Chinatowns, Railroads and Lanterns: Frank Chin in Dialogue

          with A. Robert Lee

 LEE: Few writers, Asian American or otherwise, can quite have been so resolute in seeking to dismantle the frames and silhouettes of stereotype than Frank Chin. Charlie Chan or Fu Manchu. China Doll or Tokyo Rose. Who better has taken on the sorry wrap of “orientalism” in all its myriad forms? Who, too, and as he sees it, has more shown his hand about the role of Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and David Henry Wang in issues of Chinese representation? A veritable cause célèbre. But Frank Chin, like any seasoned professional, has long been a figure of more than mere critique or ideology. This session is meant to highlight his range, his powers and variety of contribution as a literary presence. To which end I’d like to address four of the domains in which he has been of enduring importance: the Aiiieeeee! anthologies of 1974 and 1991 which did so much, literally and figurally, to re-orient the perception of Asian American literature, and then his stories, plays, and novels. So, Frank, let me ask you about how those anthologies first came about. What did you, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Inada and Shawn Wong have in mind in first putting them together?

CHIN: Well, at the time I’d published only one short story called “Food for All His Dead” in a little magazine, and I was surprised that Jeff Chan said that Asians in San Francisco (I was in Seattle at the time) were picking me up and embracing me as a figure, as literature. He was a writer; he wanted to write. He put me together with Shawn Wong, and we found Lawson Inada. And we were and we were not writers. I had published one story, that’s all, and I didn’t deserve the attention or to be considered a real writer. I did not believe that I was the only writer or the first writer. We, the Chinese in America, had been here—at that time it was 1969-1970—since 1840. The Chinese had to have produced a writer. I was not necessarily very courageous, and I was not saying anything particularly dangerous, and yet there were no writers. We didn’t know of any writers. So I said that we three friends were going to go find some writers, and we went to the most logical place to look for writers: We went to the used bookstores. We looked under the “Cs,” the “Ls” and the “Ws.” We were Chinese and so we were looking for Chinese names, and we found them! We found that several writers had published in America by American publishers. They had published books and all these books had become forgotten.

LEE: Yet not only Chinese but Japanese names also?

CHIN: We found John Okada, a Japanese American writer. The reigning Japanese American scholar of the time said that by no standard of literature could the work of John Okada be considered literature. I read it, and it was a good book—No No Boy. We found Louis Chu. A Chinese graduate student had written a paper about me and Louis Chu, and she’d favored me over Louis Chu so I didn’t read Louis Chu for a little while and I just basked in the praise. Then finally I read Louis Chu and I realized Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea was a good book. His accomplishment was he used the English language as if it were a dialect of Chinese. All the rules of English went out, and the rules of Chinese grammar applied. And it worked! Americans could read it, they could understand the book and hopefully would realize it was a good book. But the Chinese could read it and, Wow! He used the English language as if it were a dialect of Chinese. The rhythms were right; the shape of the language, of every sentence, it just was thrilling to read. We went looking for these writers. They both were dead. Okada had died several years earlier, but Louis Chu had died just the year before. If I had read Chu when I had gotten that graduate student’s paper we might have been able to talk to him.

LEE: And other Asian American writers?

CHIN: Yes, we also found writers like Toshio Mori and Diana Chang (unfortunately we didn’t include her in the anthology). And as we were trying to get this anthology published we were refused by every publisher. They mistook the writers for our friends. They were our friends, but we didn’t include them because they were our friends. We found writers going back to 1872. And forms of writing that made us go back to school. And I said, Wow, if we had known that these writers existed our own writing would be free. I would be free of having to think about and talk about whites and all that because these other writers had taken care of and talked about it already. I’d have been free to talk about the wonders of pool or how to shoot pool—I could talk about anything I want because these other writers had taken care of the racism or all these other issues.

But then we were to encounter the racism again because the editors just did not recognize Asian America as existing at all. They were treating us as if we had just landed, and that enraged me. We finally managed to find a publisher for Aiiieeeee!. It was a black publisher: Howard University Press in Washington D.C. But unfortunately Howard University Press itself got a new publisher; it was a guy who had been with the diplomatic service and he told us to get out and take our books with us. And so we found another publisher, a better publisher. So Aiiieeeee! went through three publishers, and finally found a semi-permanent home with Penguin (the books is out of print now).

