Authentic Watermelon: Maxine Hong Kingston's American Novel.

I did not read any reviews of Roots that judged whether or not Alex Haley's characters ate watermelon or had rhythm. (Kingston, "Cultural" 57)

"That's like saying that LeRoi Jones is as good as a watermelon. `Yum yum, authentic watermelon.'" (Kingston, Tripmaster 307)

Maybe my writing can provide work for English majors. (Kingston, "Cultural" 64)

In 1982, after publishing two books which were part history, part autobiography and part fiction, Maxine Hong Kingston wrote, "I am an American writer, who, like other American writers, wants to write the great American novel" ("Cultural" 57-58). Kingston published her intention to write "the great American novel" in an essay about the racism implicit in reviews of The Woman Warrior (1976) which called her Chinese, described her work as mysterious, exotic, and inscrutable, and quoted Kipling on East and West. Most of The Woman Warrior and much of China Men (1980) are narrated by a first person narrator. These books are divided into thematically related narratives; they make radical leaps in time and space, spanning over 100 years of Chinese-American history; they take place in China, Hawaii, and across America. Except for a weekend in Oakland and a one-day car trip to Sacramento and Reno, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), Kingston's first novel, takes place entirely in San Francisco over the course of a few weeks in the fall of 1963. The novel's protagonist, Wittman Ah Sing--a fifth-generation Chinese-American and an aspiring beat poet and playwright--never leaves the novel's center stage.

At the center of this essay are questions about the novelistic strategies Kingston employs in Tripmaster Monkey. Why does a self-described feminist, whose first book is virtually required reading in women's studies courses, shift from memoirs to a novel dominated by a single male protagonist? Why is Kingston so careful to acknowledge debts to colleagues, friends, and writers living and dead, notably Walt Whitman and James Joyce? How does this novel respond to criticism of her earlier work, and critical debates within Asian American literary studies, particularly the assertion by Frank Chin that Kingston works in the genre of "fake" Chinese-American autobiography? I argue that Kingston is less interested in writing a novel which is authentically Chinese-American, according to Chin's terms, than in writing a novel which is, on her own terms, authentically American. If we take Tripmaster Monkey as a new paradigm for the American novel, we see that neither an American novel nor a Chinese-American novel is an artefact of artistic purity in service of racial or national purity. Rather, it is a dialogue of cultural artefacts and rhetorical practices appropriated from a range of sources, American and otherwise.

The critical/artistic practices of both Kingston and Chin are rooted in resistance to the masculine-centered narrative of American literary history which, as Nina Baym has argued, has no place for literature by or about women or ethnic minorities (3-18). Chin is not the only advocate of ethnic literature who has responded to this exclusion by formulating exclusive and essentialist narratives of authenticity which rigidly define the parameters of, in this instance, literature by and about Asian Americans. Kingston's novel posits a less stable version of authenticity, In Tripmaster Monkey, she disavows an essentialist definition of Asian American identity and refuses to read America as the product of a monolithic, unified culture. Instead, she theorizes, through her novel, an America that is always already heterogeneous and an American literature characterized by appropriation, parody, and play.(1)

To explicate this theory of American literature, including ethnic American literature, as literature of appropriation, I begin by interrogating the overdetermined relationship between narratives of "nation" and narratives of "tradition." Then I explore the allusive, intertextual, dialogic structure of Tripmaster Monkey. Finally, I posit Tripmaster Monkey as an alternative to both the cultural nationalism of Chin and the racial exclusivity of conventional narratives of American literature.

Benedict Anderson describes the nation as a community united by the perception that community members share common narratives with other community members, the vast majority of whom they will never meet. This community is an imaginative construction both because citizens must imagine the existence of other citizens and because the narratives that are perceived as uniting are themselves collective, imagined fictions. Frontier mythology, for example, represents a series of interlocking narratives that have provided Americans with a way to understand the past and locate themselves in the present.(2) Homi Bhabha pushes the relationship of nation and narrative further, calling the nation itself a narrative. To recognize the imaginative, narrative, and unstable character of nationhood is to recognize in national narratives the fictions that shape the community's understanding of its own origins. Slotkin's work on frontier mythology and Reginald Horsman's work on Manifest Destiny demonstrate that the idea of America has historically been inseparable from an ideology of Anglo-Saxon superiority.

In a cosmopolitan reading of Asian American literature, Elaine Kim writes against this practice of defining national identity through racial othering: "The notion of an absolute American past, a single source for American people, a founding identity or wholeness in American, is rooted in the racist fiction of primordial white American universality" (Preface xii). This `racist fiction' becomes an explicit component of nineteenth-century American nationalist ideology; this `racist fiction' justified Indian removal, the Mexican War, and laid the groundwork for the Civil War. The ideology of Anglo-Saxon superiority also justified the Chinese exclusion acts passed by Congress between 1882 and 1902.

However, the origins of national consciousness are not in communities of racial or linguistic purity, as manifest destiny ideology would have it, but in "creole" communities (Anderson 47-65). The identification of Americans and American culture as hybrid, creole, or mestiza/o not only destabilizes purity as a defining characteristic of American cultural identity, but more accurately reflects America's origins. As Gloria Anzaldua suggests in Borderlands/La Frontera, this version of identity turns borders--geographic, generic, racial--from zones of exclusion into regions of possibility.

