Amazon.com Review
Since the early 1990s, Justin Chin has made a name for himself as a "Generation Q" poet, performance artist, essayist, actor, cultural commentator, wisecracker, and slammer. As a gay Chinese American with a punk, postmodern, and perpetually impudent attitude, Chin treats his outsider role with relish and aplomb. He first emerged in print with
Bite Hard, a 1997 collection of poetry and performance pieces that won critical and popular acclaim.
Mongrel, an assemblage of opinion pieces and essays, brings out a radically different side of Chin's talent. These 21 prose pieces map out his positions and thoughts on everything from the best way to eat pancakes to the lure of firing guns, from "rice queens" (Caucasian men attracted to Asian men) to the removal of anal fissures. Chin takes on all topics fearlessly--his dissection of professional white Buddhists is simultaneously shockingly flippant and profoundly insightful--and he always manages to surprise or startle. Sometimes he is simply playful, as in "After Yoko" (in which he maps out various art installations with names like "Dead Fag Piece"), or deadly serious, as when he discusses, in "Death of the Castro," the meaning and limitations of a gay ghetto for a multiracial community. Throughout, Chin manages to steer clear of predictable politics, excessive personal angst, or a smarmy hipper-than-thou tone.
Mongrel is a smart, witty, perceptive--and sometimes disturbing--tour through the life of a young gay man who can deliver not only careful observation and critical discussion but also a laugh or a punch on every page.
--Michael Bronski
From Publishers Weekly
Ever wonder how someone copes with the pain of an anal fissure? Chin imagines three elves having "wild adventures" in his colon. In this ragtag collection of essays about being gay, being Asian-American, being an artist and every permutation thereof, Chin offers his take on such topics as delicate surgery, the importance of class, his Asian upbringing, San Francisco's Castro neighborhood, Thai sex clubs, his disenchantment with poetry slams and pretty much anything else that enters his mind. At his most flippant, Chin is downright charming. In a piece titled "Don't Ask Isadora, Ask Me," he advises: "never serve semen with fish or seafood." He's also engaging when he turns unexpectedly sentimental?as he does in remembering his grandmother's meatballs. Even when Chin lapses into straight journalism, as in his description of the pay scales for boys in Bangkok sex clubs, the book is still endearing. The real tossers come when he tries to present himself as a social commentator. Would anyone who's so much as seen a picture of Marx be shocked to read that "Class is all around, and sometimes, we don't see until it is too late"? How surprising is it that "porn may be morally or politically good or bad depending on whom you ask"? Yet despite the occasional bland insight, Chin's eclecticism and voice make the book, like a poetry slam, an enjoyable, if transient, entertainment.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
