men feeling that the Anglo vision of Asians is always feminine and that there are no good male role models in the Chinatown communities. The male narrators of "A Chinese Lady Dies" and "Yes, Young Daddy" are surrounded mostly by women, with the fathers gone and the only other men around being the local storekeepers. One of the ways Chin's characters escape the dead-end of Chinatown is by valorizing their ancestor's heroism in the face of oppression and poverty. The title of "The Eat and Run Midnight People" refers to the narrator's peasant ancestors in Canton Province, China: "...the get out of town eat and run folks, hungry all the time eating after looking for food". And the narrator of "Railroad Standard Time" knowingly romanticizes the life of a grandfather he never really knew. Another way his characters escape the static nature of Chinatown culture is through motion. Many of Chin's characters are, in Wong's words, "addicted to mobility: [...] the exhilarating rush it provides, a solipsistic sensation of power and domination"; his characters are not interested in finding a better place to live, but rather in being altogether free from social constraints. Chin relishes the freedom celebrated in legends of the Old West, represented by the railroads that he references in the title of the collection, which were built with the help of Chinese immigrants who would never themselves be able to ride them. For Chin, the history of these immigrants in the Old West is as important for Chinese American history as the story of the oppressed rebels who challenge the Emperor's authority in the Chinese classic novel Outlaws of the Marsh, which he references in "A Chinese Lady Dies"; Chin's love of the Old West includes a strong-sense of retribution for Anglo racism, of "Chinaman vengeance on the West". The narrator of "The Eat and Run Midnight People", a former railroad brakeman, loved not only the freedom of movement provided by the railroad, but also the way his job allowed him to become part of the American project of conquering the West (e.g., Manifest Destiny), the kind of job that is sung about in folk songs like "I've Been Working on the Railroad". But as Wong notes, the railroad is an ambivalent symbol for Chinese Americans, since it represents both the American dream of mobility, luxury and power but also the historical difficulties of the Chinese workers,