The most compelling narratives of ethnic American literatures recognize the hybridity of ethnic traditions. Two such narratives, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and Sau-ling Wong, are useful for understanding Tripmaster Monkey's border crossings. While both help set the terms for my reading of Kingston, Wong's textual coalition is more in keeping with Kingston's political project than is Gates's hierarchical model.

In an essay on the African American literary canon, Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes about his first public speech. The four-year-old Gates was to recite in church on Easter Sunday. Despite weeks of practice, Gates panicked onstage and forgot his fourteen-word piece. After a few moments of terrified silence he heard "a voice from the back of the church proclaim, `Jesus was a boy like me, and like Him I want to be.'" Gates explains that the voice was his mother's, and concludes:

   For me ... much of my scholarly and critical work has been an attempt to
   learn how to speak in the strong, compelling cadences of my mother's voice.
   To reform core curricula, to account for the comparable eloquence of the
   African, the Asian, and the Middle Eastern traditions, is to begin to
   prepare our students for their roles as citizens of a world culture,
   educated through a truly human notion of "the humanities," rather than ...
   as guardians at the last frontier outpost of white male Western culture,
   the Keepers of the Master's Pieces. And for us as scholar-critics, learning
   to speak in the voice of the black female is perhaps the ultimate challenge
   of producing a discourse of the critical Other. (Loose Canons 42)

Gates makes three principal points in this essay: first, that critics of African American literature must recognize the "complex ancestry" of their subject matter, "one high and low (literary and vernacular), but also one white and black" (39); second, that African American texts must be read within the American tradition but also within an African American tradition; third, that the African American tradition must not be defined by "a pseudoscience of racial biology, or a mystically shared essence called blackness, but by the repetition and revision of shared themes, topoi, and tropes" (39). These useful guidelines for criticism of African American literature can also be adapted to read other historically marginalized fields of American literature.

Gates concludes, however, by suggesting that scholarship and criticism is a matter of appropriation. He resists the frontier-outpost vision of cultural uniformity articulated by those who represent themselves as defenders of traditional humanism. Nevertheless, Gates has been criticized for suggesting that scholarship is about appropriation, and more problematically, that the voices of Black women can be heard only through the mediation of male critics likes Gates.(3) About this essay's conclusion, Michele Wallace writes: "Not only is it impossible for anybody to speak in anybody else's voice, such a project tends to further consolidate the lethal global proposition ... that women of color are incapable of describing, much less analyzing, reality, themselves, or their place within the world" (251).

Sau-Ling Wong's articulation of an Asian American "textual coalition," resembles Gates's narrative of tradition in several crucial ways. Wong explicates intertextual relationships affiliating Asian American texts and contextualizes them within Asian American history. She shares with Gates a dialogical conception of tradition and a refusal to find in Asian American literature evidence of an essentialist Asian American identity. Wong advocates instead, "an emergent and evolving textual coalition, whose interests it is the business of a professional coalition of Asian American critics to promote" (Reading 9).(4) Where Gates and Wong differ is that Wong's emphasis on a textual and critical coalition suggests a conversation among equals rather than a hierarchically-structured appropriation of voices.

A dialogical relationship among texts, structured by the incorporation of past literary monuments into contemporary works of art, represents a highly conventional version of tradition, famously articulated by T. S. Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Kingston's re-reading of American literature partially endorses Eliot's assertion that "The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them" (50). Even Eliot admits that tradition is earned: "it cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour" (49). For Kingston, claiming Euro-American literature and some of its most canonized voices--notably Whitman and Joyce--represents the labor necessary to claim a tradition. While Kingston's allusiveness is a kind of appropriation, her acknowledgement of her debts and the Whitman-like celebration of her novel's coalition of voices offer the possibility that appropriation can exist without hierarchy. This works in part because Kingston's style of appropriation reveals the boundaries that define the older narrative as fortresses, and the ways these intellectual fortresses mirror other, fortress-like ideological formations.

Gates's metaphor of the "frontier outpost of white male Western culture" is apt because American identity has long been shaped by a myth of Americans as frontiersmen. The role of frontiersman from the seventeenth century onwards has been to stretch the boundaries of civilization, shrinking wilderness and eliminating the "Others" who stand in the way (Slotkin, Regeneration, 21-22). Frontier rhetoric, in turn captures the ways in which debates over tradition and university curricula are cast by defenders of humanism as a war over the control of space. They speak of invasion, boundaries, borders, and walls. Similar rhetoric has long provided ideological support for confinements placed on ethnic and racial minority groups. Ideas about who Americans are and what America is are inescapably linked to slavery, the Chinese exclusion acts, the removal of Native Americans, and the internment of Japanese Americans, to mention just a few examples. The nation's failure to live up to its promise of equality has depended not only on racial boundaries dividing "Americans" from "Others," but geographical boundaries dividing America from not-America. Exclusive narratives of American literature and culture recreate these racial and spatial boundaries.

