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The Chinese American writer Frank Chin owes his current status as a margin- alized figure in Asian American Studies not only to his anti-feminist vitriolics, but also to his writing style. Judged by common contemporary standards, Chin's novels appear dis- jointed and crude: He routinely puts blunt, didactic statements from his essays into his characters' mouths without even trying to give them any literary embellishment; yet at the same time all these doctrine-like, straightforward, and obviously instructional passages are infused with complex hints at ancient myths, and his competently lecturing pro- tagonists are prone to irritating sudden irrational outbursts of emotion. This article pro- poses that these peculiarities of Chin's style - a combination of passion, plainness, and allegory - do not necessarily have to be seen as literary weaknesses; they can also be interpreted as a radical employment of strategies that helped form an important strain within the American literary tradition: the strategies that the first distinctly American writers (the plain, passionate, and allegorical Puritans) used. Viewed in this light, Frank Chin seems much less of an 'outsider' than before. Frank Chin is not exactly popular among practitioners of Asian American Studies. The Chinese American writer, born in 1940 in Berkeley, author of the first Asian American drama that made it onto an important New York stage, and co-editor of the seminal anthology Aiiieeeee!, suffers from an "institutional negligence" (Li 1991, 211), being regarded as "chauvinist, nativist, or nationalist" by a majority of scholars (Goshert 2000). The demonstrative Asian hyper-masculinity he displays and advo- cates, and his vitriolic and by now legendary attacks on The Woman Warrior by the nearly untouchable Maxine Hong Kingston, in the late nineties the most widely taught author in American academia (Simmons 1999, 15), appear to have turned Chin into a pariah of sorts: When he was nominated for the Distinguished Achieve- ment Award of the Western Literature Association in 1999, massive protest mainly from feminists led to his ending up as the first nominee ever to be rejected (Davis 2000). John Goshert reports that when he attempted to discuss Chin with academ- ics, "respondents at a number of conferences quickly called me to task for even broaching the subject" (2000). The Kingston-Chin dispute with its literary and cultural implications has been competently and comprehensively analyzed already (for instance, by Cheung 1998, 107-24), as has been the question of what Chin's marginalization tells us about the state of Asian American Studies (Li 1991, 211-23). What I am interested in here is something else, something that is related to the judgment of the literary merit of