ABSTRACT
Frank Chin (b. 1940) presents without doubt the most perceptive, most inventive literary sensibility to emerge from the post Exclusion Act Chinatown communities at the end of World War II. Novelist, playwright, essayist, actor, teacher, polemicist, raconteur, he has laid the foundation for the first critical appreciation of Asian American writing and established the terms for its definition, for its critical measure in America’s literary canon, beyond the Christian missionary autobiographies and Chinatown tour guides that represent the accepted English language descriptions of Asian American culture of the day.
