Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston

First published: 1989

Type of plot:Bildungsroman

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: San Francisco and Sacramento, California

Principal Characters:

• Wittman Ah Sing, a Chinese American antiwar activist
• Nanci Lee, the most beautiful Chinese American girl of Wittman’s college days, an aspiring actress
• Taña De Weese, an insurance adjuster who marries Wittman

The Novel

Tripmaster Monkey is Maxine Hong Kingston’s portrait of the artist as a Chinese American who attempts to assert his identity by blending together the two sides of his heritage. Using the Vietnam War as the backdrop, Kingston has also captured the exuberant antiestablishment sensibility of the Bay Area, immortalizing the flower-power counterculture of the psychedelic 1960’s. Whereas the “tripmaster monkey” in the title alludes to the hero of a Chinese folktale and the hippies of American subculture, the “fake book” refers to the novel’s similarity to “music fake books,” which, according to Kingston, may contain many basic melodies or plots other people can develop.

The action begins with the depression of Wittman, a fifth-generation native Californian who is contemplating suicide every day after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California at Berkeley. Working part-time as a toy salesman at a department store in San Francisco, Wittman, who aspires to be a writer, often feels alienated much the same way as the young poet in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), passages of which he recites as he goes about his daily business. Conscious of his Chineseness as well as his Americanness and conceited about his intellectual prowess, he looks for others of his kind. His first candidate is Nanci Lee, who aspires to be an actress. He dates her, shows her his trunk of poems, and declares his intention to write a play for her. Offended by her lack of sensitivity to his talents and identity crisis, however, he scares her away by acting crudely.

As the action progresses, Wittman encounters, in his workplace, a “stocking guy,” a beatnik-hermit who happens to have been published as a Yale Younger Poet. Though encouraged by him, Wittman finds his own job frustrating; after making clockwork toy monkeys perform simulated copulation on Barbie dolls in front of his customers, he fires himself. Unemployed, he goes to the wedding party of Lance Kamiyama, a Japanese American friend and rival with a successful career. On the way, he runs into Judy Louis, a Chinese American who so bores him to death with her nosiness and snobbishness that he pretends to be Japanese in order to evade her stereotyping. At the party, he engages in round after round of verbal combat and intellectual wrestling, abusing and abused by his friends, with whom he has developed a love-hate relationship. Among the group is Yoshi Ogasawara, a smart pretty woman whom he takes as a nemesis because of her tireless discourse, replete with demonstrations, on the “epicanthic fold” typical of the eyelids of many Asians. Later on at the party, after anecdotal and satirical conversations about films, race, lifestyle, Nazism, nuclear war, and other topics of interest to him, Wittman discover Taña De Weese, a beautiful blonde who descends upon him like an angel. She gets along with him so well that the next morning they start having a serious but unromantic sexual relationship, which shortly afterward leads to their being declared husband and wife by a conscientious objector who claims to be a priest of the Universal Life Church.

Having found the personal and intellectual companionship of Taña, Wittman begins to act purposefully. He takes Taña to Sacramento to visit his mother, Ruby Long Legs (formerly an opera star), and his father, Zeppelin Ah Sing (a retiree who publishes a newsletter advocating the art of living on minimal means). Taña is also introduced to more than a dozen former “Flora Dora girls” who contributed to China’s and America’s cause during World War II. Their presence inspires Wittman to involve them in his forthcoming play.

During the visit, Wittman learns that his parents have taken PoPo (his grandmother of uncertain origins) out to the Sierra Mountains and abandoned her there. Horrified, he and Taña try to find her but to no avail (as Wittman discovers later, she has gone to San Francisco with a man, Lincoln Fong, her newfound hero and love). Going back to San Francisco, Wittman files for unemployment benefits, lives like a pig with Taña, and concentrates on the writing of his play, which is a formidable melange of folktales derived from classical Chinese novels, with the Monkey King as the main character. With the help of friends, relatives, and the residents of Chinatown, the play is launched in due course at a community center and proves to be a phenomenal success. Upon the triumphant close of the play, the action of which takes several days to complete, Wittman improvises a one-man show. Interacting with the audience, he gives a lengthy but critical monologue about cultural identity, war, love, and lifestyle. The completion of Wittman’s apprenticeship as an artist is signaled by the audience’s enthusiasm and approval.

The Characters

Although the novel contains several delightful characters, it is Wittman who is the focus throughout; all the others are seen through his eyes. Hence, the entire novel can be regarded as an extended character study of Wittman, with the other characters shedding light on his life and illustrating his philosophy. In characterizing Wittman, Kingston not only captures Wittman in action, but also relies heavily on the prolific verbalization of his inner consciousness.

On the social level, Wittman is characterized as both a misfit and a gadfly with a cause. Unlike his fellow Asian Americans such as Lance, Nanci Lee, and Judy Louis, he is ill prepared, both intellectually and academically, for a stereotypical career (such as engineering) that would readily earn him success and recognition from his peers, parents, relatives, and the mainstream society. This apparent failure is partly responsible for his inferiority complex (and megalomania), which he often exploits by adopting a hostile stance toward the people he comes across, including the new Chinese immigrants in the streets, the customers at the department store, and even his friends at Lance’s party. Yet although his life is a shambles, like many other Americans of his generation who defy the draft in order not to fight an unacceptable war in Vietnam, Wittman also stands on a moral high ground, which makes his cynicism an act of courageous rebellion. While his witty diatribes against the stereotyping of Chinese Americans at times sound vindictive and self-contradictory, his outbursts against wars, atomic bombs, Nazism, and modern life bespeak the pacifism of his generation. His concluding monologue is a culmination of this sensibility.

