Memories of a Chinese-American Boyhood : THE CHINAMAN PACIFIC & FRISCO R.R. CO. <i> by Frank Chin (Coffee House Press: $9.95; 184 pp.) </i>

When I think of some friends of mine from the old neighborhood (all of whom had the proper ethnic credentials, let me assure you), one thing I remember is our wariness of what we called “I Have a Problem” literature. By that, we meant literature of ethnic experience at its most tiresome: brooding, Angst -ridden story-polemics, crammed to the gills with resentment and righteous anger, about existential misery in the Land of the Round-Eye; literature that seemed to assume that any bit of drivel was worth your attention just as long as it had a chip on its shoulder. It’s a species related to what Calvin Trillin called the “kvetch novel”--any novel in which you want to say to the main character, “Oh, just pull up your socks”--only more irritating. But it’s also an easy trap for anyone who writes from an ethnocentric point of view to fall into. It is, therefore, to Frank Chin’s credit that his collection of short stories, “The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.” by and large avoids this trap even as it dances on the edge of the pit.

There are eight stories in this volume, most of them autobiographical in tone. Almost all have as their essential subject the alienation of Chinese-America from the America of white skin and Wonder Bread. The first two, “Railroad Standard Time” and “The Eat and Run Midnight People,” read like meandering stream-of-consciousness memoirs and are self-indulgent enough to make them the weakest of the bunch. The final story, “The Sons of Chan,” clothes itself in shreds of fiction with some interesting Freudian overtones, but it is otherwise a tiring screed on growing up with the stereotypes in Charlie Chan movies as your only reflection in popular culture. Chin’s rhetoric is often sharp and funny, but he also rides the high horse of racial bitterness for more than it’s worth.

It’s the other five stories that distinguish “The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.” In them, Chin displays two considerable writerly virtues. One is a wicked sense of humor that runs a provocative gamut from jangled whimsy to scathing satire. His subject matter is weighty enough so that an amusing conceit or figuration often balances out the mood. This is particularly true of “A Chinese Lady Dies,” in which the narrator’s problematic (and disturbingly Oedipal) relationship with his mother evokes such tension that the story would self-immolate without the whimsical dream passages in which he imagines himself as an Old-Western hero called E. Chino. His wit feels more like a dagger than a feather, but is no less amusing for it. And for good measure, Chin tacks on an afterword that reads suspiciously like a freewheeling satire on Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior.”

His other primary virtue is his considerable skill as a storyteller. He has a genuine gift for bringing characters and their predicaments alive. One sees this most vividly in “The Only Real Day,” which focuses on the struggle of an aged immigrant to keep American culture at bay and preserve his identity as a Chinese. Chin has a definite point to make in this story about the corrosion of Chinese values and identity in a mostly white world, but the message is filtered so thoroughly through the plot and well-drawn characters that it has no didactic harshness. It is, above all, a poignant and entrancing piece of fiction. “Yes, Young Daddy,” which depicts the protagonist’s relationship with a female cousin who is grappling with adolescence, is also worth noting for its skillful portraiture.

Chin’s prose style tends toward a looseness vaguely reminiscent of William S. Burroughs. It’s lively stuff but also slow going at times, what with the missing antecedents, plastic sentence structure and all. He also enjoys playing fast and loose with temporal shifts in his stories, with the result that memory, present experience, anticipation and pure fantasy often overlap. It’s an absorbingly dense reflection of the way in which past, present and future come to bear upon each other in the mind, but everything melds so seamlessly that the reader may have some trouble keeping things sorted.

On the whole, Chin does a good job of avoiding the hazards that could have swallowed up these stories. Although alienation is the great theme of post-World War II American literature and our age is distinguished by its voices from outside the mainstream, just because a work is about racial alienation doesn’t automatically make it worth reading. The problem with ethnocentric literature is that its force is so centripetal. It tends to reach inward, instead of outward toward the universal significance that, as Northrop Frye said, marks literature in its highest form. Fiction need not reach that level to be worth our while, but it should at least show a human dimension that will move us and provoke us, as mere formalized pique cannot. Fortunately, “The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.” achieves such transcendance often enough to make it worthwhile fiction.