The Sons of Chan by Frank Chin
"The Sons of Chan" is a thought-provoking story by Frank Chin, featured in his collection "The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co." The narrative centers on a Chinese American protagonist who grapples with the impact of media portrayals of Asian men and women on his identity and relationships. The protagonist constructs a fantastical brotherhood, The Sons of Chan, comprised of symbolic sons of the infamous character Charlie Chan, who are united by their vow to confront the damaging stereotypes represented by this figure.
In the story, the hero's personal journey intertwines with his interactions in the real world, particularly as he navigates his attraction to white women and his disconnection from his own cultural identity. His quest leads him to Las Vegas, where he aims to interview a former stripper but instead faces deeper issues surrounding his warped perceptions of love and desire shaped by American culture. A turning point occurs when he encounters an older Chinese American woman on a picket line, prompting a complex reflection on his identity and relationships, as he begins to connect with her as an individual rather than a stereotype. This encounter illustrates the protagonist's struggle to break free from the oppressive narratives that have shaped his understanding of himself and others.
On this Page
The Sons of Chan by Frank Chin
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1988 (collected in The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co., 1988)
Type of work: Short story
The Work
“The Sons of Chan” is the last story in Chin’s short-story collection The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co. Chin’s stories are the most stylistically idiosyncratic of his writings. Their prose is dense, allusive, and layered. In keeping with this individualism in style is the way that, in many of the stories, the protagonist concocts a subjective mythology. In the earlier The Chickencoop Chinaman, the hapless hero had tried to remold American pop iconography to his own ends; in the later Donald Duk, the hero locates a sustaining mythology by discovering forgotten pages from the Chinese past. In “The Sons of Chan,” however, the hero dreams up his own personalized fantasy world, which is centered on the existence of a secret brotherhood; the imaginary actions are intercut with the more realistic events of the story’s plot.
This brotherhood, The Sons of Chan, is made up of symbolic male children of Charlie Chan, that is, of Chinese American men who were crippled by media depictions of Asian sons. The vow of this order is to kill the actor who originally played Charlie Chan.
In the story, the symbolic attempt to break with the male stereotypes acquired in childhood intersects with the narrator’s attempt to face down, in the real world, an example of the female type who has been put forward as the only worthy object of desire by American popular culture. This culture never portrays desirable Asian women but instead presents a pantheon of blond, curvaceous love goddesses whose seductiveness has distorted the narrator’s own romantic life. He has had affairs with and been married to only white women, never finding himself capable of loving a fellow Chinese. In coming to Las Vegas to interview a has-been stripper for a magazine, he is also coming to grips with his own warped sexuality.
Because a major facet of the hero’s problems is that he cannot disengage his mind from these oppressive stereotypes, it is unlikely that his encounters with these archetypes will be productive. In fact, the meetings are abortive. In fantasy, he meets Chan, but he lets slip the opportunity to assassinate him; the hero cannot even arrange a meeting with the stripper.
The real moment of learning for the narrator occurs outside his fantasies. He runs into an older Chinese American woman who is on a picket line, and he feels drawn to her. Half charmed and half disgusted with her pidgin English and aging flesh, he sympathizes with her and ends up sleeping with her. Though his misgivings about himself are hardly laid to rest by this one-night stand, the episode does show him breaking with his evasive circling around media creations. He broaches the more fragile but potentially fuller relationship to someone he is meeting as a person, not as a reflection of programmed stereotypes.
Bibliography
Abe, Frank. “Born in the USA: A Story of Japanese America, 1889-1947.” Amerasian Journal 30, no. 2 (Summer, 2004): 107-113.
Cheung, King-Kok. “The Woman Warrior Versus The Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose Between Feminism and Heroism?” In The Woman Warrior: A Casebook, edited by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Lee, Rachel. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Leonard, Suzanne. “Dreaming as Cultural Work in Donald Duk and Dreaming in Cuban.” MELUS 29, no. 2 (Summer, 2004): 181-205.
Li, David Leiwi. “The Formation of Frank Chin and the Formations of Chinese American Literature.” In Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives, edited by Shirley Hune, Hyung-chan Kim, Stephen Fugita, and Amy Lin. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1991.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “The Remasculinization of Chinese America: Race, Violence, and the Novel.” American Literary History 12, nos.1/2 (Spring/Summer, 2000): 130-157.
Richardson, Susan B. “The Lessons of Donald Duk.” MELUS 24, no.4 (Winter 1999): 57-78.
Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia. “Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour? Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and the Chinese American Autobiography Controversy.” In The Woman Warrior: A Casebook, edited by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998.