LEE: A number of times you’ve lamented the absence of a working roster of literary critics in connection with Asian American writing. Why especially?

CHIN:  We said we weren’t critics. We were trying to stimulate Asian America to come forward and criticize us. Between the writer and the reader there is the critic, and the critic serves a function. The knowledgeable Asian American critic, as we imagined him, would say, “This is fake or it’s real; this is good or it’s bad.” The critic would free us from having to brag and plead with the public, from having to plead with ignorant people. It became clear that not only did we not have critics, we didn’t have magazines—real magazines, not these vanity magazines that we have all over the place. As time went on, it increased. Yes, we did stimulate writers. Yes, there are more Chinese American, Japanese American and Korean American writers. But there are still no critics. There are still no magazines. And that’s where we are now. We have these seminars, but there is still no magazine. And without a magazine, without critics… There really is no Asian American literature without Asian American critics. Without Asian American critics that know, that can say from their heart and especially their head that the basis of this or that story is Asian. What I mean is that if someone came out with a book that asserted that George Washington was a bad man because he failed to defend women’s rights in 1776 and failed to get women’s rights into the Constitution and for that reason he was killed by John Wilkes Booth. You know, a critic would say: This is wrong: this book is phony, not American; this book is a racist book against America. Well, we have no critics, no knowledgeable critics who know Asian culture. There will not be another Aiiieeeee! because we all have split off. We all really want to write. And with or without critics we will write.

LEE: Let me link the writing in the anthologies to your own writing. The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco RR Co came out in 1988. I think it’s fair to say that all the stories you were working on in the 1970s?

CHIN: That’s right.

LEE: One of the very best of these, for my money, and the not least for how it brings out your skills of voice and image, is “Railroad Standard Time.” You can blush quietly in the corner while I rhapsode a little. I like it so much because first of all I learned a great deal, which is one kind of tribute to what you’ve just been saying. But I also like  that it’s a marvelously well-threaded piece of storytelling. Those who know the story will not need reminding that it involves this railroad watch as the perfect mnemonic device, a sort of memory stimulus, for both the grandfather who worked the railroad and the grandmother who passes it on to the narrator. A kind of intimate, delicate conversation takes place, symptomatically no doubt, in the family kitchen where the clock is passed on as a piece of heritage. The story speaks of “Words I’d never heard before.” There is a rich working of the clock as not only time in general but the railroad, space, the ghosts of past family mealtime gatherings. A composite scene. That, among other things, frees us as readers from mere plot-line. This is a theater of memory, a play of voice. And the scene plays also against the present-tense of the break-up of the narrator’s marriage to his wife Barbara and the moving farewell to the son and daughter. You also have your charming, and engagingly un-reverent slaps at dear old Pardee Lowe and Jade Snow Wong. You even have Mrs. Morales, the large-breasted high school music teacher, recalled as – what else? – having taught the narrator “Home on the Range.” So let me ask you about how you went about constructing this story, the irritation, even anger, at stereotype on the one hand, the craft of writing on the other.

CHIN: Whew, wow. What a question. Well, I began with memory. When I was in my 20s I went to work on the railroad, first as a railroad clerk. In the railroad hierarchy clerks were the lowest of the low because we stayed on the ground, we never rode, we never got in the engines, we never got on the caboose. The brakemen, the conductors, and the engineers were the royalty of the railroad. They were the cowboys, the John Waynes. They had the boots, the lanterns, the mitts that they signaled with, and they conducted themselves on the railroad yards as the kings. And every time we would make way for them. I was called the mudhop. That’s what they thought of us, that we were always on the ground. I was like the guy who, as you see in the Western movies, is always sweeping up the horse shit; the town drunk. But even then, even as the town drunk, I loved the railroad. I would talk to the car knockers—the guys who’d hit the wheels and test them if they’re solid or repair the defective air hoses—and they’d recommend these books on the railroad, and I read these books. I just loved the railroad. And I knew that the Chinese worked on the railroad. And I knew that the Chinese were never paid to ride the engines or the cabooses, and I was determined I was gonna ride the engines. I was gonna become a brakeman, by God! And it happened. And I was so proud. “Goddamn, I’m a brakeman on a real railroad!” And I’m riding the engines. “Oh Grandpa!”

