# Frank Chin

Frank Chin (born February 25, 1940) is an American author and playwright. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian-American theatre.

## Life and career

Frank Chin was born in Berkeley, California on February 25, 1940. His grandfather worked on the Western Pacific Railroad. He remained under the care of a retired vaudeville couple in Placerville, California until he was 6. At that time, his mother brought him back to the San Francisco Bay Area and thereafter Chin grew up in Oakland Chinatown. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he contributed to the California Pelican. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1965. According to Chin, who had returned from a sabbatical working as the first Chinese brakeman for the Southern Pacific railroad, he intimidated a dean into graduating him with a bachelor's degree in English: "[I said] 'I want a decision by Friday' and he said, 'Well, I'm a very busy man,' and I said, 'You're a working stiff like me - you have a decision Friday and I don't care what it is. Either I've graduated or I haven't graduated because I have to get back to work.' Friday, I walked by the office and the secretary jumps up and says: 'You've graduated!' I said, 'That's all I want to know'."
Early in his career, Chin worked as a story editor and scriptwriter on Sesame Street and as a reporter for KING-TV in Seattle.
Chin is considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian-American theatre. He co-founded the Asian American Theater Company with Filipino-American playwright Melvyn Escueta in 1973. His play The Chickencoop Chinaman was the first by an Asian-American to be produced on a major New York stage. As an author, Chin has won three American Book Awards: the first in 1982 for his plays The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon, the second in 1989 for a collection of short stories entitled The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co., and the third in 2000 for lifetime achievement. His full length novel, Confessions of a Number One Son: The Great Chinese American Novel, was written in the early 1970s, but was not published until nearly four decades later (2015) by Calvin McMcmillin, a literary scholar specializing in Asian American literature. The work is a sequel to The Chickencoop Chinaman and follows the further adventures of Tam Lum, the original work's protagonist.
Stereotypes of Asian Americans and traditional Chinese folklore are common themes in much of his work. Many of his works revolve around criticism of the racism in the United States. Frank Chin has accused other Asian American writers, particularly Maxine Hong Kingston, of furthering such stereotypes and misrepresenting the traditional stories. Chin also has been highly critical of American writer Amy Tan for her telling of Chinese-American stories, indicating that her body of work has furthered and reinforced stereotypical views of this group. On a radio program, Chin has also debated the scholar Yunte Huang regarding the latter's evaluation of Charlie Chan in his writing. This discussion was later evaluated on the activist blog "Big WOWO."
In addition to his work as an author and playwright, Frank Chin has also worked extensively with Japanese American resisters of the draft in WWII. His novel, Born in the U.S.A., is dedicated to this subject. Chin was one of several writers (Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong of CARP, Combined Asian American Resources Project) who worked to republish John Okada's novel No-No Boy in the 1970s; Chin contributed an afterword which can be found in every reprinting of the novel. Chin has appeared in Jeff Adachi's The Slanted Screen, a 2006 documentary film about stereotypical depictions of Asian males in American cinema. Chin was also an instrumental organizer for the first Day of Remembrance.
Chin is also a musician. In the mid-1960s, he taught Robbie Krieger, a member of The Doors, how to play the flamenco guitar. After a stroke in 1990, he lost his ability to play the guitar and, temporarily, to laugh.
Chin was married for five years to Kathy Chang in the 1970s. Kathleen Chang (October 10, 1950 – October 22, 1996), was better known by her performance name Kathy Change. She was a Sino-American political activist, writer, and performance artist.