The Chickencoop Chinaman

Last updated
The Chickencoop Chinaman
Written by Frank Chin
CharactersTam
Kenji
Lee
Charley Popcorn
Tom
Robbie
The Lone Ranger
Tonto
Hong Kong Dream Girl
Date premieredMay 27, 1972 (1972-05-27)
Place premiered The American Place Theatre
Original language English
Subject Asian American identity
Genrecomedy
SettingOakland area of Pittsburgh, late 1960s

The Chickencoop Chinaman is a 1972 play by Frank Chin. It was the first play written by an Asian American to have a major New York production. [1]

Contents

Story

Tam Lum, a Chinese American filmmaker working on a documentary about a black boxer named Ovaltine, has arrived in Pittsburgh to visit Ovaltine's father, Charley Popcorn. In Pittsburgh, he stays with his childhood friend, the Japanese American Kenji, who lives in Pittsburgh's black ghetto with his girlfriend Lee and her son. In Act I, Tam has just arrived and is catching up with Kenji. In Act II, the two men meet with Charley and bring him back to the apartment, where Lee's ex-husband has shown up to take her back. These scenes are intercut with fantasy sequences, such as one in which Tam meets his childhood hero, the Lone Ranger.

Characters

First performance

The American Place Theatre, 27 May 1972. Directed by Jack Gelber; scenery by John Wulp; costumes by Willa Kim; lighting by Roger Morgan. With Randall Duk Kim, Sab Shimono, Sally Kirkland, Anthony Marciona, Leonard Jackson, Calvin Jung, and Joanna Pang in the lead roles.

Reception

Although the play won the 1971 East West Players playwrighting contest, the reviews of the New York production were mixed. Positive reviews came from Edith Oliver at The New Yorker and Jack Kroll at Newsweek , but neither Clive Barnes nor Julius Novick of The New York Times enjoyed it. A middle-of-the-road review came from The Village Voice's Michael Feingold, who liked the characters, the situations, and much of the writing, but felt that the monologues were "hot air, disguised as Poetry". [2] Audiences were critical too, as author Betty Lee Sung points out that many members left midway through. [2]

Themes

The play is a direct attack on the John Chinaman stereotype that continued to affect Chinese American men [1] and an attempt to investigate what Chin perceives to be the cultural emasculation of Asian American by racist stereotypes. [3] The main character of the play, Tam Lum, is a Chinese American filmmaker who, as a boy in search of heroic Chinese American models listened to the Lone Ranger radio shows and believed that the Ranger wears a mask because he is in fact a Chinese man intent on bringing "Chinaman vengeance on the West". [4] Seeing the men of his parents' generation as unheroic—he used to care for an elderly dishwasher who wore his underwear in the bath out of fear of being watched by old white women—Tam uses Ovaltine as his model for masculinity; but he finds out later that Ovaltine had made up his stories about Charley being his father, and he also learns that the old man he cared for (whom everyone else assumes is his father) was in fact extremely dignified and loved to watch boxing matches. As scholar Jinqi Ling notes, Tam's inability to see [the dishwasher's] dignity represents not only the historical and cultural effects of racism on Asian American men, but also the role of language and story in capturing and passing on a new, heroic Asian American masculinity. [3] As scholar Elaine H. Kim notes, Tam is only good for his ability to out-talk people, and even though he has given up his self-delusions and let go of the idea that he could be like the black men he admires, he will remain so until he is able to connect his masculinity to his heritage; in the meantime, he is, as Kim says, "still experimenting". [5]

The character of Tam is in many ways the continuation of such earlier Chin characters as Johnny from "Food for All His Dead", Freddy (later renamed Dirigible) from "Yes, Young Daddy" and Dirigible from "Goong Hai Fot Choy". [5] As in those stories (some of which are available in revised versions in The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co. ), he looks outside of Chinatown—and outside Asian America—for models. But everywhere he looks, the models of fatherhood are absent or ambiguous: he rarely mentions his own children; his best friend Kenji seems to be refusing to acknowledge having a child of his own; Ovaltine has fabricated stories about his father (who was in fact only his manager). The only male character in the play who seems eager to embrace fatherhood is Tom, a Chinese American who has bought into the model minority myth of Asian American while, at the same time, arguing that Tam needs to accept that they are Chinese rather than Americans. [6] Chin has described Tam as the "comic embodiment of Asian-American manhood", a character designed to capture the experience of Asian American men—not just their circumstances, but their language, their symbols, their humor and their mythology. [5] Yet critics such as Kim feel that Chin has not quite achieved his own goal, and that perhaps Chin has too readily accepted an oppressive definition of masculinity. [5]

