96
Told by four first-person narrators, the novel is
divided into four sections. It begins with the life
of an actor father, Longman Kwan. Long cast in
movies as Charlie Chan’s Number Four Son and
as “the Chinaman who dies,” Longman is obsessed
with the idea of being the first Chinese actor to
play Charlie Chan—the role, to the father-spokes-
man, as “the perfect Chinese American to lead the
yellows to build the road to acceptance toward
assimilation” (13). The second section is told pri-
marily from the viewpoint of his son, Ulysses, the
central character of the novel. Ulysses grows up in
Oakland far from Hollywood and lives with his di-
vorced mother. Ulysses despises his father’s Holly-
wood roles of Asian stereotypes and wants nothing
to do with him. Named after James Joyce’s novel
and Kwan Kung, deified as the god of war and liter-
ature, Ulysses S. Kwan undergoes a Joycean adven-
ture, evolving into Chin’s ideal Chinese-American
male—an artist as well as a warrior. The rest of the
novel is alternately narrated by Ulysses and his two
childhood blood-brothers, Diego Chang, a musi-
cian, and Benedict Mo, a playwright. Filled with
references to American pop culture, Hollywood
mythology, Western literary traditions, and Chi-
nese legend, the novel spans almost five decades
from the 1940s to today and takes place all over
the country.Bibliography
Chin, Frank. “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of
the Real and the Fake.” The Big Aiiieeeee!: An An-
thology of Chinese American and Japanese Ameri-
can Literature, edited by Frank Chin, et al., 1–92.
New York: Meridian, 1991.
Ho, Wen-chin. Review of Gunga Din Highway, by
Frank Chin. Amerasia Journal 22 (1996): 158–
161.
Huang, Guiyou. “Frank Chin.” Asian American Nov-
elists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook,
edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 48–55. London:
Greenwood Press, 2000.
Fu-jen Chen96 Gunga Din Highway