As with his memoirish Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks, Chin, a poet and performance artist based in San Francisco, unfurls tendrils of his childhood to reassess the brutal abuse he absorbed, echoed by oppressive governments and reflected into his adult romantic life. Born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore, Chin (Bite Hard) structures the book's first section with 12 mostly family-based vignettes that are nothing short of phantasmagoric. There are rumors of children's heads being buried at the foot of the bridge being built from Singapore to Malaysia, and the news reports the arrest of a couple who murder children. (Chin takes a moment to identify with the murderers by describing how he would deal with a corpse.) Sent to live with his cousins in order to benefit from the better education available in Singapore, Chin ends up getting abused by his aunt (among other things, she makes him eat his own vomit at the dinner table). Chin's writing is strongest in the final section centered on his adult, gay love life: "What I desire and what I end up with are two vastly different things. Ripe and raw; school buses and dingoes." Chapters like "The French Ambassador," "26 Acts" and "A Sea of Decaying Kisses" stay within dark psychological territory ("18. You pour battery acid on your legs"), but Chin never forces a link between his childhood and (imagined?) masochism. It would all be disturbing if Chin didn't seem so firmly in control of his language and self, both of which emerge here luminously. (May)
Forecast:Chin's
Harmless Medicine, a collection of poems, recently appeared from San Francisco's Manic D press. Alyson is a Los Angeles publisher of gay and lesbian titles, so expect strong West Coast sales among the young and pierced of all preferences, and good gay and lesbian sales elsewhere.
