SOURCE: "Chinatown Cowboys and Warrior Women: Searching for a New Self-image," in Asian American Literature: an Introduction to the Writings and Their Social context, Temple University Press, 1982, pp. 173-213.

In the following excerpt, Kim examines Chin's depiction of the struggle to define a uniquely Asian American male identity in The Chickencoop Chinaman and other works.

Chin views Chinese American history as a wholesale and systematic attempt to emasculate the Chinese American male. Racist laws "warred against us … to deny our manhood, to drive us out of the country, to kill us… . [T]wenty to thirty men for every woman… . Chinese-America was rigged to be a race of males going extinct without women." Chinese Americans were deprived of a knowledge of their history, according to Chin and the other editors of Aiiieeeee!, and forbidden a "legitimate mother tongue" because they were viewed as foreigners who cannot speak English:

Only...