Charlie Chan Is Dead: 4an Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction

In her introduction Hagedorn ( Danger and Beauty ) calls Asian American literature ``too confining a term'' for these wide-ranging works. And indeed while the short stories and novel excerpts, nearly half being published for the first time, provide interesting reading, they seem to lack a cohering premise. Moreover, pieces by well-known writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan are not particularly fresh. The most successful of the works paint sharp portraits of individuals. Gish Jen's Catholic-school girl is eager to work miracles, especially after her mother falls from a bedroom window during a fight with her father. Cynthia Kadohata's domineering grandmother insists on telling inappropriate stories and affects the narrator so forcefully that the girl swears, ``Anything she does, I never will.'' Marilyn Chin's Moon is ``a little fat Chinese girl'' who is humiliated by two boys who urinate on her, and subsequently by her parents, then wreaks supernatural revenge. Cherylene Lee's narrator tells how her brother came to be a flame diver despite their overprotective parents' disapproval and muses that ``Perhaps there is a Chinese gene encoded with a protein for caution.'' (Dec.)