[In the following review, Ho praises Chin's Gunga Din Highway, asserting that, “Chin adroitly weaves his ideological design or agenda into an intriguing saga of two generations of the Kwan family.”]

Three years after the publication of Donald Duk, Frank Chin turned out an ambitious novel of satire and protest pointedly called Gunga Din Highway. While Donald Duk attempts to reconstruct an alternative history of early Chinese Americans' heroic deeds concerning railroad construction, Gunga Din Highway deals mainly with Chinese America's predominant attitude toward Hollywood film industry's deliberate misrepresentation and underrepresentation of Chinese Americans and their culture. This attitude involves the Chinese American's adoption and internalization of the white man's cultural values with a view to being accepted by the mainstream society. In other words, Chin aims to dispel the Hollywood-molded stereotype of Charlie Chan that has come to dominate Asian American mentality.

To demonstrate the powerful influence of Charlie Chan, Frank Chin makes him the ancestor of Chinese America while parodying the Christian creation through the mouth of his Fourth Son, the father of our protagonist Ulysses Kwan:

As God the Father gave up a son in the image of the perfect white man, to lead whites to walk the path of righteousness toward salvation, and praise God, so the White Man gave up a son in the image of the perfect Chinese American to lead the yellows to build the road to acceptance toward assimilation. Ah, sweet assimilation. Charlie Chan was his name. （13）

“The road to acceptance toward assimilation” is, in all likelihood, what Frank Chin means by “Gunga Din Highway.” A recurring icon, Gunga Din is the title character of Rudyard Kipling's famous ballad, whose film version directed by George Stevens （1939） reappears near the end of the novel. He is an Indian water boy who helps the British army fight against his own people. Chin appropriates this icon to criticize Asian American artists who fake or distort Chinese tradition.

To Chin's mind, Asian Americans who achieve fame and wealth at the expense of their racial selves or cultural tradition are all Gunga Dins. Their numbers in the novel are legion, but the most conspicuous ones are Ulysses' father, his blood brother Benedict Han, and Ben's wife Pandora Toy. Longman Kwan not only plays the part of Charlie Chan's son but he also lives the part of Charlie Chan, for he has been converted to Christianity and become Americanized. If Gunga Din keeps dreaming of being admitted into the British army in India, Longman's lifelong wish is to be the first Chinese to play Charlie Chan. Predictably, his dream to earn the right of cinematic representation remains unfulfilled. As his American-born wife Hyacinth prophetically declares: “A Chinese man will star as a Chinese man in a Hollywood movie! Never!” （36）.

Unlike Ulysses, who grows up despising his father and the movies he dies in, young Benedict Han is attracted to Longman as well as to the movies in which he either dies or says “Gee, Pop!” and “Gosh, Pop!,” the two funny utterances which significantly constitute the subtitles of the two sections in Part One. Later on when Ben speaks in defense of Pandora Toy, then his fiancée, his “Gunga Din complex,” to use the term coined by Lee Yu-cheng （“The Spectre of Charlie Chan: The Problem of Representation in Gunga Din Highway,” Politics of Representation and Chinese American Literature, Taipei: Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, forthcoming）, is brought into bold relief. In “A Neurotic Exotic Erotic Orientoxic,” Pandora advertises her hatred of Chinese tradition which she says considers belching at the dinner table good manners. Moreover, she willfully distorts the Chinese men as effeminate and sexually unattractive. Frank Chin must have Maxine Hong Kingston in mind while creating the character of Pandora, for there are a number of parodic references to Kingston's works. To cite one example, Pandora later takes Ben's contemplative Christian confession and turns it into a memoir of her girlhood entitled Conqueror Woman. Viewed in this light, Gunga Din Highway is a rejoinder to Kingston's parody of Frank Chin in Tripmaster Monkey.

But Gunga Din Highway is not just a literary response to the gender conflict concerning the politics of authenticity and cultural representation. Chin adroitly weaves his ideological design or agenda into an intriguing saga of two generations of the Kwan family. In wielding his double-edged sword at the Hollywood industry which has persistently denied minorities' right of self-representation as well as at those Chinese American accomplices of white racism, Chin creates an immigrant Chinese who has achieved fame in Hollywood by playing the foolish and subservient role of Charlie Chan's Number Four Son or of The Chinaman Who Dies. But instead of centering on the Hollywood actor, the saga focuses on the odyssey of his orphan-like son Ulysses by a bigamous marriage. Apart from its rambling subplots, the novel's main plot contains a compelling portrait of Ulysses as a young artist, brakeman, hippie, actor and writer.

