Life With a Hyphen : Obsessed with the idea of playing the first Chinese Charlie Chan : GUNGA DIN HIGHWAY, <i> By Frank Chin (Coffee House Press: $24.95; 404 pp</i> .<i> )</i>

Frank Chin’s new novel, “Gunga Din Highway,” is not an effort that fits comfortably into any fiction category. Labeling it a Chinese-American rite of passage is too simplistic; calling it cultural satire is too limiting.

The surrealist opening in Honolulu is more like comic opera. Longman Kwan, whose movie roles have earned him the nickname “THE CHINAMAN WHO DIES,” is on a search for his putative father, the fourth and last Charlie Chan. Kwan, on a break from playing bad guys in “Hawaii Five-O,” has had a career that takes us down the Memory Lane of Hollywood’s Asian stereotypes. He began as a Pearl Buckish peasant boy who dies in the arms of William Bendix. During World War II, when all the Japanese actors were corralled at Manzanar, Kwan plays Japanese pilots who crash into the rising sun yelling, “ Aiiyyeee .” But his most famous role is that of Charlie Chan’s gum-popping, wise-cracking No. 4 Son. Longman Kwan is now obsessed with the idea of playing the first Chinese Charlie Chan. He finds the (fictional) successor to Warner Oland, Sidney Tolerand Roland Winters running a porno palace in the slums of Honolulu, hiding from Chinese-American radicals. Anlauf Lorane, a Belgian in real life, wants nothing to do with the new project. “Pornography is my life,” he exclaims.

From the rubble of Hollywood’s B movies, Frank Chin’s narrative swerves back to reality, which, for Chin, is the mean streets of urban America. Ulysses S. Kwan, Longman’s second son, is growing up in the confusing world of multicultural Oakland, living with his divorced mother, far from Hollywood, above the kitchens of a Chinese hotel. He hates his famous father, “THE CHINAMAN WHO DIES,” but he loves American movies, those that have no Chinese cast members. Spencer Tracy becomes his new father.

Chin uses the perspectivism of Virginia Woolf, switching his narrative back and forth between Ulysses Kwan and his two cousins, Benedict Han, an opportunist who later becomes a playwright, and Diego Chang, a soulful musician who talks black and plays flamenco guitar. The three form a childhood bond, and Chin follows them out of Chinatown, away from their limited prospects, out into the contentious battlefields of Off-Broadway theater, mainstream American journalism and pop-music revelries.

Chin’s most delightful sections rev like a Harley through the Day-Glo ‘60s. Benedict Han changes his name and writes a controversial play, “Fu Manchu Play Flamenco,” dragging Charlie Chan’s grandson in as an actor. Chin has fun with the demon critics of New York, the over-sexed groupies of Greenwich Village, and the Warholian blankness of the era.

Reaching an absolute nirvana of absurdity during the Black Power struggles in Oakland, Chin captures the madness of the moment as Diego Chang declares himself “commandant of the Chinatown Black Tigers as a joke,” fashioning a marching song from The Mickey Mouse Club:

Who’s the leader of the Party made for you and me?

Em Ay Oh, Tee Ess Eeh, Tee Eeh Yoo Enn Gee.

Mao Tse Tung, Mao Tse Tung , etc.

The joke ends when the war on poverty money starts rolling in and Diego Chang is stuck in the role of Chinatown guru. Only his love of music and a ticket to Maui save him.

There is also a wonderful, quasi-Woodstock denouement in Washington State, where father and son come together, though they never meet. Longman Kwan has returned as No. 4 Son trading jokes with the last Charlie Chan as MCs of the rock festival. Ulysses and his cousin Diego glower in the background as radical hippy rockers.

“Gunga Din Highway” is a complex and compelling work that takes us deep into the multicultural fabric of America. It is not a sellout, exotic novel for Anglos. As a hyphenated American whose life often falls between the cracks of his dual identity, Chin warns: “Chinese morality, called Confucian morality, is not built on a foundation of faith . . . but on knowledge. Life is war. In war it’s what you know, not what you believe, that wins battles.”

In a work of the first rank, Frank Chin opens the door to real people who happen to have an Asian ancestry, and he tells us what they are not: “Weepily the little Gunga Din asks, ‘Who’ll take care of me now?’ John Wayne puts the dead soldier’s green beret on little Gunga Din’s head. ‘That’s my problem now, little Green Beret.’ ”