A 'Melus' interview: Maxine Hong Kingston.

Maxine Hong Ungston is the author of three books which integrate her ancestral Chinese tradition with American culture, life styles and literatures. The Woman Warrior, published in 1976, won a National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and was enthusiastically acclaimed. China Men, published in 1981, won the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, an encyclopedic novel, was published in 1989.

Shortly after Tripmaster Monkey came out, Maxine Hong Kingston read at the Living Writers Series, which I coordinate at San Diego State University. We spent a rich day together, and this inteview is the result of our discussion.

Reprinted with permission from the September, 1989, issue of Poetry Flash.

Interviewer. The opening chapter of Tripmaster Monkey made me cry.

Kingston: Really? I'm so glad.

Interviewer: You're glad you made me cry?

Kingston: Because everybody is saying it's tough, or they're saying, "That Wittman has such an obnoxious personality." I am so glad it brings out a softer emotion.

Interviewer: Well, I recognize that squalor, that desperation. Being an unemployed poet, going through life in San Francisco where the immigrants are making their dream. I remember sitting in coffee shops, writing up my resume while the immigrants were out there working hard and buying their houses, working towards this |dream.' I said, how have I lost that dream? I recognize that desperation in Wittman. And those piles and piles of unfinished poems in the false bottom of his Gold Mountain Theater truck...

Kingston: That dream that he's gonna be a poet. You know, lately I've met new immigrants that have been coming in, and they are so different than my parents. I've met a whole bunch of brand-new people who are musicians, and their strength and their music is so strong. They come here looking for part-time jobs. They don't want to open a restaurant or laundry, but they will take a menial job in a restaurant in order to practice their music. And their dream ... they've come here with the ancient instruments - their erh hus and yuehs [2 string fiddles and moon guitars], and they want to introduce American people to this music. And they think they can introduce those ancient instruments and make music and compose and make a career

Interviewer: Let's talk about the opening chapter. Why Wittman Ah Sing ... and not Wilma Ah Lan? Why a male protagonist this time? That surprised me when I opened the book. I wasn't expecting a male protagonist.

Kingston: Oh, many reasons. One of them is that my life as a writer had been a long struggle with pronouns. For 30 years I wrote in the first person singular. At a certain point I was thinking that I was self-centered and egotistical, solipsistic, and not very developed as a human being, nor as an artist, because I could only see from this one point of view. I was only interested in myself. So for 30 years I did that - all my poems, my prose, evexything that I wrote. And then in about the fourth chapter of The Woman Warrior I felt the claustrophobia of that very strongly. I thought I had to overcome this self-centeredness. I guess what I'm saying is that I think you can't write well unless you're a good human being. That you cannot fake wisdom, or good values, in a book. You have to be a good person in order to write that way. So about three-quarters of the way through The Woman Warrior I was thinking, I have to care about other people more than I do. And so, very artificially, I wrote a chapter that's done with an omniscient narrator. So I could use a third person. That's the chapter about my mother and her sister going to Los Angeles to reclaim that bigamist husband.

Interviewer: That was a wonderful vignette.

Kingston: I liked it because it really fell into place as a classical short story shape. And actually what gave me a lot of help was thinking of I Love Lucy.- I thought, what an easy form; I could work in that form. The first half of the show is Lucy and Ethel. That's my mother and my aunt, and they are stirring up everything. They are plotting to do something that will get their husbands into a lot of trouble. And then, by the second half, there's the confrontation, where all of them, Ricky and Fred, and everybody, they all clash, and they're chasing all over the place, and there's all this excitement, and then the resolution. I use that form, to help me be able to manipulate four characters, to be able to look at people from the outside and not as before, always interior. Even when I wrote about other people, I would do it first person.

What was happening next, though, is that I continue that struggle in China Men. So it does begin with a strong narrator, myself. Then as I go along, I disappear. And I become a listener at the end. I can tell their stories from their own point of view. And then, what's happened in Tripmaster Monkey is that I have, as the narrator has, totally disappeared. I feel that this is an artistic as well as psychological improvement on my part. Because I am now a much less selfish person. And I can write The Other...

Interviewer: There was a letter that Ezra Pound wrote to James Joyce after he finished Ulysses. He said something like, at last you have been able to write The Other. So The Other for women is a man. At last you have found your |other' characters. It's also the maturation of the craft. To be able to work with another point of view. The first person is something we do in our youth, perhaps.