Born in 1940, Ulysses spends six happy years with an old white couple, who teach him, amidst the anti-Japanese sentiment, to say that he is “not a Jap kid but an American of Chinese descent.” So the boy starts off identifying himself with the mainstream society. Despite the fact that his parents showed up in 1946 to claim him as their son, he has never felt at home in the Kwan Family. For one thing, he receives virtually no sign of love from his father, who, as a womanizer, stays in Hollywood rather than at home with him and his mother Hyacinth. For another, his inability to speak the Chinese language alienates him from Chinatown.

After attending Chinese school, Ulysses cultivates an enduring friendship with Benedict Han and Diego Chang; they swear an oath of blood brotherhood, like the three brothers of the Oath of the Peach Garden: Lowe Bay, Kwan Kung, and Chang Fay. Just as Kwan Kung is the god of the arts of war, Ulysses grows up to become an artist and fighter. Under the inspiration of his second Chinese school teacher, the Horse, young Ulysses comes to realize the precariousness of his racial identity. Furthermore, the Horse encourages him to learn everything Chinese and American there is to know, “so as to see the difference between the real and the fake, the knowledge of what being neither Chinese nor bokgwai （white European Americans） means” （93）. If his mentor's words of encouragement remind the reader of Chin's “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake” （The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, New York: Meridian, 1991）, they set Ulysses on a quest for his cultural and racial identity.

In portraying the quest of his Joycean protagonist, Chin makes him stumble on one discovery after another concerning his father's sexual exploits. For example, he discovers at the age of twelve that apart from the Hero, he has yet another older brother by a woman back in China. Shortly after the death of his mother in a car accident, the thirty-three-year-old Ulysses, now the leading actor of Benedict's play Fu Manchu Plays Flamenco, learns that he was born in a foundling home. Prior to the death of their father, his China Brother Joe Joe Chu reveals to him that Junior, who was brought up by Hyacinth, is actually by another woman. But the most shocking discoveries are disclosed before Junior's death. While he is proclaimed the new male head of the Kwans in the presence of his articulate aunts and their silent husbands, Ulysses is told that the biological mother of the now dying Hero is his grandmother, who turns out to be his father's sister.

Chin's fictional time spans half a century, from early 1940s up to the present, and the fictional space not only covers major cities on both coasts like San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, New York, Roseville and Seattle but includes the islands of Hawaii. Besides its grand-scale temporal and spatial design, the novel also contains an imposing array of characters, but most of them appear only a couple of times. Chin's brilliant vitriolic prose is still tinged with angry wit, but the wrath that marks most of his earlier prose seems less naked and intense.

Another distinctive feature lies in its form. As is indicated in “Author's Note,” Chin structures the novel according to the twin stories of “Poon Goo, the Creator of Heaven” and “Nur Waw, the mother of Humanity,” and he divides it into four parts: “The Creation,” “The World,” “The Underworld,” and “Home.” “The Creation” is duly narrated by the old Fourth Son of Charlie Chan as a guest star in Hawaii shooting TV's Hawaii Five-O, an offender to Asians like The Green Berets, The Sand Pebbles, and many others. Starting from Part Two, the episodic narratives basically move in a chronological order, with more emphasis on the '50s and '60s. With the sole exception of one episode in “Home” recounted by the aged Longman, the impressive number of episodes in the three parts are recounted alternately by Ulysses and his two blood brothers. In addition to heading each episode with the name of its narrator, Chin also provides a subtitle. Some of the subtitles simply date the episodes, a feature suggestive of diaries. Others like “Throw Out a Brick to Catch Gold” （275）, “Switch the Guest and the Host at the Table” （289）, “Shedding the Skin Like the Golden Cicada” （331）, and “Borrow a Corpse to Catch a Soul” （357） are translations of well-known Chinese idioms. But it is sometimes difficult to decipher the connection between a subtitle and the episode proper.