The American Century: Literature since 1945 769out of desert and swamp. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, published in 1989, is
more of a novel, recounting the exploits of Wittman Ah Sing. Wittman, a “Chinese
beatnik” as he is called at one juncture in the story, is a protean figure, who gradually
resolves his problems by embracing his immigrant past while singing the song of an
American open road. And like its protagonist, the form of the book is fluid, evasive,
with the borderlines between naturalism and myth, the material and the magical
constantly blurred. This may be the story of a beatnik playwright, a contemporary
incarnation of Walt Whitman, living in Berkeley, California in the 1960s. It also
alludes to and accommodates Chinese legend and fantasy. One constant source of
reference, for example, is the Chinese classic Monkey or Journey to the West, the story
of a magical, mischievous monkey who accompanies a monk to India for the sacred
books of Buddhism. “Where’s our name that shows that we aren’t from anywhere
but America!” Wittman demands toward the end of this book. “Once and for all:
I am not oriental,” he adds. “An oriental is antipodal. I am a human being right here
on land which I belong to and which belongs to me.” Resisting any monolithic
notion of American identity – or, more simply, the use of “ ‘American’ interchangeably
with ‘white’ ” – Wittman sees and names multiplicity as the core of personal and
national selfhood. For him, as for his (almost) namesake, the author of “Song of
Myself,” America is a “teeming Nation of nations.” Both Wittman and Whitman, in
turn, echo Kingston here who, in Tripmaster Monkey as in all her other writing,
creates a multidimensional fictive space to reflect and express the American mosaic.
The secret that her work discloses is that the American voice does not speak simply
in this way or in that. It is large; it contains multitudes; and it speaks in many tongues,
many accents.
The differences between Tan, Jen, and Kingston indicate that, even among
Chinese-American women writers, there is no set formal agenda. That is a point
pressed home by two other seminal novels by Chinese-American women: The
Frontiers of Love (1956) by Diana Chang (1934–) and Crossings (1968) by Chuang
Hua (?–). Set in Shanghai in 1945, when it was occupied by the Japanese, The
Frontiers of Love considers issues of personal and cultural identity in naturalistic
terms. Crossings has similar preoccupations. As its title implies, Hua’s novel charts
movements that are both material and moral, as a Chinese-American woman crosses
over several kinds of border in order to find out who she is. Unlike Chang’s book,
however, it is determinately modernist and experimental, the story itself crossing
backwards and forwards between several different narrative forms.
Difference, too, can sometimes develop into disagreement. Kingston, for instance,
has come under considerable critical fire from other Chinese-American writers. In
the introduction to an anthology of Asian-American writing, Aiiieeee! (1974),
several of those writers, among them Frank Chin and Shawn Wong, accuse Kingston
of a failure to render Chinese myths and Chinese-American experience accurately.
Their charge is, briefly, that her rewriting of traditional stories and her use of hybrid
forms constitute a kind of “contamination,” generic, cultural, and even racial. What
is needed, they argue, is a literature that resists racial stereotyping more actively and
responds more fully to the present needs of the Chinese-American community.GGray_c05.indd 769ray_c 05 .indd 769 8 8/1/2011 7:31:44 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 44 PM