The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co.
| Author | Frank Chin |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | short-story collection, Asian American |
| Publisher | Coffee House Press |
|
Publication date
|
1988 |
| Pages | 165 |
| ISBN |
The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co. is a 1988 short-story collection by Frank Chin that collects many of the short stories he had published in the 1970s. It won the American Book Award. The collection deals with Chinese-American history by recalling the work of early Chinese immigrants in such jobs as "coolie, railworker and launderer".
Many of the characters in these stories are, in Sau-ling Cynthia Wong's words, "elderly paralytics [who] appear to exist in a static twilight zone of living death"; she mentions the parents in "A Chinese Lady Dies", "Railroad Standard Time", and (from an early story not included in the collection) "Food for All His Dead". Wong notes that in Chin's fiction, immobility represents an unchanging and crippling Chinatown culture that must be escaped by the younger generation. As scholar Elaine H. Kim points out, Chin's metaphors for the community include "bugs, spiders, frogs, [...] a funeral parlor, and obsolete carnival, or a pathetic minstrel show." A related issue is the generational conflict between the Chinese immigrant parents and the American-born children—recall that the "elderly paralytics" were all parents. In "A Chinese Lady Dies", for instance, both the mother and the community are dying; the mother not only described as a cadaver but also actively attending all the local funerals. In "Yes, Young Daddy", Dirigible (whose nickname was, symbolically, "Dirge") has left Chinatown for college, but is drawn back into his Chinatown habits through a letter-correspondence with his younger cousin, Lena, whose father has died and who refers to Dirigible as her "young daddy" after he corrects her grammar and gives her dating advice. After a trip back to Chinatown to visit Lena, Dirigible realizes he can no longer worry about the people still in Chinatown; he must focus on himself. The narrators in these stories see through the façades of Chinatown life but are unable to do anything to help.
As in much of Chin's work, this problem is focused on the problem of masculinity, of young men feeling that the Anglo vision of Asians is always feminine and that there are no good male role models in the Chinatown communities. The male narrators of "A Chinese Lady Dies" and "Yes, Young Daddy" are surrounded mostly by women, with the fathers gone and the only other men around being the local storekeepers.
One of the ways Chin's characters escape the dead-end of Chinatown is by valorizing their ancestor's heroism in the face of oppression and poverty. The title of "The Eat and Run Midnight People" refers to the narrator's peasant ancestors in Canton Province, China: "...the get out of town eat and run folks, hungry all the time eating after looking for food". And the narrator of "Railroad Standard Time" knowingly romanticizes the life of a grandfather he never really knew.
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