On the cultural level, Wittman is portrayed as a juggler of cultures who, caught between two heritages that he both claims and disclaims, attempts to arrive at a synthesis. On the one hand, as a fifth-generation native Californian, he asserts his American identity by distancing himself from the “F.O.B.’s” (Chinese immigrants “fresh off the boats”). On the other hand, aware of the racial prejudices leveled against Chinese Americans, he also defends the Chineseness of his heritage and berates the insensitivity of those who either subscribe to stereotypes or refuse to recognize Chinese Americans as Americans. On balance, although Wittman is equally obsessed with certain aspects of both cultures (such as films and Cantonese operas), for him, Chineseness—in the way he defines it—weighs a little more than Americanness, because it is by Chineseness that he hopes to redefine his American identity. This is best symbolized by his relationships with two young women. He loses Nanci Lee, a Chinese American, but wins Taña, a Caucasian, essentially for the same reason: his insistence on being an American of Chinese descent, warts and all. His success as an artist would not have been possible without such a commitment.

Critical Context

Tripmaster Monkey is Kingston’s answer to critics who, unable to decide whether her earlier book-length narratives (The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, 1976 and China Men, 1980) are factual or fictional, hesitate to give full credit for her work. Kingston writes Tripmaster Monkey as a testimony of her abilities and as a proof of her belief that fiction is by no means more difficult to write than memoirs and family histories. More important, having told the story of her parents’ generation in two separate narratives, Kingston finds it appropriate to shift attention to her own generation, who have come of age as biculturals with problems, solutions, imaginations, and visions of their own. Tripmaster Monkey is only the beginning of an ongoing statement about such a generation, with Wittman as its impressive spokesman.

What Wittman has achieved in the novel has great symbolic significance for many Chinese Americans. Combining two kinds of wisdoms culled from two cultures, Wittman has put the history of America into the perspective of the Cantonese operas that once sustained the communities of Chinese pioneers who helped to develop the frontiers of the United States. By involving the community in reviving the Chinese theater, Wittman has fulfilled his personal quest as well as given a new life to an old tradition. Above all, through Wittman, Kingston has added an indelible historical dimension to the myth of the American Dream.

Wittman also addresses issues that concern the United States as a whole. As Kingston suggests, nothing in modern life is immune to Wittman’s cornucopian if cynical commentaries. Impulsive as he is, Wittman is actually quite systematic in his protest against the dehumanizing condition of modern society, which at its worst moments has given rise to the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, and the Vietnam War. Through his cross-cultural and trans-temporal play, Wittman is stating that war and its propaganda ought to stop, that history has proven how even the best of warriors with the best tactics and the best weapons have invariably lost, and that peace, not war, is the real revolution of the modern world.

Bibliography

Chang, Hsiao-hing. “Gender Crossing in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey.” MELUS 22 (Spring, 1997): 15-34. Chang explores the ways in which Kingston intertwines two kinds of gender crossing: masculine gender anxiety and feminine blurring of gender boundaries. Within this context, Chang discusses Kingston’s use of psychic and linguistic dislocations to destablize fact/fiction, history/myth, and Chinese/American polarities.

Furth, Isabella. “Bee-e-een! Nation, Transformation, and the Hyphen of Ethnicity in Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey.” Modern Fiction Studies 40 (Spring, 1994): 33-49. Furth explores the continuous transformations and complex relations between nation, ethnicity, and wounds caused by separation in the world Kingston has created. She focuses on the hyphen, a symbol of both the blending and distinctiveness of the Chinese and American cultures.

Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon Press, 1990. Contains an informative section on Tripmaster Monkey. The book is also an excellent introduction to the tradition behind Kingston.

Lowe, John. “Monkey Kings and Mojo: Postmodern Ethnic Humor in Kingston, Reed, and Vizenor.” MELUS 21 (Winter, 1996): 103-126. Lowe’s examination reveals Kingston, Vizenor, and Reed’s novels as examples of ethnic humor from a postmodern perspective. Focusing on the trickster character in each novel, he demonstrates that the works owe much to the folklore tradition of Chinese, Native American, and African cultures.

Schueller, Malini J. “Theorizing Ethnicity and Subjectivity: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey and Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club.” Genders (Winter, 1992): 72-85. Schueller presents an analysis of Kingston and Tan’s novels, focusing on the common theme of discovering a feminine identity that does not marginalize racial or ethnic orientations.

Tanner, James T. F. “Walt Whitman’s Presence in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.” MELUS 20 (Winter, 1995): 61-74. Tanner explores the numerous references to Walt Whitman in Kingston’s novel. He particularly focuses on the main character, Whitman Ah Sing, and demonstrates how the character’s mottos follow the poet’s own ideas for America.