Week 8: Tripmaster Monkey

Wittman Ah Sing is a character who is searching, often in vain, for a practical use for this Berkeley English education, and he yearns for a community to call his own. He is technically part of many different communities: San Francisco, poets, Chinese, college students, and a group of friends with whom he parties. Still, he always feels out of place. He must learn to belong to a hybrid culture, one that encompasses both the individual and the community. Neither one can completely encompass the other. He must deal with the issue of his own visibility or invisibility. Sometimes he feels all important, and at others, he feels he can’t be heard by a single person in the city.

The title of the book comes from the ancient Chinese story “Monkey,” in which the monk Tripitaka brings the Buddhist scrolls from India to China. Monkey is one of his three companions, and the strongest and most unruly one. He is infinitely powerful, yet he is uncontrollable, rash, proud, and somewhat of a jokester. Much of this can apply to Wittman (except perhaps the infinite power). Wittman shares some of Monkey’s supernatural monk-ish powers. When on the bus, he sees a girl turn into a boar and speak to him. He seems to hallucinate, but his visions nearly always make some kind of sense and reveal important understandings to him.

The subtitle and chapter headings of the book are references to other types of works. The chapter titles are all phrases from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The connection here needs no explanation. “His fake book” might not imply that the story is fake; it is like a jazz fake book, or a springboard for new ideas and cultures that will require improvisation. On the other hand, it could be a direct response to Frank Chin’s accusation:

“Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” he writes: "What seems to hold Asian American literature together is the popularity among whites of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (450,000 copies sold since 1976); David Henry Hwang’s F.O.B. (Obie, best off- Broadway play) and M. Butterfly (Tony, best Broadway play); and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. These works are held up before us as icons of our pride, symbols of our freedom from the icky-gooey evil of . . . Chinese culture.

"Furthermore, Kingston, Hwang, and Tan are the first writers of any race, and certainly the first writers of Asian ancestry, to so boldly fake the best-known works from the most universally known body of Asian American lore in history."

The fact that Wittman is based on Frank Chin makes this a likely interpretation. It is a clever retort to that hurtful remark, and Kingston’s way of recreating the American canon, a goal she shares with Wittman Ah Sing.