Chin's use of the Lone Ranger signifies his interest in the history and legends of the Old West, especially the contributions and sufferings of the Chinese immigrants who helped build the railroads and who became the first Chinese Americans; Chin considers their stories to be as important to Chinese American history as those of the Chinese classic about oppressed rebels who challenge the Emperor's authority, Outlaws of the Marsh . [4] At the same time, his use of language represents his admiration for the Black Power movement and their fight against institutionalized racism and white dominance; his characters speak an English that is inflected with both Cantonese and black vernacular elements. [7] David Leiwei Li points out that this language reflects Tam's rebellion against the Orientalist American construction of Asian American and wants "to claim a Chinese American language that is self-referential and that will relate to others", and that he begins to realize by the end of the play that he needs to turn to the history and stories about Chinese America, such as those stories of the Old West he had heard from his grandmother; [8] in this way, Chinese American men will no longer be passively created by American Orientalism, but will gain the ability to create themselves. [9] In her introduction to the printed edition of the play, Dorothy Ritsuko McDonald connects Tam's use of language with Chin's desire to capture "the rhythms and accents of Chinese America," in accordance with Tam's wish to be taken seriously as neither Chinese or assimilated American, but as a synthesis of the two: an American whose ancestors were not allowed into the mainstream of American history. [2]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Keye Luke</span> American actor (1904–1991)

Keye Luke was a Chinese-American film and television actor, technical advisor, artist, and a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild. He portrayed Lee Chan, the "Number One Son" in the Charlie Chan films, the original Kato in the 1939–1941 Green Hornet film serials, Brak in the 1960s Space Ghost cartoons, Master Po in the television series Kung Fu, and Mr. Wing in the Gremlins films. He was the first Chinese-American contract player signed by RKO, Universal Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and was one of the most prominent Asian actors of American cinema in the mid-20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Ahn</span> American actor (1905–1978)

Philip Ahn was an American actor and activist of Korean descent. With over 180 film and television credits between 1935 and 1978, he was one of the most recognizable and prolific Asian-American character actors of his time. He is widely regarded as the first Korean American film actor in Hollywood. He is not to be confused with Philson Ahn, another screen actor who broke into films in the late 1930s; Philson was Philip's younger brother.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Chin</span> American author and playwright

Frank Chin is an American author and playwright. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian-American theatre.

Randall Duk Kim is an American actor. On stage, he is known both for his extensive classical repertoire and as an interpreter of the works of playwright Frank Chin. He is the co-founder of the American Players Theatre. To film audiences, he is best known for his portrayal of the Keymaker in The Matrix franchise, and as the voice of Master Oogway in the Kung Fu Panda franchise. He is an Obie Award winner and an Outer Critics Circle Award nominee.

Stereotypes of East Asians in the United States are ethnic stereotypes found in American society about first-generation immigrants and their American-born descendants and citizenry with East Asian ancestry or whose family members who recently emigrated to the United States from East Asia, as well as members of the Chinese diaspora whose family members emigrated from Southeast Asian countries. Stereotypes of East Asians, analogous to other ethnic and racial stereotypes, are often erroneously misunderstood and negatively portrayed in American mainstream media, cinema, music, television, literature, video games, internet, as well as in other forms of creative expression in American culture and society. Many of these commonly generalized stereotypes are largely correlative to those that are also found in other Anglosphere countries, such as in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, as entertainment and mass media are often closely interlinked between them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lin (surname)</span> Surname list

Lin is the Mandarin romanization of the Chinese surname written 林, which has many variations depending on the language and is also used in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tetsu Komai</span> Japanese-American actor (1894–1970)

Tetsu Komai, also known as Tetsuo Komai, was a Japanese-born American actor, known for his minor roles in Hollywood films.

Chinaman is an offensive term referring to a Chinese man or person, or widely a person native to geographical East Asia or of perceived East Asian ethnicity. The term is noted as having pejorative overtones by modern dictionaries. Its derogatory connotations evolved from its use in pejorative contexts regarding Chinese people and other East Asians, as well as its grammatical incorrectness which resembles stereotypical characterizations of Chinese accents in English-speaking associated with discrimination. The usage of the term Chinaman is strongly discouraged by Asian American organizations.

<i>Eat a Bowl of Tea</i> Book by Louis Chu

Eat a Bowl of Tea is a 1961 novel by American writer Louis Chu. It was the first Chinese American novel set in Chinese America. Because of its portrayal of the "bachelor society" in New York's Chinatown after World War II, it has become an important work in Asian American studies. It has been cited as an influence by such authors as Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston. It was made into a film of the same name by Wayne Wang in 1989.

<i>The Year of the Dragon</i> (play) Play written by Frank Chin

The Year of the Dragon is a play written by Chinese American playwright Frank Chin. It is one of the first plays by an Asian American playwright to be produced on a mainstream New York stage. It premiered in 1974 at the American Place Theatre, and starred Randall Duk Kim, who had played the lead in Chin's earlier play, The Chickencoop Chinaman. The rest of the cast included Pat Suzuki, Tina Chen, Conrad Yama, Lilah Kan, Doug Higgins, and Keenan Shimizu.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asian American Arts Centre</span> New York City arts organization

The Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC) is a non-profit organization located in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. Founded in 1974, it's one of the earliest Asian American community organizations in the United States. The Arts Centre presents the ongoing developments between contemporary Asian & Asian American art forms and Western art forms through the presentation of performance, exhibitions, and public education. AAAC's permanent collection, which it has accumulated since 1989, contains hundreds of contemporary Asian American art works and traditional/folk art pieces. The organization also has an Artists Archive which documents, preserves, and promotes the presence of Asian American visual culture in the United States since 1945. This includes the East Coast, especially the greater New York area; the West Coast; and some artists in Canada, Hawaii, and overseas. The artists include Asian Americans producing art, Asian artists who are active in the United States, and other Americans who are significantly influenced by Asia. Pan-Asian in outlook, the Arts Centre's understanding of 'Asia' encompasses traditions and influences with sources ranging from Afghanistan to Hawaii.

