Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays by Frank Chin (review)

316 WAL 33(3) FALL 1998 The touchpoint is located somewhere else. It is in the dark sand. It is inside the earth and the steam .. . . And what comes rising through the me, along with the heat, is a liberating form of knowledge, or perhaps memory— that the land is not foreign. It is familiar. This is the sand and the steam and the subsoil and the hot spring and the mountain peninsula of the globe we all inhabit (30). It is this common connection of human to earth that informs Houston’s best prose throughout the book. The narrative then moves to Hawaii where we meet a woman who con­ verses with rocks, where the shadow of Pearl Harbor mingles with the cloud of Hiroshima, and where the fire below the earth’s surface creates new land even as it affirms ancient faith. Houston continues through Indonesia, Saipan, Okinawa, Iwo-Jima, and other South Pacific islands, returning finally to his home ground near Santa Cruz. Throughout, Houston’s latest book contains essays that will instruct and inspire, in a style that is neither pretentious nor didactic. Bulletproof Buddhists and Other E ssays. By Frank Chin. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998. 431 pages, $42.00/$ 19.95. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma The student who tried to insult Frank Chin by calling him a ‘“ Literary Conservative’ for saying texts do not change” (417) failed, partly because Chin has much higher standards for insults and partly because the phrase is accurate— and not only about Chin’s approach to literature. Although Chin once referred to himself as an anarchist, only a conservative could get and stay angry about many of the same things for a quarter of a century and be at the same time consistently funny. (It’s not that liberals don’t have a sense of humor; it’s just that they avoid using it for fear of offending someone.) Chin has frequently been regarded as a mere polemicist because of his attacks on everyone from Tom Wolfe to Maxine Hong Kingston and any­ one else he regards as promulgating racist attitudes toward Chinamen— his term for Chinese Americans. And in these six essays, dating in their origi­ nal versions from 1972 to 1996, he does stand fierce guard over his defini­ tion of his Chinese heritage. Although he speaks only a little Cantonese and understands somewhat more, he maintains that “Chinese ideas are Chinese ideas in any language” (392). In fact, he insists that his novel Donald Duk is written “grammatically in a Cantonese dialect” (403). Language and culture he regards as inextricable, and only if people are given a sense of culture through myth, he argues, will they “look on them­ selves as more than the moral equivalent of consumer goods and stay away from the mob” (423). The racists who confront him and his son in Seattle Book reviews 317 are pitiable less because of their attitudes than the poverty of their language, and as a result he sees “this need to teach our young how to properly cuss and offend with the specificity of a smart bomb as the first step toward full literacy and . . . civility” (417). Chin is a relentless traveler— to early Castro’s Cuba in search of fla­ menco guitars; to Iowa City, a much more alien culture, in search of train­ ing at the writer’s workshop; to the Mexican border in search of the mean­ ing of a story about the three-legged toad; to the highways of Interstate 5 in search of a clean, well-lighted place free from racists; to San Diego in search of the truth about Asian gangs; to Singapore for an international confer­ ence on the topic “Where Is Home?” To that question, he announces, “My home is my writing. My home is my craft, my art” (390). Although Chin gets into AmerAsian literary histories primarily for his groundbreaking plays, The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon, and although he is just beginning to be recognized for his novels, Donald Duk and Gunga Din Highway, the current Bulletproof Buddhists reveals another dimension of his writing: the storyteller who in...