If Wong and Gates offer critical models for recognizing tradition as cross-cultural pollination, Salman Rushdie offers appropriation as postcolonial resistance. He writes: "Western writers have always felt free to be eclectic in their selection of theme, setting, form; Western visual artists have, in this century, been happily raiding the visual storehouses of Africa, Asia, the Phillipines" (20). Rushdie does not respond to these appropriations by claiming for himself or other ethnic Indians exclusive rights to the culture of his birth country (India) or his adopted homeland (England). Instead, he grants himself the freedom to borrow exercised by "Western" writers, claiming Conrad, Swift, and Marx as literary forebears.(5) Kingston stakes a comparable claim to any cultural artefacts she might find useful. In Tripmaster Monkey, she asserts the rights of a Chinese-American writer to appropriate Whitman, Joyce, Hawthorne, Woolf, Shakespeare, West Side Story, Vertigo, and the Big Wheel. In the course of these appropriations, Kingston critiques America's historical exclusion of women and minorities from narratives of "high culture," its imperialist appropriation of nonwhite cultures, and its violence against non-white "Others." Like Whitman, however, Kingston couples this reading with hope for America's promise of equality, even as she recognizes that the promise remains unfulfilled.

When Kingston claims America she not only claims Chinese-American history as an integral component of American history, she also claims the right to appropriate American literature, and the literatures that feed into it. From the beginning, her work has been characterized by its dialogical relationship with the Euro-American canon. She has cited The Scarlet Letter as an intertext for "No Name Woman" (Rabinowitz 182). She has said, "I feel that I am descended from Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Virginia Woolf" (Fishkin 790). Of The Woman Warrior, Kingston wrote, "I even write for my old English professors of the new criticism school in Berkeley, by incorporating what they taught about the structure of the novel. I refer to Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Shakespeare" ("Cultural" 65). Sometimes these allusions are fairly obvious. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston writes, "The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own" (62). Despite allusions as obvious as this, some criticism of The Woman Warrior implied that the Chinese-American Kingston was not authentically American.

While she responds explicitly to racial stereotyping in "Cultural Mis-readings," her second and third books implicitly respond to Orientalist readings of The Woman Warrior. In China Men, her allusions to Euro-American literature and popular culture are more numerous and less subtle. China Men begins, like all fairy tales, and, like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, "Once upon a time." One long section, "The Making of More Americans," alludes to Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans. Kingston alludes to Odysseus when the narrator hears the songs of the sirens in Hawaii (90). Another episode retells the King Midas story. "The Adventures of Lo Bun Sun" is Robinson Crusoe with Chinese names. Kingston has described China Men as a sequel to William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain. China Men's first episode narrates a mythical discovery of America. Its earliest historical episode takes place around 1860, roughly where Williams's book ends.(6)

If Kingston's allusions to European fairy tales, Greek mythology, Defoe, and Joyce certify her membership in the Euro-American literary tradition, Kingston's references to Thoreau and Shakespeare show us that these allusions are more than a literary game. Kingston's selective intertextuality claims a tradition which is oppositional, politically engaged, and above all, pacifistic. Issues of war and peace are a constant subtext in her three books. In The Woman Warrior, she writes:

   I was born in the middle of World War II. From earliest awareness, my
   mother's stories always timely, I watched for three airplanes parting. Much
   as I dream recurringly about shrinking babies, I dream that the sky is
   covered from horizon to horizon with rows of airplanes, dirigibles, rocket
   ships, flying bombs, their formations as even as stitches. (96)

In China Men's most explicitly anti-war story, "The Brother in Vietnam," Kingston writes, "There has always been a war, whether or not I knew about it" (264). The Brother justifies his decision to enlist in the Navy rather than evade the draft by telling himself that all Americans are implicated in a war economy. The Brother's farewell to his high school English students echoes Thoreau: "The last thing he tried to teach them was: `The military draft is not an American tradition. Protest against it is a longer tradition'" (285).(7)

"The Brother in Vietnam" also includes a stunning reading of Romeo and Juliet. "Strange things happened to the literature" that the brother taught in the shadow of war:

   Romeo and Juliet became a horror story about children his students' age
   whispering, tiptoeing, making love, and driven mad in the dark. They killed
   and were killed in dark streets and dark rooms. They married in the dark.
   Plague infested the country, and drugs poisoned instead of cured. Children
   were buried alive among their ancestors' bones, with which Juliet feared
   she would dash in her brains. She was locked in a tomb with her dead
   husband, a young suicide, and her cousin festering green. (279)

What is striking about this reading is that Kingston radically alters "the love story of the ages" by reading the horror already there. Kingston's choice of literary foreparents and her reading of their work constructs a literary tradition which advocates equality, inclusion, and pacificism.

In China Men, Kingston alludes not only to Joyce, Defoe, Thoreau, Homer, and Shakespeare; she also alludes to movies: The Wizard of Oz, From Here to Eternity, City Lights, and West Side Story. These references anticipate Tripmaster Monkey in very specific ways. China Men's opening alludes to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Tripmaster Monkey opens with a pastiche of Ulysses's third chapter, Stephen Dedalus's ten-page interior monologue. Mimicking Stephen's walk along Sandymount strand, Tripmaster Monkey opens with Wittman Ah Sing walking from the ocean through Golden Gate Park, reflecting on suicide, the power of his own senses, and Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. The Brother in China Men uses the soundtrack from West Side Story to help teach Romeo and Juliet. Wittman watches West Side Story and reflects on the representation of non-white Americans in American movies.

