WORLD LITERATURE TODAY Reviews THE CONFESSIONS OF A NUMBER ONE SON

Robert Murray Davis has a review of The Confessions of a Number One Son in World Literature Today. Although brief, it features some incisive commentary on both the novel and its relationship to the overall arc of Frank Chin's career.

Here's the first paragraph, but check out the full review at the link below the excerpt:

As Calvin McMillin notes, and as longtime readers of Frank Chin’s work will realize, The Confessions of a Number One Son: The Great Chinese American Novel includes characters, episodes, and cultural references, most of them pop, that have appeared in plays, fiction, and essays, for to quote Chin, “It’s all part of the same kit.” McMillin has done a commendable job in assembling, from various scattered drafts of Chin’s novel, abandoned about four decades ago, a typescript of 662 pages and then cutting material used in later stories and novels to result in the version now published.

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2015/september/confessions-number-one-son-great-chinese-american-novel-frank-chin

INTERVIEW ON CHINTALKS BLOG

Eddie Chern, editor of Frank Chin's blog Chin Talks, conducted an extensive interview with me about my work on The Confessions of a Number One Son. We discuss everything from my background to my thoughts on what the novel's prospects might have been, if it had been published in the 1970s as originally intended. You can check out the full interview at link below:

http://chintalks.blogspot.com/2015/08/an-interview-with-calvin-mcmillin.html

Rave Review for THE CONFESSIONS OF A NUMBER ONE SON in NICHI BEI WEEKLY!

Martha Nakagawa wrote a positive review of The Confessions of a Number One Son for the Nichi Bei Weekly that also has some mighty complimentary things to say about yours truly. Check out an excerpt of the review below before reading the full critique here.

Calvin McMillin is to be commended for breathing life into a long-lost novel by Frank Chin, a writer who has been instrumental in shaping Asian American literature.

“The Confessions of a Number One Son,” although written more than four decades ago, is proof positive that Chin is a master wordsmith, whose prose brim with word plays, stream of consciousness and a cast of characters that only Chin could conjure up.

“Confessions” is a sequel to “The Chickencoop Chinaman,” and follows the adventures or rather, the misadventures of Golford Tam Lum.

Read the full review here:

http://www.nichibei.org/2015/07/a-twisted-trip-filled-with-raunchy-comedy-and-poignant-tenderness/

Frank Chin's THE CONFESSIONS OF A NUMBER ONE SON (2015) is now available for purchase!

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.

THE INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER Publishes the First Review of Frank Chin's THE CONFESSIONS OF A NUMBER ONE SON

Photo by Nancy Wong

Frank Abe has written the first review of Frank Chin's The Confessions of a Number One Son for The International Examiner. Founded in 1974, The International Examiner has long maintained a mission "to serve the Asian Pacific American communities by providing accurate, in-depth, timely, and sensitive coverage of local, regional, national, and international issues which affect us." It should be noted that Abe has special insight into Frank Chin's writing, as he was not only a founding member of Chin’s Asian American Theater Workshop in San Francisco, but he later worked with the author in creating the first Day of Remembrance in Seattle. Read below for a taste of Abe's review before jumping over to The International Examiner for the full story.

The emergence 40 years later of a tightly edited, slimmed-down version of a long-lost novel from the writer who first defined Asian American literature is an unexpected gift.

That’s because to read The Confessions of a Number One Son in 2015 is to peel back the decades and discover the creative foundation of the plays and later fiction of Frank Chin, in the moment before he became consumed with the polemics of separating the real from the fakery in the work of others.

In an early 1970s America where the postwar generation was just coming of age—where the world still celebrated the model minority, the Chinese Christian autobiographies of Betty Lee Sung and Pardee Lowe, and the movie stereotype of Charlie Chan—Frank Chin was putting a self-proclaimed Chinaman voice at the center of his stories. It was an act of self-invention he was perfecting in tandem with his better-known stage plays, The Chickencoop Chinaman and Year of the Dragon.

Read the full review here: http://www.iexaminer.org/2015/03/review-a-first-look-at-frank-chins-great-chinese-american-novel/

Frank Chin's THE LAST TEMPLE (1972)

Sam Chin, son of writer Frank Chin, has posted another video from his father's archives -- a documentary Chin directed titled The Last Temple (1972). Here's the blurb from the YouTube page:

The Last Temple was made at China Alley in Hanford, California, in 1972, by Producer Maurice Chuck and his San Francisco Journal, reported by Kathryn Fong, videographer Curtis Choy, and director, Frank
Chin.

