Masculinity, Food, and Appetite in Frank Chin’s Donald Duk and “The Eat and Run Midnight People”

Abstract

Culinary fiction occupies a significant place in Asian American literature. While several scholars in Asian American literary studies have explicated well how ethnic foodways construct ethnic or racialized identities, few have considered the relationship between food and gender constructions.' It is an established claim that our gender identities, too, are constructed by our food practices. Most Americans are familiar with culinary myths such as that red meat is a masculine food and that sugar is for women and children. For the French eaters, turnips induce 'spinelessness,' and thus are a feminine food (Fischler, 280). gendered syntax of foodways not only finds ample expression in literature but it also structures the gender identities of those populating literature. In this essay, I will investigate and critique how food and appetite come to assist Frank Chin's project, in two of his works, of restoring masculinity to the Asian American male subject. Asian American masculinity has been Chin's primary concern. His main objective in literary production is to dismantle the hegemonic, emasculating representations of Asian American males in the United States, even when his agenda sometimes must be carried out at the expense of Asian American women and gay men. Recognizing his homophobic and macho tendencies, I nevertheless value Chin's literary attempts to assault the prevailing stereotype of Asian American male sexuality. His is not only an important but a necessary project in the evolution of Asian American aesthetics. Moving away from the black masculine model (such as in his play The Chickencoop Chinaman), Chin's imagination of a proud Chinese American manhood turns to Asian and Asian American cultures in his 1991 novel Donald