Since references to Hawthorne, Williams, Thoreau, Woolf, and Shakespeare in her first two books were apparently insufficient to convince American reviewers that she is an American writer, Kingston's third book is relentlessly intertextual. She chooses as intertexts a long list of movies, including Olivier's Hamlet, The Seventh Seal, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, Rebel without a Cause, Cleopatra, The Longest Day, The Lady From Shanghai, The Maltese Falcon, Vertigo, West Side Story, The Saragossa Manuscript, The Wizard of Oz, and The Treasure of Sierra Madre. A partial list of writers Kingston refers to by name or allusion includes: Dickens, Shakespeare, Swift, Yeats, Tennyson, Whitman, Maugham, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Frost, Williams, Lawrence, Joyce, Hemingway, Defoe, Rimbaud, Wilde, Twain, Rilke, Spenser, Woolf, Stein, Thoreau, Pearl Buck, and Tolstoy. She refers to writers whose work was relatively recent in 1963, including James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, J. D. Salinger, Leroi Jones, and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as to colonial writers Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling. An aspiring beat poet, Wittman has Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and, of course, Whitman, on his mind. An aspiring playwright, Wittman talks about Artaud, Beckett, Brecht, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O'Neill. Kingston writes about jazz, John Cage, Oklahoma!, James Bond books and movies, toys, and kitschy art sold in tourist stores in Chinatown. Some of these details help locate the novel in the Bay Area in the fall of 1963, despite Kingston's warning that "This fiction is set in the 1960s, a time when some events appeared to occur months or even years anachronistically."

These artefacts of American and European culture, both "high" and pop culture, converse with Chinese literature, particularly Journey to the West and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Their presence side-by-side, and Kingston's refusal to segregate Chinese from Western literature, or high culture from pop culture, allow us to read Tripmaster Monkey as a cultural coalition. Kingston's appropriation of artefacts integrated into the fabric of American life helps counteract, in Wong's words, "the stereotype that Chinese-Americans ... are unassimilable aliens with some mystical genetic hotline to China's great traditions" ("Kingston's Handling" 26).(8)

Intertextuality in Tripmaster Monkey, however, does more than locate her novel in time and space her work in the wider field of American culture. Kingston's allusions also transform the potential valences of appropriation. When Rushdie describes western visual artists "happily raiding the visual storehouses of Africa, Asia, the Phillipines," he implicitly alludes to the influence of Japanese prints on Impressionist painters and the incorporation of African masks into Cubism. Asian religion and philosophy were similarly appropriated by the Transcendentalists, notably Thoreau and Whitman, and by the Beats. African American culture, as Norman Mailer has noted, was appropriated by the hipsters who are Wittman's literary role models. Kingston changes the terms of appropriation by appropriating in support of pacificism instead of cultural hegemony. We can see these differences when we compare the uses of "The Orient" and African American hipness by white American writers with Kingston's appropriation of Whitman and Joyce.

In Walden, Thoreau writes frequently of his fondness for eastern philosophy. Praising the simplicity of his eating habits he writes: "It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India" (55). He imagines that ice cut from Walden pond is transported to India where "the sweltering inhabitants of ... Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well" (266). His study of Indian philosophy links him with the Indian past while the waters of Walden link him to India's present:

   In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal
   philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods
   have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern worlds and its
   literature seem puny and trivial.... I lay down the book and go to my well
   for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma
   and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading
   the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I
   meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it
   were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with
   the sacred water of the Ganges. (266)

In this metaphysical conceit Thoreau reads India as a timeless place, defined by its sacred books. As Edward Said argues in Orientalism, textualizing "The Orient," is a way for "the West" to both "know" the orient and dominate it. Thoreau's reading of India as ancient and timeless removes it from the flow of history. It is a vision which has little to do with nineteenth-century India, a period of consolidated British rule. Read through Said's work on orientalism and imperialism, the ships Thoreau imagines carrying Walden water to India become a displaced version of the European gunboats that brought, not water, but military and economic domination.

Thoreau's orientalism does not, however, alter the fact that the Indian revolution was led by an Indian lawyer who lived in South Africa, was educated in English, and studied Thoreau. The American civil rights movement was led by an African American minister who studied Gandhi. The Berkeley free speech movement was led by students involved in civil rights work in the American South. When Kingston, a 1962 graduate of Berkeley, tells Chinese students about "Civil Disobedience," she participates in the migration of ideas across centuries and national boundaries. Paul Gilroy dubs the black modernism that links Africa, the Carribean, North America, South America, and Europe "The Black Atlantic." Who owns pacificist ideas that travel from India to Massachusetts to South Africa to India to Georgia to Mississippi to California to China? To what national tradition do these ideas belong?

The Beats were, like Thoreau, enamored of Eastern religion. Unlike Thoreau, they were also enamored of Black culture. Toni Morrison points out that "black idiom and the sensibilities it has come to imply are appropriated for the associative value they lend to modernism--to being hip, sophisticated, ultra-urbane" (52). Indeed hipness itself, borrowed from African American discourse, is the founding principle for a white cultural movement which, as Norman Mailer argues in "The White Negro," imitates black culture. As respondents to Mailer's essay pointed out, appropriating black culture does not always translate into loving black people.(9) Kingston critiques this version of appropriation when Wittman tells a story that took place during the 1957 "Howl" obscenity trial. A famous poet (unnamed) asks Wittman to recommend a good Chinese restaurant. As Kingston's (possibly) fictional anecdote suggests, loving Chinese philosophy does not always translate into respecting the humanity of Chinese-American people. It is characteristic of Kingston's brand of appropriation, however, that she can critique the shortcomings of the movement but still pay tribute to the role it plays in her own artistic practice. The Beats incorporated popular culture into poetry and advocated poetry that was accessible, performative, politically engaged, and community based.(10) Kingston incorporates these attributes into her novel, and Wittman incorporates them into his theater.