The year that The Last Temple was made, Hanford was famous for being the birthplace of Bessie Loo, the Hollywood Talent Agent, and formerly married to Richard Loo, the baldheaded bucktoothed Japanese general of the WWII movies.

Richard Wing (d: 2010), the owner of the block of buildings, that includes his Imperial Dynasty restaurant, at one end, and the Last Temple at the other, was a third generation cook, chef, restaurateur, activist for Chinese integrity, and a preservationist of Hanford history. From birth to death, the story of Richard Wing is a Hanford story.

His father had helped Chinese escaping the "pie wah" the persecution of Chinese in the Mexico of President Calles, by hiding them in his walnut groves and training them to cook Chinese dishes to White tastes and sending them east on the railroad.

He was Gen George C. Marshall's food taster during WW II. His post was in the kitchens of the mighty and powerful of the world. He learned the most about cuisines around the world in the kitchen of Chiang Kai shek. The Generalissimo wooed his guests with home cooking.

Richard Wing came home to Hanford and designed and built his The Imperial Dynasty restaurant with his older brother Earnest. While Richard Wing was cooking in the kitchen with his father at six years old, his older brother Earnest at eight was delivering food and foodstuffs to the wineries from a horsedrawn buckboard. The boy Earnest was often invited to lunch and wine. Earnest Wing was Imperial Dynasty's nose for wines. Their titles and Holiday Magazine awards mounted.

The Imperial Dynasty became a popular day trip from Los Angeles Union Station for Bing Crosby and bandleader Phil Harris and their dove hunting pals. Doves prepared by Richard Wing in the evening. Drinks on the train back to L.A. Walt Disney flew to the Imperial Dynasty for snails prepared by Richard Wing. After the Party Trains and private planes to pick up Richard Wing's escargot were past. Hollywood old timers still were chauffeured to the Imperial Dynasty to dine. The only talent agent to work as a studio casting director Bessie Loo was seen at the Imperial Dynasty with Phillip Ahn, the velvet voiced Korean character actor in WW II movies, and Marlon Brando's One Eyed- Jacks, and as one of the monks on TV's Kung Fu, with David Carradine.

Richard Wing was a big man and deceptively soft-spoken and gentle mannered and humble, "Think of it. A humble Chinese cook become the food taster for the Chief of Staff!" Gen. Marshall saw that Richard Wing had "command presence," and knew every bite of food crossing his lips was safe under Richard's wing.

...AND STILL CHAMPION! THE STORY OF ARCHIE MOORE (1967) written by Frank Chin

In Frank Chin's 1972 play, The Chickencoop Chinaman, the protagonist -- Tam Lum -- takes a trip to Pittsburgh, PA to gather information for a documentary he's making about Ovaltine Jack Dancer, a former light  heavyweight champion of the world. In a seedy porn theater, he finds the owner-operator of the place: Charley Popcorn, Ovaltine's former trainer and father. But as Tam soon finds out, what Ovaltine claimed about his alleged "father" may not be the real story at all.

Like most writers, Frank Chin borrowed from his own life in crafting his plays, novels, and short stories. During the late 1960s, he worked for four years at KING-TV and King Screen Productions, writing TV documentaries and other films. One project that emerged from his tenure at King Screen Productions was ...And Still Champion! The Story of Archie Moore (1967). As one might expect, this documentary traced the career of boxer Archie Moore from childhood to the mid-1960s. Moore, who still holds the record for the most knockouts (131) and even played Jim in Michael Curtiz's 1960 adaptation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, makes for a fascinating interview subject, as the narration -- written by Frank Chin -- suggests, but doesn't say outright that some of Moore's childhood memories may be self-invented . While Chin served as writer and associate producer, ...And Still Champion! was directed by Loy Norrix, with narratation by Jack Palance (Shane, City Slickers), with a special appearance by Moore's Huckleberry Finn co-star, Tony Randall (The Odd Couple).

Thanks to Youtube user Carbon Titanium (aka Frank's son, Sam Chin), the documentary is now widely available for everyone to see.

SOURCE: YOUTUBE, CARBON TITANIUM