“Why can’t one of us write tragedy?”: The Unpublished Correspondence of Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin

This article presents unpublished 1970s correspondence between Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin, reframing the “Chin-Kingston debates” as an evolving dialogue over genre, representation, and literary authority rather than a zero-sum contest over authenticity. Read alongside Chin’s exchanges with Diana Chang and both writers’ correspondence with Aiiieeeee! co-editor Shawn Wong, these letters illuminate the aesthetic and political fault lines shaping early Asian American literature. Disputes over New Criticism, racialized genre, publishing, and artistic autonomy reveal overlapping commitments to craft and community, while showing how tensions between being a “minority writer” and “just a writer” were experienced both ideologically and personally.