Chinese American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of Chinese descent. The genre began in the 19th century and flowered in the 20th with such authors as Sui Sin Far, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lee Tung Foo</span> American actor

Lee Tung Foo was a Chinese American Vaudeville performer born in California who performed in English, German, and Latin. He became a film actor later in his life.

<i>Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers</i>

Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers is a 1974 anthology by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, members of the Combined Asian American Resources Project (C.A.R.P.). It helped establish East Asian American literature as a field by recovering and collecting representative selections from Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans from the past fifty years—many of whom had been mostly forgotten. This anthology included selections from Carlos Bulosan, Diana Chang, Louis Chu, Momoko Iko, Wallace Lin, Toshio Mori, John Okada, Oscar Peñaranda, Sam Tagatac, Hisaye Yamamoto, Wakako Yamauchi, many of whom are now staples in East Asian American literature courses. Because of this anthology and the work of C.A.R.P., many of these authors have been republished. At that time, however, they received little attention from publishers and critics because they did not subscribe to popular stereotypes but depicted what Elaine H. Kim calls the "unstereotyped aspects of Asian American experience". The "aiiieeeee!" of the title comes from a stereotypical expression used by East Asian characters in old movies, radio and television shows, comic books, etc. These same stereotypes affected the anthology itself: when the editors tried to find a publisher, they had to turn to a historically African-American press because, as Chin states:

The blacks were the first to take us seriously and sustained the spirit of many Asian American writers.... [I]t wasn't surprising to us that Howard University Press understood us and set out to publish our book with their first list. They liked our English we spoke [sic] and didn't accuse us of unwholesome literary devices.

<i>The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co.</i>

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".

<i>China Men</i> 1980 collection of stories by Maxine Hong Kingston

China Men is a 1980 collection of "stories" by Maxine Hong Kingston. It is a sequel to The Woman Warrior with a focus on the history of the men in Kingston's family. It won the 1981 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

2013–14 Hong Kong Senior Challenge Shield is the 113th season of one of the oldest football knockout competitions in Asia, Hong Kong Senior Challenge Shield. Unlike last two seasons, the competition will be played in single-legged tie.

<i>The Iron Moonhunter</i> 1977 childrens picture book by Kathleen Chang

The Iron Moonhunter is a short children's picture book published in 1977, written and illustrated by the activist Kathleen Chang. The book purportedly retells a Chinese-American myth set in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the construction of the First transcontinental railroad, starting in the fall of 1866.

People of Chinese descent have lived in Colorado since the mid-nineteenth century, when many immigrated from China for work. Chinese immigrants have made an undeniable impact on Colorado's history and culture. While the Chinese moved throughout the state, including building small communities on the Western Slope and establishing Chinatown, Denver, the presence of Chinese Coloradans diminished significantly due to violence and discriminatory policies. As of 2018, there were 45,273 Chinese Americans living in Colorado. 

References

  1. 1 2 Lee, A. Robert (2003). "Eat a Bowl of Tea: Fictions of America's Asia, Fictions of Asia's America". Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions. University Press of Mississippi. p.  142. ISBN   1-57806-645-X.
  2. 1 2 3 McDonald, Dorothy Ritsuko (1981). "Introduction". The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon: Two Plays by Frank Chin . Seattle: University of Washington Press. pp. xiv–xix. ISBN   0-295-95833-2.
  3. 1 2 Ling, Jinqi (1997). "Identity Crisis and Gender Politics: Reappropriating Asian American Masculinity". In King-Kok Cheung (ed.). An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Cambridge University Press. pp. 317–319. ISBN   0-521-44790-9.
  4. 1 2 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia (1993). "The Politics of Mobility". Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance . Princeton: Princeton University Press. pp.  147–148. ISBN   0-691-01541-4.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Kim, Elaine H. (1982). "Chinatown Cowboys and Warrior Women: Searching for a New Self-Image". Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. pp.  180–189. ISBN   0-87722-260-6. Note that Kim was working with the original version of "Yes, Young Daddy", with Fred as the character's name.
  6. ↑ Act II, scene 4.
  7. ↑ Sau-ling Wong, Cynthia (1997). "Chinese American Literature". In King-Kok Cheung (ed.). An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Cambridge University Press. pp. 48–49. ISBN   0-521-44790-9.
  8. ↑ Act II, scene 4
  9. ↑ Li, David Leiwei (1992). "The Production of Chinese American Tradition: Displacing American Orientalist Discourse". In Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (ed.). Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. pp.  323–324. ISBN   0-87722-936-8.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.