride.

As if to refuse the stereotypic view that Chinese never say “I,” the story is told by four first-person narrators, all of whom talk with considerable energy and a wide range of allusion. It begins with the quest of Ulysses' father, Longman Kwan, to be the first Chinese to play Charlie Chan after a long career in movies as Chan's Number Four Son and as “the Chinaman who dies.” Ulysses, the third brother exiled for reasons not revealed until the final pages, rejects his father's desire to take on “the image of the perfect Chinese American to lead the yellows to build the road to acceptance towards assimilation.” Ulysses and his friends, closer than brothers, are enjoined by their Chinese schoolteacher that “you must master all the knowledge of heaven and earth … so as to see the difference between the real and the fake.” The boys feel special: “All things were possible. No guilt. We were pure self-invention.”

Ulysses, the strategist, tries to avoid becoming the grandson of Chan, but, ironically, the pseudonym of the author of The Art of War is “the Grandson.” He becomes the （figure）head of his extended family, inherits his father's only honest film, Anna May Wong, and at the end escapes from the movie-haunted vision of his conception, from Chinatown, and from the obligations that would hold him. A friend pronounces the intercultural valedictory: “Life is war. … Let the good times roll.” It is. They do.