Violet America: Regional Cosmopolitanism in U.S. Fiction

3. The Chinatown and the City: Maxine Hong Kingston and the Relocalization of San Francisco

THREETHREE It was the fantastic drowse and drum hum of lum mum afternoon nathin’ to do, ole Frisco with end of land sadness—the people—the alley full of trucks and cars of businesses nearabouts and nobody knew or far from cared who I was all my life three thousand five hundred miles from birth-O opened up and at last belonged to me in Great America. —Jack Kerouac, “The Railroad Earth” San Francisco has become an Asian city. To speak, therefore, of San Francisco as land’s end is to betray parochialism. —Richard Rodriguez, “Late Victorians” THREE The Chinatown and the City Maxine Hong Kingston and the Relocalization of San Francisco Maxine Hong Kingston is widely considered to be a pivotal figure in what Yunte Huang calls the “multicultural recanonization” of American literature (142). Her memoirs, The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980), are regularly read both in and out of academic settings. They have received scores of scholarly articles and major national awards.1 Less attention and fewer accolades have been paid to Kingston’s fiction. Part of the reason is that Kingston has written only one novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.2 Another part of the reason is that this novel seems to be too radical a departure from the subject and sensibility of her memoirs for readers to place its significance among Kingston’s other work. However, Kingston’s novel explicitly dramatizes the interaction between canonical and multicultural literature. 62 chinatown and the city Kingston claims to have written Tripmaster Monkey in order to explore this question: “what use is a liberal arts education?” (quoted in Skenazy, “Kingston,” 140). This question seems to differ from the questions she explores in her memoirs, questions about the role of Chinese cultural knowledge in the production of American history. Whereas Kingston’s memoirs uncover the Chinese immigrant’s role in the production of American history, her novel explores the role of canonical literary knowledge in the production of art that gets labeled “Chinese American.” To some readers, Tripmaster Monkey kowtows to highbrow literacy. However, this literacy is part of her protagonist’s “fake book,” his freestyle method of middling highbrow literary knowledge, making it useful for a Chinese American writer with countercultural ambitions. Her protagonist’s very name, Witt­ man Ah Sing, is a repurposing of literary knowledge, a set of allusions that exceeds the sum of its parts. Wittman yearns to make literature that is useful. Specifically, he wants his literary knowledge to help him both remake himselfandreclaimthecityofSanFranciscofromtheknow-nothing bohemians that flooded it in the 1960s. What is inspiring about Tripmaster Monkey is the way Kingston injects literary value into such neglected urban spaces as the San Francisco Tenderloin, answering the question “what use is a liberal arts education?” with a demonstration of the capacity of literary knowledge to enrich a citydweller ’s encounters with public space. But Kingston’s intentions are not entirely altruistic. She also uses her novel to settle an old score. Tripmaster Monkey is set in the very milieu into which Kingston came of age as a writer (early 1960s San Francisco) and follows Wittman, a Berkeley-trained “Chinese Beatnik,” as he confronts the barriers that Bay Area bohemians have placed between themselves and the ethnic diversity and urban materiality of “the City” (82).3 Kingston’s San Francisco is overrun by bohemians whose allegiance is not to the City but to the foggy haze of community that has been left behind by the frenetic cultural sensibility of the Beat generation. Through such fog, San Francisco’s ethnic diversity appears to be little more than colorful wallpaper on a city-sized rumpus room. But Kingston’s satiric representation of bohemian life in the early 1960s is not a postmodern reaffirmation of Norman Podhoretz’s argument in “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” Instead, Kingston’s satire is affectionate , delivered in a spirit that rescues the liberatory potential of the very Kingston and the Relocalization of San Francisco 63 road novels that inspired the bohemian migration west. In fact, Tripmaster Monkey affirms the narrative sensibility found in Kerouac’s earliest fiction, the sensibility I referred to in chapter 2 as “delocalization.” This sensibility is lost on the San Francisco Renaissance. Instead of emphasizing the interchangeability of urban experience, Renaissance practitioners simply transcend (that is, ignore) the multiethnic urban realities of the City. From Kingston’s point of view, this transcendence equals an erasure...