My grandfather was in the steward service, and he collected railroad watches. And wow, I said: “Grandpa, I made it and I’m being paid to ride the railroad—your railroad.” The Central Pacific became the Southern Pacific. Oh, I was so proud. 

But I had my comeuppance, from a conductor. The engines began to move. It’s always quiet when you start up the engines. It’s when you start to move the engines you feel the shock of the links of the cars closing up—koon katoong katoong—we’re moving. And then you feel the stress, you feel it in your bodies, the energy through the engine that is now pulling all the cars. They’ve closed the links and we’ve begun to move. And as we begun to move, there’s a sigh of relief. And as we begin the conductor, a third generation railroader, said, “Chin, you know what I did last night?” He’s gonna tell me what he did last night. Oh boy, this is so railroad I can barely contain myself. I said, No, what did you do last night? He said, “I grouted my bathroom floor.” And it occurred to me, God, I admire him for working on a railroad, when he thinks he’s a family man. He thinks he’s a middle class family man living at home when our life is here on the railroad. We’re gonna work 18 hours, then we’re gonna sleep at the other end, then we’re gonna work 18 hours back before going home to sleep to await another call. But he really thinks he has this nice comfy middle class life with his wife and he just grouted the floor. But nobody thinks of us that way.

Another time, another railroader changes into his middle class clothes and tells me he’s going to deal dope out of his garage in his middle class home. Wow, he deals dope!

Yes, the railroaders have lives and imagination too. And I realized that I was caught up in the romance of the railroad, that I would not work on the railroad forever, that I was just gathering memories. People who worked on the railroad were people like him, who dreamt of grouting their bathroom floors, who would divorce his wife in a couple of years, marry another woman, grout her floor…

I guess part of the railroad dream caught me too—that I was a normal son, briefly. And so I wrote about the railroad, edited it down because it was too long, and gradually I focused on the watch. When my grandmother died, the family distributed the watches to all the grandkids. And all the grandkids took the watches apart and destroyed them. But I kept my Elgin. When I worked in the railroad I wore my Elgin watch, even though it was illegal. It was the old railroad standard, something like 10 jewels, and the current railroad standard was 18 jewels. And if you had anything less than 18 jewels then it was an illegal watch and you couldn’t go to work. And I had an illegal watch. But I wore grandfather’s watch and it made me so proud.

LEE: Let’s step back from there to the plays – The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of The Dragon? What first drew you to theater?

CHIN: I was working with a group of acidheads on Maui. The head carpenters discovered they were God on acid. And not a joint God, but were the one and only God. I wrote a play and entered the East West Players playwright’s contest. I shared the prize with Momoko Iko and one her plays set in Heart Mountain Concentration Camp in Wyoming. The East West Players couldn’t do the play. The language intrigued them but their actors couldn’t handle the shifts of voice. I thought the bplay was dead. Ishmael Reed sent the play to Harry Belafonte Enterprises in New York, and Chiz Schultz, a producer at Harry Belafonte Enterprises, sent it to Wynn Handman, head of The American Placer theater and invited me to rewrite the play to fit two hours. I’d sit and Wynn would inflict my words on me. He’d read and I’d listen. Chickencoop had two readings, in eight weeks and was treated to a full production. I was a mighty playwright and I thought I had hooked the actors into wanting to work with me again. Yes and no. They wanted to do my work if the American Place produced it, but the Asian actors really had no stomach for playing Asian characters.

hhThe Year of The Dragon is my second and final play. I learned that Asian actors aren’t actors and don’t want to be Asian. They play stereotypes fine. Yellows like playing the white image of the Chinese and Japanese in front of whites. But playing yellows, written by a yellow, confuses them. I was hoping to hook yellow actors and feed each other create Asian American theater, as James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, long recognized as the best writers of English in the world, insisted they weren’t English and objected to the portrayal of the Irish, in English theater. They started the Dublin Playhouse with Lady Gregory’s money, and the playhouse produced John Millington Synge who comes form an island smaller than New York but it led to Playboy of The Western World along with Brendan Behan and Sean O’Casey.

