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WHAT’S WRONG WITH FRANK CHIN?

1 April Saturday, 3pm
Curtis Choy | 2005 | 97 min | video | USA

How about too many things to count or absolutely nothing?
That is the question director Curtis Choy (Fall of the I-Hotel) poses rhetorically in his exploration into the man behind the myth, the conundrum known as Frank Chin who created his own legend, becoming the first Chinese brakeman on the railroad built by the Chinese many generations earlier. From the maverick author of such books as The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co. and Donald Duk and his play, The Chickencoop Chinaman and as editor of the seminal text on Asian American writing, Aiiieeeee! and The Big Aiiieeeee! to the old hippie radical activist championing redress for the Japanese internment, here in its glory and ignominy is the life and times of someone who refuses to “sell out,” railing against the Asian stereotype, bent on telling the truth, or as he calls it, “the real.”
And yet the beauty of this documentary is also the so-called beast of Frank Chin himself, forever shooting himself in the foot. Opinionated, to say the least, he has made enemies of fellow writers, most notably Maxine Hong Kingston, through his unrelenting tirades against the fakeness of her work leading to a fabulous war of words culminating in Kingston satirizing Chin as a monkey in her payback novel, Tripmaster Monkey. How absolutely... Frank Chin!
Through interviews, not only of Frank, but also color analysis from Asian American bigwigs like Elaine Kim, Lawson Fusao Inada and his early partner-in-crime, Shawn Wong, the portrait we see painted of this character, the self-proclaimed godfather is quite multidimensional. And so who can ask for anything more?

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