who often had no choice but to take railroad jobs and who were never allowed the sort of mobility the railroad offered to Anglos. The narrator of "The Eat and Run Midnight People" also recognizes that the heroic songs about railroad workers are fundamentally silly and feels trapped by the restricted range of motion found on railroads: although they allow a great range of mobility, they do not allow much freedom of direction—their path is predetermined. The narrator longs for the free motion of birds' flight but also finds himself pondering death by falling as a way to escape the life of constant riding. Scholar Rachel Lee has examined one story in which Chin examines the young/old conflict from the perspective of the older generation: "The Only Real Day," which focuses on Yuen, an immigrant who has fallen out of contact with this family back in Hong Kong and now works as a dishwasher in Oakland for a woman he finds too assimilated to American culture; his only contact with his friends comes once a week when he meets them in San Francisco for gambling night. His life is overly routine until he receives a letter from immigration that he cannot read; he must depend on Rose and her American-born son, Dirigible, to guide through an immigration system that he does not trust—he knows from experience that the authorities don't always play fair with Chinese residents and feels that he has no rights in this country. Yuen despairs about the state of the world, lamenting that there is little chance of new heroes arising in the same manner of those recounted in the classic Chinese novel Outlaws of the Marsh. Yuen attempts suicide, but ends up dying in the bath; Lee considers that Chin has deliberately created "a prolonged, Hamlet-like contemplation of one's lack of action" that also reveals the legacy of U.S. legal discrimination against Asians. See also Asian American literature Chinese American literature References 1988 short story collections American short story collections Works by Frank Chin Asian-American short story collections American Book Award-winning works