When Wittman reflects on his Berkeley education, he thinks, "Four years of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Whitman, Joyce, Pound and Eliot" (113). Given their importance to this novel, it is not surprising that both Whitman and Joyce appear in Wittman's one-sentence summary of his undergraduate education. As literary role models for Kingston, both Whitman and Joyce incorporate the voices of whole cities and nations into their epic texts. Both produce pacifist literature in response to nationalist crises. Kingston's debts to each are readily apparent from the first pages of her novel.

Wittman Ah Sing's family name plays on Whitman's most characteristic statement: "I Sing" ... myself, the body electric, America. Tripmaster Monkey's first two chapter titles, "Trippers and Askers" and "Linguists and Contenders," are drawn from "Song of Myself."(11) Walt Whitman's extensive use of the first person pronoun makes him an appropriate model for Wittman, a perpetual talker who wishes to reclaim for his Chinese-American community "the mean-ass motherfucker first-person pronoun of the active voice" (318). Kingston borrows Whitman poem titles for chapters five and six: "Ruby Long Legs' and Zeppelin's Song of the Open Road," and "A Song for Occupations." The Whitman song-poems from which Kingston derives four of her nine chapter titles were all first published shortly before the Civil War when Whitman wrote poetry intended to bring together Americans of different genders, races, classes, and occupations.

This inclusive vision of America is explicit in the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, in which Whitman conceptualizes the limitless scope of American poetry: "The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races" (713). While this line might imply that the American race is the acme, it could also be interpreted as a paean to cultural plurality. Whitman's list suggests that the subject of American literature includes the nation's rivers, lakes, trees, birds, history, political institutions, and character, as well as "slavery and the tremulous spreading of hands to protect it, and the stem opposition to it which shall never cease till it ceases or the speaking of tongues and the moving of lips cease" (714). Confronted with a crisis dividing the nation, Whitman defines the national community in the most inclusive way possible. While he includes both slavery and the opposition to it, he privileges opposition to a practice that institutionalizes racial difference and racist violence. The America he imagines is inherently plural, defined not by boundaries between people, but by boundlessness.

Like Whitman, Joyce is an includer in time of nationalist crisis. In Joyce's case, the crisis is the Great War. Joyce, like Kingston, wrote a novel of consciousness; a novel which reproduces a historically specific urban landscape; a novel whose narrative echoes a mythical quest narrative; a novel with allusions on every page; a novel filled with the texture of everyday life; a novel in which a climactic chapter is a play in which almost every character in the novel performs. But where Joyce's allusions to the Odyssey reify a text that is central to a world view that traces European culture to a single source, the mythical echoes of Journey to the West in Tripmaster Monkey help cement the textual coalition. Kingston also includes structural allusions to Joyce. Stephen Dedalus is a model for Wittman. These youthful artists, when they imagine suicide, think of Hamlet. Wittman, like Stephen, wears "Hamlet's night colors" (12). We can trace Wittman's steps through the park, onto the bus, into North Beach and Chinatown, just as we can trace the steps of Joyce's characters in Ulysses. Like Joyce, Kingston writes about the time and place of her youth from a distance of many years. Joyce wrote about the Dublin of 1904 from the perspective of Trieste, Zurich, and Paris between 1917 and 1922. A committed pacifist, Joyce began Ulysses while observing the Great War from a neutral country. Kingston wrote about the Bay Area of 1963 from the perspective of Hawaii, Michigan, and California between 1980 and 1989. She and her husband went to Hawaii for the same reason Joyce and his family went to Switzerland: to avoid a war.

Leopold Bloom's encounter with the Irish nationalist Citizen in Ulysses's "Cyclops" chapter is one of the novel's many pointed critiques of the blindness of nationalism. Bloom, who is a Jew and therefore, in the eyes of the Citizen, not Irish, has the temerity not only to define nationhood to the victims of English imperialism, but to call himself Irish. Bloom says, "A nation is the same people living in the same place." When laughed at, he adds, "Or also living in different places." Asked what his nation is, Bloom says, "Ireland.... I was born here. Ireland" (272). Bloom's definition of national identity, which ignores ethnicity, would satisfy Wittman. If you live in America, you are an American. Period. Bloom's caveat defines citizenship in global terms. If people living in different places can be part of the same nation, it could mean that nation and race are linked. This is the logic of the racist assumption, codified in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1888, that descendants of Chinese are inherently Chinese: "the provisions of this act shall apply to all persons of the Chinese race, whether subjects of China or other foreign power" (Sec. 3). Given the first half of Bloom's definition, however, the second half should be construed to mean that people in different countries may be part of a community not limited by national boundaries. Bloom's claim of Ireland as his homeland anticipates Wittman's, and Kingston's, claim of America as their homeland, no matter what their skin color, no matter where their ancestors came from.

