"The Confessions of a Number One Son: The Great Chinese American Novel" by Frank Chin (University of Hawai‘i Press; $24 paper, $45 cloth)

Review by Pat Matsueda
Special to the Star-Advertiser

In the 1970s, Frank Chin co-edited the influential "Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers." He also wrote, but never published, a novel called "Charlie Chan on Maui."

Two versions of the manuscript were discovered in library collections by Calvin McMillin, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who got in touch with Chin. The current, renamed novel is the result.

The protagonist of "The Confessions of a Number One Son: The Great Chinese American Novel" is Golford Tam Lum, known as Tam. He is living on Maui in the 1970s, having left his wife, two children and writing career on the mainland. This Maui floats in a subjective space — one that merges with Tam’s self-perception as a failure, "the outcast of Wailuku town" living "the arty life of an exile" in a termite-eaten wooden house.

In a Chinese restaurant, Tam meets Jerome Thorpe, Chin’s fictional composite of the non-Asian actors, notably Warner Oland and Sidney Toler, who played the detective Charlie Chan in the movies. Thorpe’s daughter, Lily, is a 43-year-old ex-nun who strikes Tam as "a delicate schoolgirl playing a hardcase badmouth in the term play." Lily tells Tam he talks like a haole. Tam tells Lily she is beautiful, setting up the affair in a nice noir-esque tone.

Later, though, he describes her as an aged near-cadaver with "hair in worms and leeches clamped to her face" and skin like old turnips. Yet she bears a child by him.

Lily fears that Tam will harm Thorpe in retaliation for her father’s emasculating film portrayal of a Chinese male. Suspense builds as the novel becomes a darkly comic struggle with illusions, expectations and secret desires.

Tam was the protagonist of Chin’s first play, "The Chickencoop Chinaman," and Chin is also the author of "Born in the USA," a novel that decries the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II. As a critic, Chin has not spared some of his fellow Asian writers: He has accused David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan of misrepresenting and falsifying traditional Chinese lore.

In his introduction to "Confessions," McMillin writes: "Editing Frank Chin’s work is no mean feat. He possesses an inimitable style and an unmistakable cadence in his narration, which often strays into a kind of stream-of-consciousness prose, containing flashbacks within flashbacks, changes of perspective (sometimes midsentence), and all sorts of wild and innovative flourishes."

Reading Chin’s work is not an easy feat, either. He writes fluidly, creates strong characters and has a playwright’s ear for dialogue, but this novel’s combination of phantasmagoria, social satire and scatological humor can be hard to take. Seekers of literary thrills may enjoy the book, but despite Tam’s intermittent displays of tenderness and profound reflection, most readers may find it too strange and unpredictable.

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Pat Matsueda is editor of thumbnailreviews.com.