Kingston: Another thing about the first person was that, in that first book, the reader is reading the first person. So I was thinking that I was creating this world, that the |I' is so strong the reader is caught in it; the reader believes it. But then I wanted to show them, who is this |I' after all, in the context of the rest of the world? It's just some dumb kid who sits in a comer. I want to show her place, socially. How do other people see her. She is just some kid who doesn't know anything about anything. She has no business in the drama of the adults. I just want to give the different perspectives. But anyway, this new book, I think that it's a real triumph to do the omniscient narrator. And she is actually pushing Wittman Ah Sing around, telling him to shut up. She gives him various girlfriends; she gives him different difficult human situations to contend with. And, as I was writing along, I saw that she has a personality. First of all the onmiscient narrator is a woman. And second, she has a memory that goes back to China. She has a memory that sees a little bit into the future, toward the end of the Vietnam war, in the movies that were being produced. And she is also sometimes very tough on Wittman, and she captures him. Remember in the Monkey story, as Kuan Yin takes a rock and throws it on top of the monkey for 500 years? I felt that as narrator I took a rock and threw it on top of the protagonist and captured him. And kept him in place. So I was beginning to see that my narrator is Kuan Yin, and she is very merciful. I mean, nobody is going to get killed or hurt. She keeps giving people wonderful opportunities.

Interviewer: At the same time, life is not a bowl of cherries for Wittman.

Kingston: She gives him a lot of hardships and problems he has to deal with, such as, what are you going to do with your life after you get your degree in English? How are you going to apply what you have learned? How are you going to bring back what you have learned to your people? There are no ready-made answers, as there are for your engineers and the business majors. So this is Wittman's task. And I wanted him not to end up like Madame Bovary, who's a reader, or Don Quioxte, who's a reader. Literature took them to all the wrong places. I wanted to see whether Wittman can take all this wonderful literature and make the world a better place, given what he knows. As craft, though, I felt so good, so revolutionary, in that I have a woman, goddess narrator, as opposed to those nineteenth century omniscient narrators, who were really men - they were white men because God m the nineteenth century was a white man. I'm saying that's not so anymore.

Interviewer: That's great, the Goddess of Mercy is the omniscient nartator. I had a feeling Kuan Yin was in there.

Kingston: Oh, I'm so glad you got that! Nobody's gotten it.

Interviewer: Ah Sing's long-winded style is mimetic of the bombardment of the multi-cultural society of San Francisco and the Bay Area. And he's a precocious and unhappy and alienated anti-hero, wading through the shit of American life. And a lot of shit is his own making. I can see Kuan Yin up there, often judging him.

Kingston: Yes, often.

Interviewer: And he not liking it. They struggle. There's a struggle going on between the narrator and the protagonist.

Kingston: Yes. And his struggle is also with the society around him. It's also with women. He's a very macho spirit. The narrator is the great female, so he struggles with her and fights with her and refuses to accept reality. He has to learn to be one with the female principles of the world. But he starts out alienated. It's a struggle against alienation. And he tries for integration so much. He sees it on simple levels, such as integrating the buses and the bathrooms and the Johns and all that. But he also has to work on integrating himself. And then there's that large integration between him and the rest of the universe. And America.

Interviewer: And you go toward that, by putting out his vision of the theater - an integrated theater. And that vision is complete. What he has is the spirit of play, which the Monkey King had.

Kingston: The Monkey King was always mischievous, and he was always looking for the Elixir of Life. And the gods in heaven put him through so many trials. But he always bounced back; no matter how the evil prince and his army chased after him and so forth, he always bounced back. He ended up a very important figure in Chinese literature and unforgettable.

His bouncing back has to do with irrepressible joy and his spirit of fun. Somehow we are going to solve the world's problems with fun and theater. And with laughter. The reason this is all set in the Sixties, too, is that the monkey was here, in the Sixties. Abby Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, you know? They were monkey spirits, trying to change the world with costumes and street theater.

Interviewer: And thumbing their noses at the establishment.

Kingston: That's it. The monkey's task was to bring chaos to established order. So Wittman has that also.

Interviewer: In the Sixties there was a self-empowerment movement.

Kingston: Self-defining. Life is beautiful.

