"What are the real important issues at stake? I have identified two. One of them is the racial and cultural myths. Whom do they belong to? Frank would say they belong to real Chinese such as himself. And they do not belong to, for example, the Caucasians. My feeling is, if somebody goes to a bookstore and buys my book, then they have bought the myths, and they can have the great myths of China by reading them. The only way that myths stay alive is if we pass them on. He has also been saying that there is a true text, including the chant of the Woman Warrior. Now I know that myth is not passed on by text; it's mostly passed on by word of mouth, and every time you tell a story and every time you hear it, it's different. So there isn't one frozen authentic version; there are many, many authentic versions different from person to person."
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Activists from the United StatesNovelists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United StatesPlaywrights from the United StatesChinese Americans
Original Language: English
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Sources
1993 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frank_Chin
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Frank Chin
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