|
I
promise you, Mr. Durant, there will not be
a heathen in sight at tomorrow's ceremonies...The
Last Spike will be hammered home, the telegram
sent, our photograph made to preserve a great
moment in our nation's history, without the
Chinese. Admire and respect them as I do.
I will show them who built the railroad. White
men. White dreams. White brains and white
brawn.
|
As a result of witnessing these events in his
dreams, Donald begins to change, to be interested
in embracing his race and heritage. Towards the
end of the book, he has this conversation with his
father:
|
"The
Chinese. The Chinamans who built the railroad.
I dream I'm laying track with them when I
sleep, and nobody knows what we did. Nobody.
Just me. And I don't want to be the only one
who knows, and it makes me mad to be the only
one who knows, and everything I dream makes
me mad at white people and hate them. They
lie about us all the time."
|
| "No, don't hate all the white people. Just the liars," Dad says. |
In the movie, Chin speaks eloquently of the
dreadful way in which whites made certain that no
Chinese appeared in any of the railroad photographs.
And contemporary historians' accounts certainly
back up this sentiment, particularly H.W.
Brands in The Age of Gold: The California
Gold Rush and the New American Dream and Stephen
E. Ambrose in Nothing Like It In The World:
The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad
1863-1869. Ambrose actually studied Chinese-English
phrase books from 1867. He notes that the phrases
"How are you?" and "Thank you"
are not in any of them.
Essentially, the novel only has this one theme:
overcoming the denial of one's roots and racial
identity in favor of being 'American'; but, as in
all of Chin's writing, this is especially true of
the long novel Gunga Din Highway—it's
an undeniable fact that Chin, himself, is American
to the core, so steeped in American culture, folklore
and, most particularly, the movies, that one has
to wonder if he is not one of the most shining examples
of true multiculturalism (he would despise the term)
that we have.
So, if the book is somewhat thematically limited,
what might readers extract from it, what might they
learn and enjoy? In a word, fun! Donald's journey
from being a self-hater, who accepts negative white
attitudes about Chinese-Americans, to a proud Chinese-American
has him cross paths with quite a few interesting
characters along the way, not the least of which
is his family. His father, King Duk, owns one of
the best restaurants in Chinatown. His namesake,
Uncle Donald, is a Cantonese
opera star who's in for a visit. Mom is supportive
and often attempting to keep a handle on Donald's
twin sisters, Venus and Penelope, cute literary
creations often speaking as if they're commentators
rather than participants. (Chin's sense of play,
here, is palpable.) Crawdad Man and his son, Crawdad
Jr., a Vietnam
vet named Victor Lee, a pair of old twins who haunt
the streets of Chinatown at night, the Frog Twins,
and a dancing teacher who bills himself as The Chinese
Fred
Astaire round out the cast. Each exists within
the structure of the fiction to reinforce the main
lesson to Donald in a situation that's usually comical.
I think this is the sign of a truly developed intelligence—the
exacting of humor in making a deadly serious point.
And because Chin insists on bewildering the non-Chinese
reader, at first, by including cultural customs,
in his story, without the benefit of explanation,
the author involves the reader in experiencing
how the white power structure has humiliated and
degraded his people since the days of the railroads.
This kind of thing is always a fine line; I'm not
sure that the non-Chinese, the non-Indian, the non-African
American, can always empathize. Sympathize,
yes, but empathy is hard...sort of like a male trying
to understand what it's like to be pregnant. Chin
gives it a great effort, nonetheless.
I'd like to comment, briefly, on what I perceive
to be both intensity and integrity of purpose, on
Chin's part. I sometimes read that Chin's attacks
upon other writers actually have their roots in
malice or jealousy. This claim is mistaken. While
Chin's books don't sell in the numbers that Tan's
or Kingston's do, we needn't argue that point intellectually
to rebut it. All we need to know is that a top Hollywood
director, Wayne
Wang, has approached Chin about filming his
play "The Year of the Dragon", and Chin
rejected the idea on the grounds that he didn't
want Hollywood messing with his story. This rejection
of potentially millions of dollars in royalties
is not the action of someone who lacks belief in
himself. Chin practices what he preaches. His integrity
is intact. So is his intensity. At the outset, I
mentioned his files on Asian-American actors. The
reason that this came into being is that, incredibly,
no Asian-American actor has ever played Charlie
Chan in the movies. Chin's long novel Gunga
Din Highway is about this ridiculous, apalling
state of affairs and, in it, his research about
the actors is put to full use. That research constitutes
a massive scholarly project, amply demonstrated
in a reading of the book. Whatever Chin's merits
or demerits, love or hate him, he's the rarest type
of writer of imaginative literature—one making
an undeniable impact upon the times.