Interviewer: So Wittman Ah Sing could be an Asian-American emblem of that era. Some of the Asian-Americans then considered themselves separatists, with the blacks, with the |60s self-empowerment movement.

Kingston: But then there were lots of Asians in the Rainbow Coalition. I thought that was great. I thought they were so big to have done that, because Jesse Jackson didn't remember yellow until quite late in the campaign.

Interviewer: Your Tripmaster is really a poet's novel. The play in the language, the puns, the cacophony, the history, the invective, the pieces of Americana, filled with the stuff of life.

Kingston: Thank you. I love that.

Interviewer: Poets should read this novel.

Kingston: He starts out in the book as a poet, as I started out a poet. And then, he wants to make a difference, socially. And he wants to form a community. His being a playwright would do that better than being a poet. So he picks a more social art.

Interviewer: I remember on page 33, Nancy, his girlfriend says, "An actress says other people's words. I'm an actress. I know about other people's words. You scare me, a poet saying his own words. I don't like watching." Something interests me about this. That's saying that the art of poetry writing is akin to masturbating; that the reader watches while the poet goes on...

Kingston: No, that's Nancy ... But what I feel is that a poet speaks directly. When you get up there on a platform and read your poetry, you are saying your own words. It comes directly out of your body, your voice, your mind. And Nancy is an actress. She uses other people's words. But she is scared of him because ... he has just put on a one-man show for her. And she's all by herself. She's his one person audience. And he blasts her, with his language. It comes straight from him, blasting at her. She gets no help from other members of the audience. And she is sort of like an unworthy audience. She doesn't understand it, and she's scared.

Interviewer: She's one of those Philistines.

Kingston: Well, she's not the girl for him. She's not the perfect listener or the perfect reader, which I try to be for those Chinamen.

Interviewer: I want to tell you that The Woman Warrior was a very important book in my life. I discovered it in 1977 in the Jeffrey Amherst Book Store in Amherst, Massachusetts. I was an undergraduate there.

Kingston: I was just at Amherst. So many Asian-American kids there. They gave me a standing ovation. I was reading, and they were standing in the balcony, clapping. I felt like I was at a revival meeting. [At the University of Massachusetts - Ed.]

Interviewer: The Asian-Americans there, they hunger for this. I think we're very spoiled on the West Coast. We get more of this Asian-American culture. The streets of California are littered with budding writers. And we get more of the cross-cultural stuff. And they don't, back there. When I discovered The Woman Warrior I recognized Brave Orchid as my grandmother and Moon Orchid as my sad, sad mother. And my father was Moon Orchid's doctor-bigamist husband. My whole family was in that book. All those faces, with the complete physiognomy of that first generation of Chinese-American chaotic families. But it was wonderful. I think it gave us permission to go on. That book set precedent. That summer I was wallowing between law school, and becoming a poor starving poet. So that book really made a difference in my life. And I'm certain that it made a difference in many, many fives.

Kingston: You mean it helped you think that you should continue as a poet?

Interviewer: Yes.

Kingston: How did it do that? I don"t know how it would do that.

Interviewer: Well, for a long time I was in despair. I thought there was no audience for my voice. And the narrator, the protagonist in The Woman Warrior, she was working hard to let her voice out. She had to wade through the contradictions of this dual culture, this heavy-duty heritage. If she had the power and the fortitude to continue her |pressed duck' voice, to eke out that voice, I said, perhaps so must I continue my struggle. Poetry was my passion. This was what I wanted to do. That summer I decided not to go to law school and to become a poet. And here I am, a starving poet.

Kingston: So that's what I've done for you.

Interviewer: Oh, I'm sure you've done that for many, many Asian-American women.

Kingston: I've done it for a lot of women. I was so amazed when I was up in Seattle. A young black said that I started her writing again and that she wanted to thank me. So she gave me a rap. She did it, and the audience snapped their fingers along. It was a poem in praise of me, with my Chinese name - Ting Ting - She played on the rap rhythms, and it was just lovely. And then the audience cheered. I thought, my gosh, what a wonderful response to my writing! And I"ve heard that before, from writers who say that I get them going again. It makes me feel that in my life I am at the source of life and words. I feel that I'm sort of standing over this hole in the universe, and it's all pouring in. I can be a conduit. The people who read my work feel more alive, and they can work. I feel like that about other writers that make me keep going. When I read Virginia Woolf's Orlando or William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, I can feel like I'm dying, or I'm stuck, both in life and in work. I read those books, and then I start flowing again. I am happy I can do that for other people.

