FRANK CHIN BLOGSITE: Viet Nguyen on Frank Chin

Sunday, November 18, 2018

Viet Nguyen on Frank Chin

(photo of Viet Nguyen comes from NBC News)

In his critique of Wesley Yang's The Souls of Yellow Folk, Pulitzer-prize winning author Viet Nguyen mentioned Frank Chin...

This Asian-American legacy in politics and art is invisible to Yang, who does not even mention Frank Chin, the writer who most forcefully dealt with the agonies of Asian-American manhood. Chin, who connected racial emasculation to the treatment of Asian-Americans as objects of “racist love” (as opposed to the “racist hate” directed against African-Americans), argued that Asian-American writing had to be a form of fighting. Yang flails rather than fights, which suggests that there is something inadequate about the Asian-American legacy for him. He may not be alone. His neglect of historical forebears and his almost exclusive focus on the personal is indicative of a generational shift in Asian-American thinking; revolution is not very fashionable today.

(HT: Calvin McMillin)

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