Chin’s writing is all about transforming yourself from a kissass into a badass. His general strategy is twofold. First, Chin achieves a style that is often violent and jarring by drawing on the models provided by the Black Power movement of the 1960s. Describing Chin’s first two plays and his collection of short stories, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong writes that Chin’s “verbal pyrotechnics impressed even as its hybridity baffled mainstream critics and outraged some Chinese readers.”5 Second, Chin—like the natives manipulating the Westerner’s Bible in Homi Bhabha’s famous essay “Signs Taken for Wonders” (1994)—takes the dominant tradition of U.S. liberal individualism and shifts its meaning.6 In describing himself as a “Chinatown Cowboy” and using archetypes of rugged individualism drawn from the literature of the American West, Chin not only reasserts the vitality of Chinese American masculinity, but also roots that masculinity deep within a cherished archetype from U.S. cultural mythology. By focusing on the image of the Chinese worker building the railroad and opening up the American West, Chin argues that Asian American masculinity has been a crucial aspect of U.S. history all along.
Chin has devoted his writing to refuting the idea that Asian Americans are necessarily the victims of an “identity crisis” in which they are forced to choose between two opposed and incompatible identities—the Asian and the American. Chin’s stories and plays depict a Chinatown that is dying because it provides no models of “manhood” for its younger generation. Chin’s dramas of beseiged Asian American manhood look back to a more heroic era in which Chinese men were men. Asserting that the cultural mythologies of China, with its “sword-slingers,” and the United States, with its gunslinging loners, are fundamentally alike, Chin claims a place for Asian American men within the archetype of the American rugged individualist. In denying the opposition between American and Asian forms of masculinity, Chin moves away from the choice implicit in the idea of an “identity crisis” toward a conception of cultural hybridity in which the Asian and the American fuse into a seamless whole.
The problem, however, is that this account of identity is still a drastic oversimplification. For Chin, the only identities that matter are the “American” and the “Asian,” and he vilifies those Asian Americans who try to assert the primacy of other categories such as gender or sexuality. Chin’s aim is not to reconceptualize American identity but simply to reconfigure it, to enable it to accommodate his vision of Asian masculinity. Not only has Chin accepted the general premise of binary thinking, but he has also accepted some of the particular premises of the opposition he is seeking to refute, namely its misogyny and homophobia.
I invoke Frank Chin’s writing here to serve as an emblem of the fact that the roots of many of the problems and strategies that mark U.S. emergent literatures from the 1960s on lie in nineteenth-century U.S. cultural dynamics. The task of showing what nineteenth-century U.S. history looked like to those pushed to the margins of U.S. culture was central to the project of late-twentieth-century U.S. emergent writing. For example, in describing his “first impulse” in writing the young-adult novel Morning Girl (1992), which portrays the lost Taino tribe, Michael Dorris argues that “if we concede the explication of our past, on any level, to those who have no investment in its accurate and sympathetic portrayal, we are giving up much more than the exploration of roots. We are abandoning the future to which we are uniquely entitled.”7 The project of creating the emergent, which by definition is all about the future, turns out also to be very much about the past.
The Origins of “Homosexuality”
Ironically, the image that Chin chooses as a counterweight to the portrayal of Asian American men as “effeminate closet queens like Charlie Chan” or “homosexual menaces like Fu Manchu” may not be as free from associations with same-sex desire as he thinks. In his study Queer Cowboys (2005), Chris Packard argues that the association of the cowboy with a certain kind of “ruggedness”—“unrestricted freedom, crafty self-reliance, familiarity with wilderness and horses, good with guns”—is primarily the effect of Hollywood’s recreation of the archetype. “If you look a little closer” at the image of the cowboy, Packard writes, “you’ll see another figure, the cowboy’s sidekick—his partner and loyal friend,” and in nineteenth-century representations of the cowboy, the relationship between partners is frequently marked by erotic affection: “Before 1900, that is to say before the modern invention of the ‘homosexual’ as a social pariah, cowboy narratives represented male-male affection quite a bit more freely than Westerns produced after 1900, when male-male sex was classified as abnormal.”8 Packard cites Badger C. Clark’s cowboy poem “The Lost Pardner” (1915) as an example of this kind of male-male affection:
We loved each other in the way men do
And never spoke about it, Al and me,
But we both knowed, and knowin’ it so true
Was more than any woman’s kiss could be.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The range is empty and the trails are blind,
And I don’t seem but half myself today.
I wait to hear him ridin’ up behind
And feel his knee rub mine the good old way.
He’s dead—and what that means no man kin tell.
Some call it “gone before.”
Where? I don’t know, but God! I know so well
That he ain’t here no more!
The poem tries to capture an unspoken aspect of the relationship between the narrator and his partner, Al, something that was “more than any woman’s kiss could be,” yet captured in the feel of knees rubbing together.9
The term “homosexuality” first appeared in 1869 in a pamphlet entitled “An Open Letter to the Prussian Minister of Justice” by the Austrian-born Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Benkert. Writing under the pseudonym “Karl Maria Kertbeny,” Benkert urged that sodomy be decriminalized in the penal code that was about to come into force in the North German Confederation and, two years later, in a unified German state, the so-called Second Reich. Although what we would today call “homosexuality” existed in the ancient Greek world, classical Greek has no word for “homosexual.” Ancient Greek culture understood sexuality as a matter of preference rather than orientation, liable to change from occasion to occasion—at least as far as men were concerned. Describing the sexual practices of ancient Greece in The Use of Pleasure (1984), Michel Foucault argued that “the notion of homosexuality is plainly inadequate as a means of referring to an experience, forms of valuation, and a system of categorization so different from ours. The Greeks did not see love for one’s own sex and love for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior.”10
The idea of “homosexuality” is also inadequate to describe the sexual practices of many Native American cultures whose languages contain words that express sexual categories for which there are no equivalents in European cultures. The term berdache has been used by anthropologists to describe morphological males who do not play the traditional male roles within their tribes. In his study of sexual diversity in Native American culture, the anthropologist Walter L. Williams writes that a berdache has
a clearly recognized and accepted social status, often based on a secure place in the tribal mythology. Berdaches have special ceremonial roles in many Native American religions, and important economic roles in their families. They will do at least some women’s work, and mix together much of the behavior, dress, and social roles