The Asian actors regard themselves a “personalities,” “types,” “stars,” not actors. Mako at East West Players tried to teach the actors to be actors, but the theater;s response was to fire him. Mako won an Oscar for his role as Steve McQueen’s apprentice in The Sand Pebbles. Mako was trained at the Strasberg and in the Stanislavsky method. Asian actors, unlike Mako, and one or two people who – whether they can act or not, learned to research their parts and which, in an Asaian American theater company means to inform their art with their racial activism…which is what whites do. Take Conrad Veidt, that Nazi Bogart plugs in Casablanca. He was intensely anti-Nazi but played Nazies you hated.

LEE:  Did you have an eye on any actor from Chickencoop for a part in Dragon? For Fred Eng, say?

CHIN: Randy..Randall Duk Kim was a brilliant Tam Lum in Chickencoop, and just the sight of him making a face at someone onstage brought several different thoughts swirling for the drain. A tourist guide in his forties that the audience has to believe had the talent to be a writer. It has to show in his spiels delivered solo. It’s easy, easier, to play him a no-talent cry-baby.                

LEE: Both these plays deal in issues of Chinese heroism as against passivity. What in figures like Tam Lum and Fred Eng were you most concerned to address?

CHIN: I don’t see either of them a representing anything, but they’re Chinese from the San Francisco Bay Area and they know what whites think of them. They represent the state of Chinese America at a specific time. The Chickencoop Chinaman echoes Black civil rights from Oakland, a Chinaman town. The Year of The Dragon was 1976, the year of the American BiCentennial. I knew that fact from all the BiCentennial hoopla grinding up the pitch in 1972. Critics never noticed the coincidence between the Year of the Dragon and the BiCentennial. They seemed new to the common language of English or ignorant of American history.   

LEE: I’d like next to move on to the novels. What has now become a famous quotation opens Donald Duck. “Donald Duk does not want to laugh about his name forever. There has to be an end to this.” Two questions. What kind of book did you think you were writing when you wrote it? What was your thinking in connection with the lantern material that closes the book?

CHIN: When I sat down to write Donald Duk—and the book came to me very fast because I thought it was a children’s book—I had a reputation for being angry. (audience laughs) Story by Frank Chin: “Oh no, angry!” I wanted to show them that there was nothing to be afraid of, so I’d write this nice children’s book and all the issues would be there in the book. Everything that I’m supposed to be angry about would be in the book. I’d show Chinese Americans that there’s nothing to be afraid of: you can talk about white racism, you can talk about stupid whites and smart whites, you can talk about non-acceptance. You can talk about it! And it came out and it was taken as an angry book! In San Francisco it was said to be too angry to be a children’s book. Jeeesh (frustration).

And the scene of the lanterns, well that came to me—it just came to me. On the 15^th day of New Years, the traditional Lantern Festival, you light a lot of lanterns. There’s even a competition, and you’re supposed to walk with your lover and look at the lights. So I thought, let’s make this American lanterns; let’s use model airplanes. It was a plot device. One of the plot devices was the father is making rubber-powered model airplanes, from kits, with the family. Come the 15^th day he will go out with all these model airplanes, he will wind them up, and fly them from Angel Island and burn them. I had to burn my lanterns. It just seemed right. And I think it was right.

