In the early 1970s, Frank Chin, the outspoken Chinese American author of such plays as
The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon,
wrote a full-length novel that was never published and presumably lost.
Nearly four decades later, Calvin McMillin, a literary scholar
specializing in Asian American literature, would discover Chin’s
original manuscripts and embark on an extensive restoration project.
Meticulously reassembled from multiple extant drafts, Frank Chin’s
“forgotten” novel is a sequel to
The Chickencoop Chinaman and follows the further misadventures of Tam Lum, the original play’s witty protagonist.
Haunted
by the bitter memories of a failed marriage and the untimely death of a
beloved family member, Tam flees San Francisco’s Chinatown for a life
of self-imposed exile on the Hawaiian island of Maui. After burning his
sole copy of a manuscript he believed would someday be hailed as “The
Great Chinese American Novel,” Tam stumbles into an unlikely romance
with Lily, a former nun fresh out of the convent and looking for love.
In the process, he also develops an unusual friendship with Lily’s
father, a washed-up Hollywood actor once famous for portraying Charlie
Chan on the big screen. Thanks in no small part to this bizarre
father/daughter pair, not to mention an array of equally quirky locals,
Tam soon discovers that his otherwise laidback island existence has been
transformed into a farce of epic proportions.
Had it been published in the 1970s as originally intended,
The Confessions of a Number One Son
might have changed the face of Asian American literature as we know it.
Written at the height of Frank Chin’s creative powers, this formerly
“lost” novel ranks as the author’s funniest, most powerful, and most
poignant work to date. Now, some forty years after its initial
conception,
The Confessions of a Number One Son is finally available to readers everywhere.
The novel is available for purchase on
Amazon.com and directly from the University of Hawai'i Press (
click here for link).
Frank Chin is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and cultural critic. His first two plays,
The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon, remain seminal works in the history of Asian American theater. Chin’s books include
Donald Duk, Gunga Din Highway, and
Bulletproof Buddhists. He is also the co-editor of two landmark anthologies of Asian American literature:
Aiiieeeee! and its sequel,
The Big Aiiieeeee!
Calvin McMillin
is a writer, teacher, and scholar. Born in Singapore and raised in
rural Oklahoma, he received his PhD in literature from the University of
California, Santa Cruz. He writes fiction and previously worked as a
film critic for
LoveHKFilm.com, a Hong Kong cinema Web site.
