(Photograph by Ken Gaetjen)
(From Left-to-Right: Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Wong, and Chan’s daughter Jennifer)
For your interest, please checkout Hua Hsu's New Yorker article (the views expressed are Hsu's own and do not necessarily represent the views of Frank Chin's):
Proudly embracing their role as outsiders, a group of writer-activists set out to create a cultural identity—and a literature—of their own.
In August of 1972, the Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal was working on an article about theatre in New York’s Chinatown. He was focussing on the challenges faced by performers who had recently emigrated from Hong Kong and Taiwan. They were shut out of mainstream productions, and the grassroots theatre scene was still maturing. Blumenthal’s editor asked a colleague named Frank Ching, who presumably knew a bit more about that part of town, to look the piece over. Ching felt that Blumenthal cast the broader Chinese-American population as foreign. He recommended some more interesting artists to Blumenthal, who ended up including a parenthetical mention of an up-and-coming playwright named Frank Chin. Ching likely believed that he was doing a favor for Chin, whose “Chickencoop Chinaman” had opened at the American Place Theatre months earlier. At the very least, Ching must have felt that he had helped sneak an edgier name into an otherwise drab roundup. But Chin was furious to be included at all. [Continue reading here]
You'll get an interesting history on how the Aiiieeeee! book got published. Speaking of which, the 3rd edition of Aiiieeeee! just came out:
Don't forget to purchase your copy (more information here).