Interviewer: You are a positive force. It's wonderful to have you in California again. You can't imagine how important your work is. Do you as an Asian-American writer, now in the prime of your literary life, still feel the same contradictions that Ting the protagonist, felt in The Woman Warrior? That struggle to get out, the struggle to have a voice?

Kingston: No, no. I feel much more integrated. I think that it takes this long, to be middle aged - it takes decades of struggle. When you are a person who comes from a multi-cultural background it just means that you have more information coming in from the universe. And it's your task to figure out how it all integrates, figure out its order and its beauty. It's a harder, longer struggle. I feel that I am now a pretty integrated person. I still have a way to go, but when I compare myself to other women...

History is all these migrations, from the very beginning. People are probably a migratory species. And they go faster and faster and faster. We're all here in America now. Lately I met an Indonesian-Chinese woman immigrating to Japan. She learned Japanese language, then came to America in the middle of the civil rights movement, joined the civil rights movement and identified with all these black people. Then there came a time when the black people decided they had to consolidate their own forces. So they threw everybody else out of the movement. So she was thrown out. And I was thinking, my god, what a beautiful, strong woman. How is she going to integrate Indonesia, Chinese-ness, Japan-ness, her black-ness? She had to do all that, and she has. So I look at myself. I just have two. It's not that bad.

Interviewer: It's a hard life. To be a writer is marginal. There's no place for a writer in this country. Even being a reader is weird. It's like being Kafka's character who wakes up one morning and turns into a cockroach, and the family ends up crushing him to death. There are times in which I feel, as a poet, that it's almost hopeless, but then, of course, when we're reading people that we love and when we're writing well and the spirit, the muse is with us ... it makes it an worth it.

Kingston: That's true about writers being marginal. It comes to me when I'm on an airplane. I guess because I've been on a lot of airplanes lately, but, you know, your seat mate might ask, well, what do you do? I always struggle. I cannot just say, I'm a writer. It's awful. I hate it. I've resorted to lying. If you say you're a writer, they say, well what do you write? Then they feel defensive because they don't read.

Since you're an Asian Lit specialist, I want to tell you that when I went to China - I was there last year - it was a trip sponsored by UCLA and the Chinese Writers Association - there was this whole group of writers. We were guests of Chinese writers, poets, scholars. One told me that I was writing in the water and grass style. And then I read an early draft of Tripmaster Monkey aloud to them and they had it translated, and they read it. A poet told me that I was the only Chinese that was writing in the tradition of the Dream of the Red Chamber because here is Wittman as the effete young man battling to keep his manhood among the matriarchy, the twelve women of that book. He said that I was writing in the tradition of the past. And, in part of the conference, they were telling us that there was a "roots literature" movement in China - because in the Cultural Revolution they cut off the roots.

So they had cut off their ties to the West, and cut off the bindings of feudalism, the imperial arts and all that. But then they weren't left with anything. So, as I came to the end of the trip, when we got to Shanghai, they were crying and talking about all this Cultural Revolution stuff. Then I thought, I know why they invited us American writers there, especially me, because they felt that I was working m free conditions. Here I was in America, where I had free speech and free press. And I spent this lifetime working on roots. So what they were saying was that I was their continuity. And they wanted help in figuring out where to go.

They thought Gabriel Garcia Marquezs would be the way because of his richness, because his work can be multi-layer. He can use the Indian past and the Catholic-Spanish heritage. Keep it all. You don't have to cut that out, cut this out.

Interviewer: And also, keep in the political realism, which is very important.

Kingston: Yeah. But, god, I felt so terrific. Because they were telling me I was part of a Chinese canon. And here I was writing in English!

Interviewer: But that's important, to think that there is continuity. I always think back to the Tang Dynasty when I write poetry. I feel that I am very much a part of that Chinese tradition. I don't want to be cut off from it. That's why I studied classical Chinese. I feel it's very, very important. I don't know if other Asian-Americans feel that way, but I know you feel that way. Our roots go way back. We're old souls. We need to speak for all those people who didn't have a chance to speak, all those women who were illiterate, all those court women who were embodied in the architecture and couldn't get out - their feet bound, so they would not wander away from the courtyard. We're almost like mediums for those ancient voices. I feel close ties to my Chinese roots.

