From Chinatown to Gunga Din Highway: Notes on Frank Chin's Writing Strategy

Abstract

Exploring Frank Chin's work, particularly in his latest novel Gunga Din Highway, the essay endeavors to re-situate ethnic writing in the historical specificity of its inscription in the United States as a racial polity. This cognitive remapping of the literary field as reconfigured by multiculturalist liberalism may be accomplished by examining Chin's cultural politics. Chin's mode of strategic writing interrogates the modelminority myth and the premises of cultural nationalism. While it rejects the pluralist resolution of the traditional conflicts in the Chinese diaspora, Chin's satiric impulse proposes a defamiliarization of Asian American “common sense” adequate to provoke a revaluation of the presumed conjunction of ethnicities, cultures, and nationalities in the current counter-terrorist milieu.