The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R Co.
Short stories by Frank Chin

Winner, American Book Award

"The stories in Frank Chin’s first collection use fantasy, obscenity, slapstick, and acute introspection to describe the frenzied search for identity of a Chinese American artist."
- The New York Times Book Review

"A gifted writer and electric sensibility, Frank Chin is part Chinese Lenny Bruce, spritzing a comedy of bitter alienation, and part Number One Son, drawn to the traditional Chinese values - family, duty - which have been diluted by American Culture."
- Jack Kroll, Newsweek

"There can be no question about the ability of the gifted, passionate, funny Mr. Chin. His characters are playable, complex, always convincing, and the words they speak are theirs and theirs alone."
- Edith Oliver, The New Yorker

The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co. embodies the complex fate of a Chinese-American artist struggling and surviving in the social and cultural vortex of late twentieth century America. In the opening story, "Railroad Standard Time," the narrator sits in a Chinatown kitchen, talking to his mother following his grandmother’s funeral, fondling her final gift to him, his own "Chinese heirloom," an American-made railroad watch.

In "The Chinatown Kid," a Chinese man who has married an American woman and has been rejected by his family, watches his son sleep, wondering in what language the boy dreams. White food, white music, and white stereotypes surround and provoke the characters in these stories, giving the reader a mounting sense of alienation.

In its relentless pace and unflinching sincerity, The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co. takes the reader inside the Chinese-American experience, reflecting the pain, and at times, the hysterically funny paradoxes faced by those who, because of their color, can never quite dissolve into the "melting pot."

Frank Chin’s plays have been performed at The American Place Theatre, and The Year of the Dragon was produced on public television. He has given writing and theater workshops at Michigan State, University of Michigan, Yale, Harvard, and Washington State.