Tripmaster Monkey

According to critic John Leonard, Maxine Hong Kingston’s third novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book is “the Great American Novel of the Sixties” even though it was published in 1989. Using many of the techniques of postmodernism, such as shifting points of view, interpolated texts, and references to pop culture, the novel follows the transformation of its Chinese-American protagonist from would-be poet to truth-telling playwright. As he comes into his artistic own, he also makes peace with his complex identity and the ways in which the daily prejudice he experiences squares with his sense of himself as an American.

The novel’s protagonist is Wittman Ah Sing, a young man who a year ago graduated with a degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley. His name is a reference to the poet Walt Whitman, a combination of his last name and his famous poem “I Sing the Body Electric.” It is the 1960s, and Wittman is himself a tall, skinny, would-be poet with a honeyed tongue. He decides to stay in San Francisco to pursue his dream of writing a play that will parlay his childhood as the son of traveling Chinese-American vaudevillians into a shocking spectacle, something that will finally tell truth to power in a way that can’t be ignored.

The play would be a way for Wittman to work out his conflicts over his Chinese background. On the one hand, thinking of himself as American, he looks down on newly arrived Chinese immigrants. At the same time, he resents that Asian-American women feel the need to live up to white beauty standards. Overall these personal responses to others are Wittman’s own anger over the racism towards Asian people he constantly experiences. The more he considers his journey through the world, the more he starts to associate himself with the mythic character Sun Wukong, the Monkey King of Chinese folklore – primarily from the epic novel Journey to the West. This association gives Kingston’s novel its title.



The novel opens as Wittman asks out Chinese-American Nanci Lee, the most beautiful of all the girls he knew in college. They meet for cappuccino, and Nanci tells him that she is now an aspiring actor. Excitedly, Wittman tells her about his actor parents; they seem to be hitting it off. However, after they get to his apartment, Wittman starts jumping around wildly, declaring himself to be the reincarnated Monkey King of legend. A freaked out Nanci quickly leaves.

Wittman works in a department store. He used to be considered management material but has recently been demoted to part-time clerk because his disdain for the materialist preoccupations of the customers finally got the better of him. Now that his job consists of shelving and reshelving items for sale, he has stopped all pretense of being a salesperson. Instead, he advises customers not to buy toy guns, to avoid credit cards and debt, and sometimes even gives things away for free. The last straw for the store is when Wittman poses windup monkeys and dolls into sexual positions. As he is about to be fired, he quits.

At a beatnik party thrown by his best friend Lance, Wittman encounters the various counter-culture types that populate San Francisco, like heroin users arguing about the benefits of various health foods, and intellectual potheads watching a movie while playing cards and discussing their private lives. A beautiful white woman, Taña De Weese is reciting poetry that inspires Wittman to confront his friend Lance about some traumatic events from their childhood. As the party winds down and only a few people are left sober and awake, Wittman does a quick rendition of his play to entertain them. The play is improvisational, so after he lays out its basic premise, he assigns roles to the people listening. Afterward, Wittman and Taña walk home through a nearby park, and she is inspired to ask a passer-by priest to marry them so that Wittman can avoid the Vietnam War draft.



Taña introduces Wittman to her parents, and he is surprised to find himself growing more comfortable with the white American culture they represent. In turn, he takes her to meet his own mother, who is spending the day playing mahjongg with her close friends, the former showgirls who are Wittman’s Aunties. Wittman also takes Taña to see his father, who lives in an RV park. They then briefly go to Reno to look for his quasi-grandmother.

Back in San Francisco, Wittman applies for unemployment, registers with the job service as a playwright, and gets the Benevolent Association to allow him to stage his play in their hall.

The play goes on for three consecutive nights. Mostly improvisational and with a cast of hundreds of actors, it uses characters from Chinese mythology, can-can dancers, and kung fu monks to convey anti-war messages. It is exactly the play that he has been dreaming of staging all along. Wittman is thrilled by the response of the audience: “Things were happening all over the place. The audience looked left, right, up and down, in and about the round, everywhere, the flies, the wings, all the while hearing reports from off stage. Too much goings-on, they miss some, okay, like life.”



The novel ends with the conclusion of the play, which is a long monologue by Wittman. He discusses the history of Chinese people in America, the ways they have been oppressed, the ways they have endured and overcome, and the meaning of being Chinese in America. The monologue is a kind of catharsis for him, as he comes to accept both sides of his heritage and culture.