play The Year Of The Dragon. Actor George Takei continues the same character's lines, performing
in the PBS/Theater in America series. Chin mocks a television broadcast of Flower Drum Song. He
sits on the floor writing at a small computer, using an unusual two-handed mouse technique as a TV
and radio blare. His writing style is discussed and critiqued by his contemporaries. He reveals his
aspirations to be an artist. In 1969, he arrives at the birth of Ethnic Studies to teach and produce
guerilla theater. He begins the quest to discover other Asian American writers, culminating in the
publication of the collection of AA writing, Aiiieeeee! In 1972, he becomes the first Chinese American
playwright to have two plays produced in New York. He forms his own theater company in San
Francisco, hoping to recreate Dublin's Abbey Theatre for a young Asian America. He is dismissed in a
power struggle. In his endlessly beeping car, Chin denies using the term "sell-out", and proceeds to
insult the sell-outs. His uniquely theatrical wedding ceremony is punctuated with a retelling of the
legend of The Iron Moonhunter. Chin thanks the National Endowment for the Arts by lecturing them
about race relations. The first Asian American Writers Conference is held in 1975, a landmark event;
Chin reads as a who's who of AA writers appears. He takes on the falsification of texts as he lays into
Maxine Kingston's popular novel with an intense exchange of letters. She confesses her re-invention
of the heroic tradition, and we see the actual original story of the woman warrior. Kingston exacts her
revenge by novelizing Chin into a monkey. He teaches at UCLA, and chides the class for not being
able to write. The students are clearly afraid as he rants about Charlie Chan. Back on the road, Chin
explains why the Chinese hate Christians. The transition to night finds us inside the D.H.Hwang
Theater, where The Year of The Dragon is being performed for the first time in 20 years. He clarifies
the fine points of Chinese mythology, and winds up enigmaticly wandering in a siren-filled nightscape.
He suffers a stroke in 1999 and struggles to re-achieve fighting trim. He digs up the dirt on the
Japanese American Citizens League's complicity in the roundup and encampment of American-born
Japanese during World War 2, and unveils their exalted leader as a government spy. 30 years later,
Frank Chin publishes his documentary novel Born in the USA: A Story of Japanese America,
1889-1947, and he reads an ominous 9/ll-relevant passage from it. A roadtrip through California gold
country brings us to Chin's little-known childhood and his family's secret.