The multilayered character of Kingston's allusions, in which literature, pop culture, and cultural critique coalesce, is perhaps best embodied in the game Kingston plays with San Francisco's Coit Tower. Coit Tower stands more or less on the border of both Chinatown and North Beach. North Beach is famous as the epicenter of the Beat movement and the location of the City Lights bookstore, publisher of, among other books, Howl and Other Poems and The White Negro. City Lights is "The Bookstore," Wittman visits in Chapter 1. Coit Tower appears in the novel's first pages, giving Wittman the finger in a suicide fantasy in which he weighs the merits of jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge on the city or ocean side. Wittman's imagined suicide is stimulated by the voice of Lawrence Olivier, as Hamlet, asking "To be or not to be." In Olivier's film version of Hamlet, Olivier delivers this speech from the top of a tower by the ocean. Both Coit Tower, as it first appears, and the movie image it evokes for Wittman, are associated with solitude and death. Coit Tower also evokes Martello Tower, the waterfront home of Stephen Dedalus and two other men. Stephen leaves the tower at the end of Ulysses's first chapter, imagining Buck Mulligan as the usurper Claudius and himself as Hamlet. The opening words of Chapter 5, "Mr. and Mrs. Wittman Ah Sing monumentally descended the sculpturesque steps outside Coit Tower" (165), echo Ulysses's first words, "Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead" (3).

When Wittman climbs Coit Tower in Chapter 4 he thinks about the tower in Vertigo, "which could have been [Wittman's] favorite movie" (320). In Vertigo, James Stewart "lives in sight of Coit Tower" (320). The other tower in Vertigo is the bell tower at the cloister with the vertigo-inducing staircase. Stewart climbs these stairs one and a half times, first in failed pursuit of Kim Novak, the second time literally dragging her to the roof. As Wittman climbs Coit Tower, he thinks, "James Stewart looking for lost Kim Novak in all the old familiar San Francisco places" (161). At the top of Coit Tower, however, Wittman and Tana are married by a self-ordained minister of the Universal Life Church to provide Wittman with a draft deferment. Towers are comically obvious symbols of masculinity. In Vertigo, the appearance of Coit Tower behind Novak's head signifies Stewart's arousal; his failure to get up the tower at the cloister signifies his impotence. In Coit Tower, Kingston converts a landmark from a recognizable landscape into an intersection of literary and pop culture allusions. She appropriates a symbol of solitude and isolated masculinity and converts it, through an anti-war marriage, into a symbol of union, community, and peace.

While the multiple allusions to canonical literature and pop culture are clear responses to the orientalist readings of Kingston's first book, in order to understand Tripmaster Monkey as a contribution to the study of Asian American literature we need to examine the connection between Wittman and Frank Chin. In a 1990 Los Angeles Times article, Edward Iwata publicized a long-running dispute between Chin and Kingston and explained that "most people who follow the Asian-American literary scene" believed that Kingston wrote Tripmaster Monkey, "in part, to defend herself against her longtime literary foe, Frank Chin," an assertion Kingston has denied. Kim, Wong, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Leslie Bow, and Robert G. Lee are among the critics who have commented on Chin's long-running feud with Kingston and his assertions in article after article that Kingston's writing is "fake." At issue in this dispute is the efficacy of the autobiographical genre to define Asian American culture, and the authority to represent Chinese-American history.(12) Chin defines these issues according to a hierarchy of authenticity in which autobiography and adapted myths a la "White Tigers" are "fake" and his own "yellow" art (fiction, poetry, drama, history) is "real." Chin expresses two primary objections to the autobiographical form: first, unlike the heroic Chinese tradition, autobiography is Christian and confessional and therefore not authentically Chinese; second, autobiography panders to the orientalist expectations of white audiences. Autobiographies which exoticize Asian culture reinforce the otherness of Asians in the eyes of white America.

Chin locates Kingston's work in a tradition of "fake" Chinese-American autobiographical writing, a tradition characterized, according to Chin, by self-hatred, internalization of white racism, and meek acceptance of a white supremacist vision of Asian Americans as the "model minority." In their introduction to The Big Aiiieeeee!, Chin and anthology co-editors Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, cite a long list of "fake" Asian American autobiographies--from Yung Wing's My Life in China and America (1909) to Betty Lee Sung's Mountain of Gold (1972)--as antecedents to The Woman Warrior. The anthology's first article, Chin's "Come all ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake," an extended commentary on the publication history of Asian American writing, describes Kingston as the apotheosis of the tradition of Chinese-American autobiography (26). In "This is Not an Autobiography," Chin places Kingston first in the list of, "the most important and influential writers in Chinese America today. All from the Christian autobiographical tradition. All fake it" (110).

