Frank Chin. I don’t expect to be ambushed by the fans of Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, and Amy Tan in Portland.

• Do not sell your children to monsters

• My first novel is in the bookstores. My name and, here and there, my picture pop up in newspaper book reviews and Asian-American weeklies. “Are you famous?” Sam asks. What is fame to a five-year-old kid? How am I, the almighty daddyisimo, to explain it to my son? Someday he’s going to leave home—for college, or to go to war, or take a job, or marry a woman out of state or on the moon. If he grows up thinking I'm famous, he might not want to go. (March 23, 1995)

Laotian girl flashes gang sign. The Lao and Cambodian kids of today’s gangs never saw the war.

• Bulletproof Buddhists

• “They like to carry the 9mm handgun,” Officer Roy moody says. He's talking about Lao and Cambodian gang kids. “And, of course, they do like the semi automatic rifles like AK-47s, even though we haven't seen an AK-47 in a while." (July 27, 1995)

Arturo nods to me, pulls a large bottle of dark tequila he says he’s bought especially for me. He and I will drink this bottle, then we’ll be friends.

• Chinese hiding under a rock in Baja

• “When we get to Calexico, we’re hooking up with George Woo. He’s big in the Chung Wah there and a part of the Calexico establishment. His daughter by his second wife, a Mexican woman, says she’s more Mexican than Chinese and considers herself a Mexican in terms of culture. (May 5, 1994)

Juanita Franco. "She is, for my money, probably the best performer of the solea."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

• White boys and gypsy souls

• I saw nothing unusual about a Chinaman kid dabbling in flamenco guitar. I liked it. Then Jackson Burgess, a writer from the South, sat down next to me as I practiced one afternoon. Teacher to student, father to son, brother to brother, friend to friend, he said the reason I played flamenco guitar was that I was a Chinese-American who couldn't accept either my Chinese or my American identity and was attempting to manufacture a new one as a Spanish gypsy guitarist. (Oct. 13, 1994)

Author, playwright, and musician, Frank Chin is considered a pioneer in Asian-American theater.