Kingston: I do, too. I think it's partly because my mother came from China, so I live with a person who remembers that history. I feel directly concerned. On the other hand, I've also realized that I'm an American. There's such a struggle to establish one's claim to America. And I keep thinking, maybe I shouldn't be interested in Tang Dynasty poetry because that's going backwards. Because I am writing in English, after all. And I have to show that the connection is here. Because the moment I let go of my hold to this country, there are people out there who will say, well, go home then. Why don't you go back where you came from? Which is not where I come from. I come to my Chinese roots very tentatively. This is why Wittman can't help it - it's in your genes or something, this concern for China. But, see, we get scared about that, because it's like the Japanese-Americans, when they burned their diaries, when they burned their art work. Because they didn't want people to think that they should be put in camps. There is this wanting to be American and to write American. But, when I was writing The Woman Warrior and so concerned to just throw out any exotic imagery, because I didn't want people to think I was exotic, I only kept the ones that I thought were absolutely necessary. They were so much a part of my life here that they are American imagery. And yet, when I look at it now, it still looks really Chinese. You know, in Tripmaster Monkey, at the beginning, it comes pouring out of Wittman, all this Chinese history and poems of Chinese theater. And then, all of a sudden, he looks at it and says, oh my gosh, what am I doing? All this Chinese stuff. I'm an American. I gotta write American stories. So he takes it, and he bums it.

Interviewer: He keeps going back and forth, doesn't he? I mean, he looks at FOB's [|fresh off the boat'] on the street and is ashamed of them.

Kingston: There's a part of him that's like a mainstream, racist American because he's got a Mayflower complex, himself. He's been taught by America that, ff you were born here, then you're a real American. If your people go way back, then you're a real American. His people do go way back, except that there are a lot of white Americans who will come up to you and say, where do you come from? There is a refusal to understand that an American can look like one of us and doesn't have to be white. He just doesn't want to be taken for an FOB.

So he takes it out on them by being nasty to them and not liking them and saying I'm not one of you. Like minority guys who beat up minority women.

Interviewer: Yes, let's talk about that.

Kingston: As we were saying, among the minority writers, it looks like there is an argument going on, between black men and black women writers, between the Chicano men and the Chicanas, between the Asian-American writers, the men and women, the same argument is being carried out. And it's not even an argument; it's so one-sided. Attacks by the men on the women. Saying that somehow, we have achieved our success by collaborating with the white racist establishment. We are in bed with the white literary establishment; that's how we get published. Or they say, we pander to the white taste for feminist writing. We're just panderers ff we write this kind of stuff. We write, we put exotic visions, images, because whites find it romantic. AR these issues that David Hwang did in M. Butterfly are very feminist. It's just a one-sided argument because the women don't answer. We let them say those things because we don't want to be divisive.

Interviewer: And the analogy...

Kingston: Yes. That's what is so sad is that here we are, the literate people, the artistic people, and we're replicating a battle that's going on among more primitive, unenlightened people. The minority women go out there, and we can get jobs, no matter how menial. And we come home to the unemployed husband, and he, because racism has messed with his manhood really badly, instead of understanding he's got to go out and change the world, he has it all wrong, who the enemy is - so he hits his wife. It's appalling, that it takes place on that level of people who solve problems with their fists. We're doing the same thing. It's so sick. And it's all because we're buckling under the racism.

Interviewer: How do you think we can overcome this? I think you're right. It's happening not only in the Asian-American world; it's happening to really very good ethnic women writers. Powerful writers. They deserve their success. They're talented.

Kingston: I was really shocked when I came out with my first book. At that time there were some Asian-American men who were all we had of our literary community. And I expected, when my book came out, for them to say, welcome. Welcome to the community of artists. Because there are so few of us. So here's another one to add strength to our numbers. And, instead, the men just right away went into this big thing. It's a very crazy plot they have in their heads. Their assessment of the publishing industry is so wrong.

Interviewer: Do you think it's mostly professional jealousy?

Kingston: You know, it's true that Asian-American men are not writing the novels. Where are they? How come they're not writing the novels?

Interviewer: And is that true about Afro-Americans?

