Wittman Ah Sing is not an immigrant. He is a
fifth-generation American, as “American as [Beat
writer Jack] Kerouac,” and he conceives of his
work as a distinctly American project; even his
name is an echo of that quintessential American
poet, Walt Whitman. Wittman does not plead for
“understanding” from the dominant Caucasian
culture in America. Like Kerouac, whose depic-
tion of Chinese characters Wittman finds exceed-
ingly insulting, he demands to be taken on his
own terms, thus placing himself in a long line of
American individualists, both real and fictional.
A formidable blend of the “high” and “low” arts
of two cultures, Tripmaster Monkey is a demand-
ing but enormously playful and rewarding novel,
which earned its author the 1989 PEN West
Award in Fiction.
Bibliography
Kakutani, Michiko. Review of Tripmaster Monkey,
New York Times, 14 April 1989, C30.
Royal, Derek Parker. “Literary Genre as Ethnic Re-
sistance in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster
Monkey: His Fake Book.” MELUS 29, no. 2 (Sum-
mer 2004): 151–156.
Schrieber, Le Ann. Review of Tripmaster Monkey, New
York Times, 23 April 1989, sec. 7, p. 9.
Smith, Jeanne R. “Rethinking American Culture:
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Cross-Cultural Tripmas-
ter Monkey,” Modern Language Studies 26, no. 4
(Fall 1996): 71–81.
Eric G. Waggoner
Tropic of Orange
Karen Tei Yamashita (1997)
Bouncing back and forth between Matzatlán,
Mexico, and Los Angeles, California, Tropic of
Orange tells a fantastic tale of migration between
the two cities revolving around a Los Angeles
traffic accident and an apocalyptic temporal/spa-
tial anomaly caused by a mobile tropic of Can-
cer. The multiracial cast of characters—Mexican
housekeeper Rafaela; her Singaporean husband,
Bobby; Latin-American journalist Gabriel; Japa-
nese-American news editor Emi; her homeless
grandfather Manzanar; the 500-year-old Spaniard
Arcangel; and African-American Vietnam veteran
Buzzworm—by their very existence challenge and
problematize common notions of ethnicity, as
well as the significance and consequences of bor-
der crossing.
The story begins at a location on the tropic
of Cancer, the small town of Mazatlán, Mexico,
where space and time distortions begin to occur
as the tropic of Cancer itself begins to migrate
north when Rafaela and her son Sol smuggle
an orange to which the tropic of Cancer is at-
tached. Having been inadvertently involved in
a conspiracy involving infant organs and poi-
soned oranges, Rafaela and Sol must flee from
a mysterious pursuer, a mythical dark force that
materializes out of Mexican legend. Eventually,
they are able to cross the Mexican border safely
and reach Los Angeles’s Pacific Rim Auditorium,
where they are reunited with Rafaela’s husband,
Bobby, at a wrestling match between Arcangel
and SuperNAFTA. Here they witness Arcangel
being defeated by his opponent, SuperNAFTA,
who, clad in his titanium armor, unleashes a
missile, penetrating the heart of Arcangel, and
kills him. Occurring in parallel to these events
is a large-scale traffic accident, which erupts on
a Los Angeles freeway. The freeway suddenly
becomes a converging point for the homeless,
news media, and law enforcement, as well as the
tropic of Cancer approaching from the South. A
war erupts, and abandoned vehicles are suddenly
reoccupied by vagabonds, half of whom are war
veterans. Among the vagabonds is an insane Jap-
anese-American ex-internee during World War
II, Manzanar Murakami, who sees himself as a
conductor of orchestral music out of the traffic
sounds on the freeway. Journalist Gabriel goes to
Mexico to follow a story about the stolen infant
organs while Emi and Buzzworm remain on the
highway to broadcast the catastrophic event. In
the confusion, Emi is shot and killed by a sniper’s
bullet. While being lifted off in an emergency he-
licopter, Manzanar, with Emi’s body in his arms,
watches all of the stopped vehicles unleash their
airbags in unison, which brings the freeway war
to an abrupt stop.288 Tropic of Orange