As Iwata notes, Wittman resembles Chin in many ways. Both playwrights founded theatre companies in San Francisco. Both wear long hair and scraggly beatnik beards. Both militantly reappropriate "yellowness." Chin writes, for example, "Before I can make art of my yellow self, and play with my knowledge of Asian America, we have to have some agreement about the facts of yellow history" ("Not an Autobiography" 110). When Wittman dresses for work we discover why he wears green:

   Buttoning up his dark green shirt, he took a good look at his skin above
   the collar--yellower. Sallow like tallow. The effect of the wearing o' the
   green had been pointed out through the years by his mother, aunties, kid
   friends, make-up artists.... For a long time he thought it had to do with
   bad taste or bad luck. Or his own personal complexion. "Green doesn't look
   good on you." Then some dorm guy said, "We look yellow in that color." It
   had to do with racial skin. And, of course, from that time on, he knew what
   color he had to wear--green, his color to wear to war. (44)

Like Chin, Wittman is obsessed with the exoticization of Asian Americans. In the monologue that follows a performance of his theatrical adaptation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Wittman catalogues racist jokes, movies, comic books, and books. Both Chin and Wittman envy the influence of African American culture on American popular culture and regret Asian America's comparable invisibility. In "Fifty Years of Our Whole Voice," their introduction to Aiiieeeee!, Chin and his co-editors contrast the model minority stereotype with African American cultural production (xxv). As an aspiring beat poet, Wittman's sense of cool derives from Black music and Black slang. Walking past Chinatown's restaurants and knick-knack shops, he thinks, "Where's our jazz? Where's our blues? Where's our ain't-taking-no-shit-from-nobody street-strutting language? I want so bad to be the first bad-jazz China Man bluesman of America" (27).

Coupled with Wittman's envy of African American hip is his sympathy for the civil rights movement. As an opponent of racism Wittman is in favor of integrating everything, including and especially the theater: "I'm casting blind. That means the actors can be any race. Each member of the Tyrone family or the Lomans can be a different color.... My idea for the Civil Rights movement is that we integrate jobs, schools, buses, housing, lunch counters, yes, and we also integrate theater and parties" (52). As a Chinese American, he is suspicious of a binary vision of American culture: "They think that Americans are either white or Black. I can't wear that civil-rights button with the Black hand and the white hand shaking each other. I have a nightmare--after duking it out, someday Blacks and whites will shake hands over my head" (307-08). In his closing monologue, Wittman refers to Leroi Jones to point up the absurdity of the food reviews his play received: "They sent their food critics. They wrote us up like they were tasting Chinese food.... That's like saying that Leroi Jones is as good as a watermelon." He refers to Lorraine Hansberry to illustrate the cultural assumptions reflected in the "East meets West" reviews of Wittman's play, "They wouldn't write a headline for Raisin in the Sun: `America meets Africa" (307).

We can read Wittman's fascination with African American cool as another example of the fascination with the "exotic" critiqued by Chin and readers of Mailer's essay. However, we can also read his construction as a strategic representation of the hybridity of American identity. Like Kingston, Wittman grew up in California's Central Valley, went to college at Berkeley from 1958 to 1962, and married a Caucasian American. If we read Wittman as Chin, we ignore Wittman's resemblance to Whitman, Stephen Dedalus, Kingston herself, and Monkey, the Chinese Trickster figure. Wittman's journey through the Bay Area mimics Monkey's journey to India. Sacred scrolls are at the end of Monkey's journey: the Chinese theatre is at the end of Wittman's. Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, protects Monkey and his companions and narrates Wittman's novel.(13)

Reading Tripmaster Monkey as an attack on Chin seems incompatible with Kingston's vision of community, pacifism, and bridge-building. It is more useful to see Kingston responding to Chin and proposing an alternative vision of Chinese-American identity and Chinese-American masculinity. For Kingston, whose first book is about finding a voice, Chin's refusal to be silent about Asian American stereotypes might seem admirable. Chin's criticism has provided a spur for Kingston to expand her vision. Iwata quotes a letter Kingston wrote to Chin in 1976: "I have to wrestle with an understanding about men and write about them/you" (E9). Kingston offers an alternative to Chin by beginning to cure Wittman of his sexism and his love of war. In the final chapter, speaking from the stage, Wittman makes his wife the following offer,

   "Tana, if you're listening in the wings, you're free to leave if you want
   to leave me. But I'll always love you unromantically. I'll clean up the
   place, I get the hint. You don't have to be the housewife. I'll do one-half
   of the housewife stuff. But you can't call me your wife." (339)

We have already seen Wittman going off to war in a green shirt. In the final chapter he is transformed and shaves off his beatnik beard. As the war in Vietnam escalates, his staged version of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms becomes an anti-war epic. On the final page, Kuan Yin tells us:

   He had staged the War of the Three Kingdoms as heroically as he could,
   which made him start to understand: The three brothers and Cho Cho were
   master of war; they had worked out strategies and justifications for war so
   brilliantly that their policies and their tactics are used today, even by
   governments with nuclear-power weapons. And they lost. The clanging and
   banging fooled us, but now we know--they lost. Studying the mightiest war
   epic of all time--Wittman changed--beeen!--into a pacifist. (340)

Calling Tripmaster Monkey her first book of peace, Kingston offers Wittman as a new kind of man. Writing a book of peace means re-imagining masculinity because Kingston associates masculinity with belligerence. In 1989 she wrote of the apparent desire of old men to kill off younger men: "There are male animals--hamsters and rabbits are two species I myself have witnessed--that have to be separated from the birthing females to stop them from eating the babies. Just so, older men, even war veterans, draft boys and send them to war" ("Novel's Next Step" 39). In Tripmaster Monkey, Kingston takes a warrior man and converts him into a feminist and a pacifist.

