SOURCE: "The Chinese-American Literary Scene: A Galaxy of Poets and a Lone Playwright," in Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium, Vol. IX, 1978, pp. 121-46.

In the excerpt below, Wand asserts that in his plays Chin has "projected onto the stage his own internal conflicts."

Although Frank Chin has written prose-fiction and some occasional poems, he is first and foremost a dramatist. Like the protagonists (or heroes), Tarn Lum in The Chickencoop Chinaman and Fred Eng in The Year of the Dragon, "his own 'normal' speech jumps between black and white rhythms and accents." Sometimes, he probably feels like Tam Lum that he has "no real language of my own to make sense with, so out comes everybody else's trash that don't conceive." The protagonists of his two plays are both in conflict, obsessed with the problem of identity. Tam (short for Tampax) Lum in The Chicken-coop Chinaman, who...