Who's Irish?

“Chin'' is told in first-person narration by a classmate who lives next door to a boy named Chin and his family. The narrator is ostensibly recounting the story of Chin and why he is always getting beaten at home and bullied at school—and he shares his family's collective narrative of Chin’s home, based on their observations and speculations. The narrator’s family speculates about why the Chins keep their windows closed as well as why Chin is always, as the narrator calls it, getting “the treatment.” One reason that the narrator’s father gives is that Mr. Chin has a hole in his cheek caused by an infection that ate away his whole cheek before he went to a doctor. Mr. Chin beats Chin, the narrator's father says, because he wants him to grow up and be a doctor, not a cabdriver. Chin also often stays up late doing homework.

Meanwhile, however, the narrator shares information about his own family, calling them “vanilla…nothing” in comparison to Chin’s and commenting on his sister’s upcoming wedding to Ray and his mother’s infatuation with Ray without revealing more. At the end of the story, however, an outburst by the narrator’s father brings the reader’s attention away from the tension in Chin’s family, exposing instead the tension of the family that is doing the witnessing.