Summary
Kingston says that Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, her first true novel, was written after she had exhausted all the stories she knew about China. Yet, its title belies that claim for it reflects the novel’s debt to the classic Chinese epic Journey to the West, wherein the king of the monkeys takes a trip to India in search of sacred scrolls. Nonetheless, the cultural amalgam that Kingston relishes is confirmed by her statement that she was thinking of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Signifying Monkey when she wrote the book. A densely packed four hundred pages, it is the story of the pranks and high jinks of twenty-three-year-old Chinese American hippie playwright Wittman Ah Sing, who lives in San Francisco in 1963 under the reign of Governor “Ray Gun” (Reagan). The book covers two months, September and October. Wittman is as free-spirited, independent, and garrulous as Walt Whitman, the nineteenth century American poet who is his namesake, yet he is equally as Chinese as Monkey, the mythical trickster-saint who brought Buddhist scripture to China from India. Like Whitman, Wittman sings America and its multifarious facets, and the legacy he celebrates is the hallucinogenic culture of Berkeley in the 1960’s.
Wittman’s picaresque bohemian life is part serendipity and part fantastic journey, and his goal is to stage his epic dramatic production based on Chinese novels and folktales. Told in nine chapters of roughly equal length, the novel moves in a seamlessly chronological and fantastical story line, using third-person limited omniscient point of view. The reader accompanies Wittman on his adventures and is privy to his thoughts through the commentary of a wise, indulgent, and engagingly intrusive seer-narrator.
When the novel opens, Wittman has been out of college for a while and is puzzling about his future. As he walks the streets of San Francisco, he contemplates suicide in such a slapdash way that the reader cannot take him seriously. His observant mind and quick wit are attuned to nuances in the behavior of strangers and microscopic features of inanimate objects. Aboard a city bus, he reads aloud passages from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1930), regaling (or at least not annoying) fellow passengers. He enjoys a cappuccino with Nanci Lee, a beautiful Asian acquaintance and aspiring actress to whom he is romantically attracted. When he brings her to his apartment and reads his poetry to her, however, she neither understands nor appreciates his work and walks out.
After working on a play all night long and sleeping for a few hours, Wittman goes to his job as toy clerk at a department store. He offends customers and is inept at assembling a bicycle display. He attends a management trainee conference at a fancy hotel (under false colors, as he has been demoted) and embarrasses the three other Chinese Americans present. Back at the job, Wittman maneuvers a toy organ grinder monkey and a Barbie bride doll into an obscene position in full view of shocked customers, an action that gets him fired.
For something to do, Wittman sees the film West Side Story (1961), but he is put off by the falsity of Hollywood. He boards a bus for Oakland and endures the self-interested chatter of the plain, aggressive Chinese American girl next to him. His destination—a party at the home of good friends, recently married—promises a new destiny, for Wittman becomes enchanted by Taña de Weese, a Caucasian with long blond hair and sandals, who recites poetry while looking directly into Wittman’s eyes.
Wittman, Taña, and...
(This entire section contains 1111 words.)
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a few other guests stay up all night, then share a breakfast omelet. Wittman reads aloud a long excerpt from his play, and everyone discusses acting in it. Wittman and Taña visit her apartment, which Wittman finds enchanting, and where they declare their love for each other. The next day they do some sightseeing and encounter a hippie claiming to be an ordained minister, who spontaneously marries them.
Their next stop is Sacramento, to visit Wittman’s parents. His mother is hosting a game of mah-jongg, so Wittman is able to introduce Taña to family relatives and friends. He searches the house for his grandmother, but his mother is elusive about her whereabouts. His father, playing poker at a friend’s house, also will not give Wittman a straight answer, except to say that they had taken her to Reno and she had not returned with them. Taña and Wittman drive to Reno but fail to find the grandmother. Instead, they enjoy an expensive restaurant dinner that is partially marred by racist jokes they overhear at an adjacent table.
The next morning Taña goes to work, and Wittman goes through the seemingly interminable application process for unemployment compensation. Later, meandering through the lights of Chinatown, he unexpectedly meets his grandmother. Her abandonment by Wittman’s parents in the Sierra Nevada has worked to her advantage; she was picked up by a wealthy Chinese man who married her. She presses money into Wittman’s grateful hands before they depart.
Wittman uses a pay telephone to contact friends and relatives—everyone he knows in the area—to assemble an acting company and an audience for his play, scheduled to open Halloween night. The play turns out to be a complex and fast-paced blend of slapstick and magic, wit and rage, with the actors playing eccentrics, freaks, and mythical heroes. The famous joined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, Chinese-Siamese immigrants who got rich appearing as a Civil War sideshow spectacle, enable Wittman to bring to the stage an embodiment of mixed identity, notes Kingston. The cast and growing audience love it, and critics rave. So frenzied are the events that the audience finds it impossible to take it all in at once. Police are called because of the pandemonium. It becomes a climactic free-for-all, with everyone fighting everyone else, and it culminates in an explosion of fireworks. A book that began with reference to suicide ends in a roaringly good time.
After things settle down, Wittman takes center stage and “talks story” about the formative influences in his life and the larger dilemma of all Chinese living in the United States. As his name echoes Walt Whitman’s, so this is his equivalent of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” His extended monologue is touching, bitter, and humorous as he describes his personal experiences of racial prejudice. His narrative reveals the agony, pain, and bafflement of trying to synthesize past Chinese heritage with present American culture, yet his invectives and fevered eloquence end in optimistic determination for the future.