The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co. is a 1988 short-story collection by Frank Chin that collects many of the short stories he had published in the 1970s. It won the American Book Award. The collection deals with Chinese-American history by recalling the work of early Chinese immigrants in such jobs as "coolie, railworker and launderer". Stories "Railroad Standard Time" "The Eat and Run Midnight People" "The Chinatown Kid" "The Only Real Day" "Yes, Young Daddy" "Give the Enemy Sweet Sissies and Women to Infatuate Him, and Jades and Silks to Blind Him with Greed" "A Chinese Lady Dies" (originally published as "Goong Hai Fot Choy") "The Sons of Chan" "Afterword" (a parodical attack on Maxine Hong Kingston's best-selling book The Woman Warrior) Themes Many of the characters in these stories are, in Sau-ling Cynthia Wong's words, "elderly paralytics [who] appear to exist in a static twilight zone of living death"; she mentions the parents in "A Chinese Lady Dies", "Railroad Standard Time", and (from an early story not included in the collection) "Food for All His Dead". Wong notes that in Chin's fiction, immobility represents an unchanging and crippling Chinatown culture that must be escaped by the younger generation. As scholar Elaine H. Kim points out, Chin's metaphors for the community include "bugs, spiders, frogs, [...] a funeral parlor, and obsolete carnival, or a pathetic minstrel show." A related issue is the generational conflict between the Chinese immigrant parents and the American-born children—recall that the "elderly paralytics" were all parents. In "A Chinese Lady Dies", for instance, both the mother and the community are dying; the mother not only described as a cadaver but also actively attending all the local funerals. In "Yes, Young Daddy", Dirigible (whose nickname was, symbolically, "Dirge") has left Chinatown for college, but is drawn back into his Chinatown habits through a letter-correspondence with his younger cousin, Lena, whose father has died and who refers to Dirigible as her "young daddy" after he corrects her grammar and gives her dating advice. After a trip back to Chinatown to visit Lena, Dirigible realizes he can no longer worry about the people still in Chinatown; he must focus on himself. The narrators in these stories see through the façades of Chinatown life but are unable to do anything to help. As in much of Chin's work, this problem is focused on the problem of masculinity, of young