Kingston: No, they have small presses that bring out the novels. But they're not writing the big books. The other day I was talking to a critic in Seattle. She was saying she didn't think Japanese-Americans had big novels because they're so careful about not hurting people's feelings and exploding emotionally. So, I don't know. No, that's not true.

There is a new novel coming out by a British man - Kazuo Ishiguro. He is so good. He's about 35 years old; this is his third book. The command of language - his language is so superior. The moment that you start reading his book you enter the land of story, because of the way the words are put together. God, that man is so good! So, they"re doing it in Britain.

Interviewer: You know, I wonder ff you realize that your work not only crosses cultural boundaries, but, in terms of the university, your work crosses disciplines. I've seen it taught not only in Literature departments, but in American Studies and Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, History, Women's Studies. And your books are being taught in high schools, colleges and universities.

Kingston: I was once taught in Black Studies. I was so proud.

Interviewer: It must be wonderful! This longevity - The Woman Warrior came out, what, in |76? And people are still reading it. It survived the test of time, the test of great literature. It's already in the American canon. You're a celebrated author, and your work win survive. The way the publishing world is now, often the book comes out and disappears.

Kingston: Yes, a shelf life of six weeks. It's amazing. Two teacher's back east on my tour told me that I was the living author whose books are most taught in colleges. Somebody just told me they did an informal survey, walking around the UC Berkeley book stores and found it in twelve courses in one university. And the MLA is coming out with a book on how to teach my work.

Interviezver. That's really exciting, to have an Asian-American writer be a very popular writer. We should all celebrate this.

Kingston: You know what happens, Asian-Americans are so cautious about saying that my work speaks for them. They don't want to say that since there are so few works that come out from us. Every one that comes out has to represent everybody. They give it a lot of weight. They make it take on many responsibilities.

Interviewer: That's very unfair.

Kingston: I understand what happens. I met some readers who get so offended when a white friend of theirs says, "Oh, I just read China Men, and now I understand you!" Nobody wants that. And then a lot of Chinese-Americans get mad, because they say my experience is nothing like theirs. Of course, they may come from a different class of people, they come from a different generation of migration; they're a different generation American. There aren't enough books out there. If there were lots of books, then you could see the variety of people in the books, reflecting the variety of people in life. But since there aren't a whole lot of books...

Interviewer: They expect everything from you. Can Moby Dick speak for every American? It's impossible. But there are more Asian-American writers now, are there not?

Kingston: Something wonderful is happening right at this moment. Right now, just in the last few months, I mean. Amy Tan published joy Luck Club and Hisaye Yamamoto published Sixteen Syllables; Frank Chin has a collection of short stories, and I think maybe Ruth-Anne Lumm McKunn just came out with her book on Chinese families. Jessica Hagedorn's in the spring, and Bharati Mukherjee's is in the fall. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Something great must be going on.

Interviewer: It's mostly women.

Kingston: Yes, I know. And then, the poets, too. You can just see the poetry in all the magazines. It's amazing.

Interviewer: Yes. It's clearly a second blooming. Don't you think it's a hundred flowers blooming? I think that my generation is taking literature seriously, especially a lot of us coming out of writing programs, for better or worse. Not going to law school, and not going to engineering school.

Kingston: I went to engineering school. I didn't last.

Interviewer: I can hear Brave Orchid saying, " Go to engineering school!"

Kingston: Yes, and I did; I did. And I was so miserable. I always thought taking English was just fun. There was no good reason for doing it. When I went from engineering to English, I felt I had abdicated all my responsibilities! I was just living life for the fun of it. I guess it was the way I was raised, but everything had to be hard. But English was easy for me, so I shouldn't do anything that was easy. I thought it was like that. There was something wrong with me if I did something that was easy and fun. But there is something about that, too, that wanted all their children to be mathematicians, engineers...

Interviewer: You know what it was. They wanted us to be safe. They were protecting us. Because they know how hard it is to survive out there.

Kingston: Stability.

Interviewer: It's a generation that did everything for their children. They pretty much sacrificed their lives so their children could have an education, so that the children could go on. This has left a burden of guilt on us.

Kingston: That's right. But they were also people who ... well, at least, my parents read Tu Fu and Li Po. My mother will read T'ang Dynasty poetry all night, aloud. And my father listens. They forget that those guys were drones wandering around in the forest. They were ultimate hippies. They were writing on rocks and leaves.

