mother, Choi’s protagonist retains her childlike
idealism and a belief in the forces of hope, courage,
and family, as well as her belief in the honor and
tradition of her Korean heritage. At the end of the
novel, Sookan and her brother Inchun are reunited
with their father and older brothers in Seoul. Their
mother, who was able to escape the Russians, joins
them six months later.
Though the novel was initially intended for
young adults, it has enjoyed success across all
age groups. The lyrical self-validation of young
Sookan’s suspenseful journey to freedom high-
lights the remarkable power of the human heart.
Bibliography
Choi, Sook Nyul. Year of Impossible Goodbyes. Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
Debbie Clare Olson
Year of the Dragon, The Frank Chin ( 19 81 )
The Year of the Dragon shows the disintegration of
a Chinese-American family in San Francisco’s Chi-
natown. A travel agent and Chinatown tour guide,
Fred Eng is the 40-year-old, unmarried son of Pa
Eng. Throughout the play, Fred strives for recog-
nition from his father by sacrificing his ambition
to become a writer, leaving college to run the fam-
ily tourism business, supporting his younger sis-
ter through college, nursing his father when he is
ill, and caring for his younger brother. The father,
however, never acknowledges the father-son rela-
tionship in public because he feels ashamed of his
son. Refusing to recognize his son’s individuality
and adulthood, the father verbally abuses the son
and slaps him repeatedly. Moreover, the father in-
sults the son by refusing to introduce him in the
presence of eminent Chinatown citizens and by
asking his white son-in-law instead of his son to
edit his mayoral speech during the Chinese New
Year. The play ends with Fred’s final futile attempt
at asking his father for once to recognize him as
an individual.
The Year of the Dragon was first staged in 1974
at the American Place Theatre in New York City
and a year later videotaped by Public Broadcasting
Service for its “PBS Theatre in America.” Reviews
of the play have been mixed. Early reviews of the
play often condemned the play as incomprehensi-
ble. Later criticism, however, tended to appreciate
FRANK CHIN’s concerns with identity and man-
hood and his attempts to dispel stereotypes about
Chinese Americans.
Fu-jen ChenYep, Laurence Michael (1948– )
Laurence Yep, author of more than 60 books for
children and young adults, was born in San Fran-
cisco, California. His father, Yep Gim Lew, moved
to the United States from China when he was 10,
while his mother, Franche Lee, was born in Ohio
and raised in West Virginia. Yep was brought up in
a predominantly African-American and Hispanic
area of San Francisco, where his family owned a
grocery store, and attended St. Mary’s Grammar
School, a Catholic mission aiming at converting
Chinese Americans. He soon experienced feel-
ings of alienation and isolation, as described in
his 1991 autobiography entitled The Lost Garden.
He also began to see his existence as an intricate
puzzle that could only be described in writing. In
his African-American neighborhood, he played the
role of the “all-purpose Asian” who could play the
part of a Japanese or Korean soldier, depending on
which war game was played on the playground. At
school, due to his limited proficiency in Chinese (at
home his parents spoke only English), he was also
regarded as an outsider who did not get the jokes
that his Chinese-American friends used to tell in
Chinese so as not to be understood by the nuns. As
he writes in his autobiography, he was not particu-
larly proud of his cultural heritage. When he was a
child, he wanted to be as American as possible and
he was, therefore, scolded by the old-timers. He
nonetheless absorbed his “Chineseness” through
his grandmother, Marie Lee, who later inspired the
character of the Chinese grandmother Paw Paw in
Yep’s 1977 young-adult novel CHILD OF THE OWL.
In high school, he was faced for the first time
with white American culture. When he was 18, his
English teacher, Reverend John Becker (to whomYep, Laurence Michael 335