Frank Chin?
Synopsis
setting, reading from his play The Year Of The Dragon. Actor George Takei
continues the same character's lines, performing in the PBS/Theater in
America series. Chin mocks a television broadcast of Flower Drum Song. He
sits on the floor writing at a small computer, using an unusual two-handed
mouse technique as a TV and radio blare. His writing style is discussed and
critiqued by his contemporaries. He reveals his aspirations to be an artist. In
1969, he arrives at the birth of Ethnic Studies to teach and produce guerilla
theater. He begins the quest to discover other Asian American writers,
culminating in the publication of the collection of AA writing, Aiiieeeee! In
1972, he becomes the first Chinese American playwright to have two plays
produced in New York. He forms his own theater company in San Francisco,
hoping to recreate Dublin's Abbey Theatre for a young Asian America. He is
dismissed in a power struggle. In his endlessly beeping car, Chin denies
using the term "sell-out", and proceeds to insult the sell-outs. His uniquely
theatrical wedding ceremony is punctuated with a retelling of the legend of
The Iron Moonhunter. Chin thanks the National Endowment for the Arts by
lecturing them about race relations. The first Asian American Writers
Conference is held in 1975, a landmark event; Chin reads as a who's who of
AA writers appears. He takes on the falsification of texts as he lays into
Maxine Kingston's popular novel with an intense exchange of letters. She
confesses her re-invention of the heroic tradition, and we see the actual
original story of the woman warrior. Kingston exacts her revenge by
novelizing Chin into a monkey. He teaches at UCLA, and chides the class for
not being able to write. The students are clearly afraid as he rants about
Charlie Chan. Back on the road, Chin explains why the Chinese hate
Christians. The transition to night finds us inside the D.H.Hwang Theater,
where The Year of The Dragon is being performed for the first time in 20
years. He clarifies the fine points of Chinese mythology, and winds up
enigmaticly wandering in a siren-filled nightscape. He suffers a stroke in 1999
and struggles to re-achieve fighting trim. He digs up the dirt on the Japanese
American Citizens League's complicity in the roundup and encampment of
American-born Japanese during World War 2, and unveils their exalted leader
as a government spy. 30 years later, Frank Chin publishes his documentary
novel Born in the USA: A Story of Japanese America, 1889-1947, and he
reads an ominous 9/ll-relevant passage from it. A roadtrip through California
gold country brings us to Chin's little-known childhood and his family's secret.