Tripmaster Monkey's subtitle, "His Fake Book," suggests jazz improvisation, a reference that connects Wittman's fascination with African American culture to the improvisatory character of his theater and poetry. Indeed, as his spontaneous marriage demonstrates, Wittman sees his life as an improvisation. However, Kingston's subtitle also anticipates Chin's classification of this book, along with all her others, as inauthentic. But her novel argues that this kind of inauthenticity lets us learn from the past rather than be in thrall to it; builds bridges across differences of race and gender rather than building walls defining those divisions ever more rigidly; and may even offer possibilities of peace.

At Lance Kamiyama's party, Wittman imagines smuggling banned books through airports. Among the recently banned books are Howl, and Ulysses (99). Leaves of Grass must also appear on the list of famous literary contraband. Kingston's tribute to Whitman, Joyce, and the Beats is a reminder that the narrative of tradition is rarely as literary or as self-contained as Eliot's "ideal order" of "existing monuments." Kingston's last words on the community that helps her create literature are her "Thanks: To friends who inspire my stories" (341). Unlike Whitman, Joyce, or Eliot, whose first title for "The Wasteland" was "He do the Police in Different Voices," she refuses to ventriloquize. Chin is acknowledged in her subtitle; she acknowledges the contributions of her friends. Like Whitman's poetry, Kingston's Authentic American Novel is a communal choir: her coalition is a coalition of many voices.(14)

Notes

(1.) A. Noelle Williams makes a compelling case for Tripmaster Monkey as parody, in which the parody in part parodies the very possibility of an original (84). Many critics of Tripmaster Monkey--including Williams, Deeney, and Wang--comment on the variety of ways in which the novel undermines any stable version of authenticity and on the heterogeneity of its cultural and artistic roots. In her article on China Men, Linton makes a similar argument about appropriation and authenticity.

(2.) This reading of frontier mythology and its importance as a filter by which Americans have understood both their history and their present is derived from Slotkin's three books on frontier mythology.

(3.) In this context it is intriguing to note that the relationship between male and female African American critics, as well as the problem of essential blackness, are played out in the debates about critical practice among Joyce, Gates, and Baker published in New Literary History in 1987 and discussed by Awkward.

(4.) Wong specifies that "Asian American critics" refers to the subject of study rather than the ethnicity of the critic (Reading 9).

(5.) Presumably he mentions these three because, like Rushdie, all three were expatriates who lived and wrote in England.

(6.) In one interview Kingston is quoted as saying that Williams's book ends and her book begins in 1860 (Rabinowitz 182). In another she is quoted dating this moment in 1850 (Pfaff 25). Since Williams's book ends with President Lincoln on a battlefield, 1860 is a more plausible date.

(7.) In 1989, shortly before the student protests in Tiananmen Square, Kingston visited China and told Chinese students that "Civil Disobedience" was the field guide for anti-war protesters in the 1960s. ("Let Freedom," 5:2. A version of this essay was reprinted in The Michigan Quarterly Review, as "Violence and NonViolence in China, 1989.")

(8.) In this context it is worth noting that, according to Deeney, Chinese readers generally saw Tripmaster Monkey as a product of an alien culture (34-35); while Wang writes, "As a reader of Chinese literature, I find Kingston's Monkey to be as exotic, uncanny, and mystic as Hemingway's Bull, Faulkner's Bear and Melville's Whale" (103).

(9.) In a letter published in the City Lights version of Mailer's essay (the essay was originally published in Dissent), Ned Polsky writes: "Even in the world of the hipster the Negro remains essentially what Ralph Ellison called him--an invisible man. The white Negro accepts the real Negro not as a human being in his totality, but as the bringer of a highly specified and restricted `cultural dowry' to use Mailer's phrase. In doing so he creates an inverted form of keeping the nigger in his place" (Mailer 27).

(10.) This narrative of the Beat movement is derived primarily from Davidson.

(11.) Both appear in Canto Four: "Trippers and askers surround me, / People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation," (Whitman 66-67); "Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, / I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait" (Whitman 80-81).

(12.) Wong explores this problem, particularly as it relates to autobiography as a genre, in "Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour?". While I draw upon her valuable argument, I am less concerned here with issues of genre than with the sources of Tripmaster Monkey. This means focusing almost exclusively on the critical persona of Frank Chin. More valuable in this context is Bow's argument that, "While the debate [between Chin and Kingston] takes on gendered overtones in ways that reflect those occurring in African American literature, it is at heart about Asian American representation, what constitutes an `authentic' Asian American voice, and who is in the position to define it." (33). Nishime and A. Noelle Williams take similar positions.

(13.) Deeney and Wang give the most detailed readings of Tripmaster Monkey's parallels to Journey to the West. Wang also cites multiple puns in Wittman's name.

(14.) I would like to thank the friends and colleagues who read one or more of the many versions of this essay, including John Michael, Bette London, Catherine Loomis, Brock Clarke, Sejal Shah, and Henry D. Shapiro. I would also like to thank participants at the 1994 American Women Writers of Color Conference, and the 1995 Susan B. Anthony Institute Conference for their helpful comments.

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Elliot H. Shapiro is a Lecturer at the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines at Cornell University. This article is adapted from his dissertation, Imagining America: Morrison, Kingston, and a Nation of Men. Other publications include articles on contemporary American fiction.