LEE: It was right. I think it’s a terrific ending myself. Those who know the book will recognize how it threads how the lantern scene acts as a sharp yet wonderfully lyric way to bring the various themes to a point of rest. Moving on to Gunga Din Highway – this, perhaps more than any of your fiction, has to be a tour de force. In part that has to do with its length and width. But I want to pursue an almost  technical question in this connection. A Chinese audience knows better than any in the  world how you’ve used the Poon Goon and Nu Wa mythologies. You call up1860s migrancy. You invoke California railtrack memory. You move forward to Berkeley and the 1960s and with it the whole identity politics issue, and so forth. This all  makes for a rich weave, an encompassing and composite piece of writing. We steer  not merely between present and past, but between a complexity of pasts and their equally complex footfalls into the present. Memory plays a key role, voices both inward and outward. Friendships, then and now, and which link Hawaii to the West Coast, come into play. How did you go about constructing – holding together -- those different layers and time-schemes? Did you feel at any point it was getting away from you?

CHIN: Well, I have to admit that I used as my model Monkey and The Three Kingdoms. So there are three characters: Ulysses, Diego and Benedict. These are takeoffs on Lowe Bei, Kwan Kung (Kwan Yu) and Chang Fei. And I began with the myths of Poon Goo and Nur Waw. This was a kind of Freudian literary interpretation (not necessarily a psychological interpretation) of the myths, a rendering of them. I said that Poon Goo and Nur Waw were brother and sisters, as Jack and Jill were brother and sister. They had sex! That’s what that’s about, an old Freudian interpretation. Poon Goo comes from some place, that place is not defined. He hits an empty spot in empty space. He breaks out of the egg, and makes the yolk of the egg the earth, the white of the egg the sky. A thousand years go by. He becomes part of the earth and the universe. One eye becomes the sun, one eye becomes the moon, etc. And then after the earth is settled down, Nur Waw comes from some place—and it’s suggested that she comes from the same place that Poon Goo comes from. Obviously they are brother and sister. She comes down from the earth. Sex! Once again, sex! She creates, in seven days, the chicken, dog, horse—all the animals that serve man. And on the seventh day she creates man out of mud takes too long, so she puts a bamboo rod into the mud and begins flicking around. And wherever the mud hits become s a family. If the mud hits a tree that becomes the tree family; if the mud hits the grass that becomes the grass family; if the mud hits a leaf that becomes the leaf family. You all know the story.

Doing Monkey and Three Kingdoms was too much, so I compressed it and did a normal novel. In my head I knew there were references to Monkey and references to Three Kingdoms, and that my Chinese readers would appreciate it—and I hope they did. Once again, my three brothers (not the three brothers in San Guo), because they are American, divide and betray each other and Chinese America falls apart. Does it? It ends with the new immigrants arriving and Diego Chan employs them (as my friend did in real life) as cooks and gives them the upper floor of an apartment. I saw this (in my friend’s life) and decided I’d use that. I end as I began, essentially. Will it happen again, I don’t know.

LEE: It would be wrong to come to a close without some due recognition of your  discursive work. That, more than anywhere, is best represented in Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays. Few pieces better hit the mark, for me, than the title essay – the extraordinarily useful parallel you explore between a kind of ancestralism going back to Three Kingdoms and the Tongs and current Los Angeles Asian gangs. To me it’s a great trove of comparative perspective. How important has it been to seek to “work” the present through the shadow or silhouette of the past?

CHIN: I knew I was writing semi-autobiographical. And I knew that the autobiography is not a Chinese form. And so working with time and working with history, I always thought that the American autobiography—me me me, I did this, I did that—was an avoidance of history and a substitute for history. I did not want to avoid history. I did not want to write a history of myself. By juggling the time thing and researching the facts of history and making the essay about Cambodian Chinese gangs in San Diego—it was as much about the gangs in San Diego. And luckily at the time I’d chosen, because the gangs were just forming, if they were established as they were in San Francisco, I would be dead. But as they were just forming, I could kind of get in at the beginning before they killed too many people. But still they gave me a little trouble, but that was all right. It was an attempt to do everything that everybody else was doing, but I wanted to expand it.

LEE: A great pleasure to hear Frank talking about writing. If a documentary film can take “What’s wrong with Frank Chin?” so can we. The answer is at once everything, some things, and not a single thing. In each of these respects, and across a considerable literary career, he in fact has been about the craft and challenge of a writer’s business. His has been a contentious voice, a public voice. It has also been intimate, a poet-storyteller’s voice. We owe a debt.