Interviewer: And Li Po was writing poetry in brothels, and he was a swashbuckler, and he might have killed a couple of guys, they say.

Kingston: I guess they didn't want us to be like that. Because they know that a poet is like that in China. And they're like that here. And so they don't want that for their daughters, especially.

Interviewer: Oh, yes. My grandmother's illiterate, but she memorized Chinese poetry. And she memorized long poems, dating back to the Shih Ching. It's wonderful. But then, when it comes to their children's future: No! No poets! And don"t you dare marry one!

Kingston: Before I could even talk, I could hear my parents reciting that poetry.

Interviewer: It's that rhythm. And I recognize that rhythm in your work.

Kingston: Oh, good. I'm so glad. I see it in your work too, in the images. They're all there. You know, my mother did the chant of Fa Mu Lan. I learned to talk by repeating those things. I never knew, until I got to college and was taking Asian Lit class, that that was important poetry. I just thought it was my parents' tales. My brothers thought, oh, those are just village ditties. They sing that on the farm. And then I thought later, oh, Tu Fu and Li Po - this is important stuff.

Interviewer: The greatest poets in China.

Kingston: But you know, that was how I got a lot of my literature. I didn't know until I got to school that Robinson Crusoe was an English novel. Because it had gone into Chinese as spoken story. So my parents spoke the story Robinson Crusoe, and that was some kind of discovery. I got to school, and I thought, oh, so this is what this stuff is.

Interviewer: It's been written down.

Kingston: The culture was handed down orally. It wasn't necessary to be literate. Most people in China were illiterate. That's why telling stories is so important.

Interviewer: And my grandmother's four-character phrases with which she admonished us. She'd dig this stuff out of Confudus...

Kingston: You know, they used to memorize the whole thing, The Analects - they memorized all of it.

Interviewer: We don't have that oral tradition in America. Who are our soothsayers? What happened to that oral tradition?

Kingston: I guess what we have is Garrison Keillor. Isn't is amazing that he started out so small, on a small radio station, and now he's an international superstar. And he's carrying on |told stories' by radio. The good thing is that we have him at all. The bad thing is that most people don't even realize that we ought to do it every night among ourselves.

Interviewer: Anything else you want to say?

Kingston: In Tripmaster Monkey, I work a lot more with American rhythms, and directly with American language that I usually speak, that my friends speak and that is around me. And when I wrote The Woman Warrior and China Men, as I look back on it, I was trying to find an American language that would translate the speech of the people who are living their fives with the Chinese language. They carry on their adventures and their emotional life and everything in Chinese. I had to find a way to translate all that into a graceful American language. Which is my language. But, after I had finished, I started thinking, I'm missing a lot ... I haven't had a chance to play with this language that I speak, this modern American language - which I love. I already finished writing all those Chinese rhythms. So I was trying to write a book with American rhythms. This is what Tripmaster Monkey is, too. So I can let Wittman talk. I love that language of the sixties, the slang of the sixties. And all those words that were invented to describe psychedefic states, visions, new social ... Zen gestures, pacifist activities, like sit-ins, and be-ins, and love-ins. All those words that were made up, |Flower Power,' and all that.

Interviewer: It's interesting that you went back to the sixties. Not very many authors are doing this.

Kingston: No, especially not the age that I talk about.

Interviewer: You're fond of the sixties. You feel a connection...

Kingston: Whenever I feel something's missing, that's when I realize: Oh, this is the next book. When I was reading William Carlos Williams's In The American Grain, and it ends at the Civil War, where Abraham Lincoln as a woman, with a shawl around her - the mother of our country - is walking on the battlefields, sort of tucking in the soldiers, I thought, wow, this is it. This is the way to write about America. This is right. This is history, the mythic history. So I'm sure there was going to be a volume 2. So I ran to the library and turned this one in, looking for volume 2. There isn't a volume 2; that's it! Then was when I thought, oh, I've got to write volume 2. If he didn't do it, then I've got to do it. So that's China Men. They bind the country together with steel, the bands of steel that are the railroads. That's the same kind of missing feeling; after I finished the first two books, I thought, oh! there's more language in me, this other kind of language, this very slangy, American, present-day language. And the other thing that was missing was that, well, I wanted to read some books about the time that the beatniks went away - those are our forefathers, our immediate forefathers.

