Shouts Of The Male In Gunga Din Highway

Though Chinese Americans have been living in the United States for over a hundred and fifty years, they still find themselves in a marginalized position in American society. The white culture hegemony and bias toward Chinese Americans still commonly exist in the form of stereotypes. Frank Chin, one of the founders of Asian American literature, contends that writing is fighting, so he uses his pen as a weapon to fight against white racism and false ideas of those assimilated Chinese Americans, especially their distortion of the Chinese American men.Frank Chin often chooses to convey motifs such as white racists'hegemony, the biased and white-imagined stereotypes of Chinese American men, and the dull and self-denigrating Chinese Americans. All these motifs can be found in his second novel Gunga Din Highway. In this novel he mainly deconstructs the"racist love", or the kind of love held by Gunga Din-style Chinese Americans, such as Charlie Chan, Longman Kwan, and Pandora. These"racist lovers"despise Chinese culture, betray themselves and their own ancestral country, and, most strikingly, denigrate Chinese American men with the purpose of assimilation into the mainstream society. Chin believes that the"Gunga Din"way that they choose is a way to death. The novel develops basically through the growth of the protagonist Ulysses who is, in contrast to those characters, brave, independent, manly, and full of vigor, and with strong sexual virility. In the end he becomes a defender of the traditional Chinese heroic culture.By subverting the stereotypical images in American popular culture, Frank Chin demonstrates the falsity and absurdity of Orientalism and expresses his intention of rebuilding a heroic male Chinese-American identity.This thesis analyzes, in light of Said's post-orientalist theory as expounded in his Orientialism, how Frank Chin deconstructs the unfair stereotypes of Chinese-American men so as to reveal social injustice.