The stories portray Chinese Americans as real people during the turn of the century. At that time, most of the Chinese were seen as one-dimensional. The author gave them emotions and feelings, yet did not portray them in a positive light. I give her credit for being these characters into the mainstream, but I think she did a dis-service by making them sound sterotypical and backward. The stories themselves are entertaining, but not terribly memorable.

I like Sui Sin Far a lot more than Maxine Hong Kingston or Amy Tan. I'm glad someone finally portrayed Asians correctly. You can always count on this important author.

This academic text, edited by scholars Elizabeth Ammons and Annette White-Parks, and published by the University Press of New England in 1994, challenges as the trickster does. The trickster is a comic shape changer/trans former, a figure who crosses the boundary between right and wrong, living and dead, clean and dirty, male and female, as the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, contradiction and paradox, and the disruptive aspect of the human imagination that opens up possibilities for creative rebellion and reimagining. Well-known tricksters include the ancient Greek Hermes, the Yoruba Esu, Hindu Krishna, Native American Coyote, Chinese Monkey King, and African-American Signifying Monkey. The 10 essays in Ammons' and White-Parks'study of turn-of-the-century American literature take a trickster's delight in disrupting tradition. They bypass the conventional Eurocentric models of realism, naturalism, and modernism, and the familiar analyses of such canonical writers as Henry James and William Dean Howells. Instead, they examine a variety of trickster characters and "strategies of tricksterism," as practiced by marginalized ethnic authors, mainly women, including Maria Cristina Mena, Zitkala-Sa, Charles W. Chesnutt, Mourning Dove, and Frances E.W. Harper. The essays are well-conceived and well-written, and the volume as a whole is an important con- tribution to reimagining American literature as a complex weave of multicultural discourses. The figure of the trickster, and the idea of a trickster aesthetics, resonates powerfully as writers and scholars from marginalized groups challenge the canon and the academy. I'm using this text in a Summer course in The Trickster at New York University and The New School in New York City, a course that pairs ancient oral texts, such as Monkey: Journey to the West, and Native American Coyote tales, and tales of the West African trickster Esu-Elegbara, with works by contemporary American women of color, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison. This text has enabled me to recognize the trickster figure and trickster strategies as practiced in texts written by ethnic Americans as much as a hundred years ago, and as such has been an invaluable addition to my library. I recommend it to all students and teachers of American literature.