Interviewer: Yes, right! Especially for those of us on the West Coast.

Kingston: And so they were going away, but there weren't any Hippies yet. The new artistic wave hadn't come. There's a dark period in theater that coincides with a dark period in Chinese-American theater. There's something missing. I could sense it, and so, when Id get that feeling, I think, oh, I've got to do it, I've got to plug it in. My first thought is - I always do this - who's doing it? Where's that book? As a reader, where's the book on this? Where's volume 2? Where's the book about the dark period? What an interesting period! Isn't that funny nobody wrote about it? I wish somebody would write about it so I could read it! And then comes this thing, oh! It's me!

Interviewer: It's your calling.

Kingston: It's me; I'm so scared, because there's no other volunteers.

Interviewer: Well, what happens after Tripmaster? What are you doing now?

Kingston: You know, I've been writing for forty years. I started when I was eight, and now I'm forty-eight, so I've been writing straight for forty years!

Interviewer: Wow!

Kingston: After I finished this book, for the first time there wasn't another one just coming along. So I thought I should take a year off and just live and not do this writing stuff and not live with these characters for years - I lived with Wittman Ah Sing for eight years! Many people have said he's obnoxious, and he is.

Interviewer: He's a difficult birthing. Well, some of our children are obnoxious.

Kingston: Yes, and you love 'em anyhow. My niece has been reading this, and she says, "I can't stand him!" She says, "if he sat next to me on the bus, I'd move! Who would want to go out with him? Yuck!" She's a business major in college.

But I was going to say ... I am beginning to have an idea that Wittman ought to grow up.

Interviewer: Wittman ought to grow up? He should be enlightened.

Kingston: Well, he has to get older, has to grow up. This is in response to people who said, "Well, what happens to him next?" But I was thinking he is only twenty-three years old, and he has all these ideals. To me, to grow up means to be able to effectively carry out the ideas into the real world. Now, he does begin to do that, because he puts on a show. But that's just one show. Will he be able to grow up and change and be a good man? If I can write a novel in which Wittman grows up to be a socially responsible, and effective, good man - forming a community around him, bringing joy to people - if I can write such a novel, then it means that I will have made Holden Caufield grow up; I would have made Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer grow up. American Literature is made up of great novels about young men. It has to do with our being a young country.

Now, what if I could write a continuing volume that shows him at forty, at fifty, as an integrated whole, a powerful, good man? Then I would have helped us all grow up. There are books now ... about grown men and grown women, but quite often they are tragedies. Those people are martyrs. Even the French novels about Communists, socially committed people, quite often they end up to be martyrs. People keep writing these tragedies, the tragedy of when you grow up. I would have to change the whole novel form to write it. And it can't be a utopian novel, in the sense that utopian novels are so often unrealistic.

Interviewer: Absolutely! But, you were willfully keeping Wittman adolescent. I was waiting for an enlightenment. I said, oh, yes, we will have a sequel. We will see Wittman in another light. One cannot grow up at twenty-three.

Kingston: It's already phenomenal that he could put on the one-man show and have his people around - for a twenty-three year old that's pretty good.

Interviewer: I thought you were willfully keeping him young.

Kingston: You know why? Because that's as wise as I am. This glimmering that I have of the grown-up novel - I don't understand it yet. I'm not sure that I'm wise enough myself to understand how to make him mature like that. I don't know whether I can do it. I don't know what win happen until I actually write it.

Interviewer: Do you feel committed to finish off the Wittman character? Do you feel he's like a bud that needs to be burst-bloomed?

Kingston: Well,... . You know, my son is just about that age, and he's an entertainer. At the moment he's a singer and a musician, plays the bass and the ukelele, He's on those cruise ships that go around the islands in Hawaii. They stop at four islands. He's in a trio with some beautiful sisters. He gives ukelele lessons to the tourists and helps them put on their talent show on the last night on board. He puts on the show; he's just like Wittman.

Interviewer: I bet you got the energy from him.

Kingston: It could be. My son is a real James Dean type, sort of non-verbal and glowers a lot.

Interviewer: That's not Wittman. Wittman is very verbal.

Kingston: My son communicates more with his music. But he's coming out of that glowering stage. That death wish stage. He's alive now, with the music. So maybe I need to see what becomes of him further. Maybe it's just that I have to recognize myself as a person who's growing up and see what that's all about.