Frank Chin often brags that he was the first Chinese American playwright to have his work produced off Broadway in New York City, and it is true that his literary reputation initially rested upon two plays, The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon, produced in the first half of the 1970s and published together as a book in 1981. Subsequently, though, Chin has become one of the most diverse of all Asian American authors, publishing two novels, a volume of short stories, and a collection of essays; he also has coedited two groundbreaking anthologies, Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974) and The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese and Japanese American Writers (1991).

All of Chin's works—plays, fiction, essays, and criticism—reveal his determination to remake or reconfigure the Chinese American male, to restore the masculinity, sexuality, voice, and power that were stripped away by white Americans...