Split Infinities: The Comedy of Performative Identity in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey

From these chicken scraps and dog scraps, learn what a Chinese-American is made up of. . . . Write the play ahead of them to include everyone and everything.

Wittman Ah Sing, Tripmaster Monkey

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Shortly before the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, a literary "warfare" began between Chinese American authors Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston. The quarrel raised questions that continue to be discussed about what constitutes a text that can speak for and about a Chinese American.¹ Chin sees the "proper" use of Chinese sources (from the heroic literary tradition) as a litmus test for an authentic Chinese American sensibility, a test that he emphatically says Kingston fails because she manipulates those sources to accommodate her own American experience.² Elaine Kim writes: "The men and women of China Men and The Woman Warrior are vivid and concrete refutations of racist and sexist stereotypes. The complexity and diversity of the Chinese American experience as presented in these books make continued acceptance of unidimensional views of Chinese Americans difficult" (213).³ The criticism has been nearly unanimous in its preference for Kingston and its rejection of Chin, favoring her as an author whose postmodern style offers a template for "performative" Chinese Americaness as a multiply determined identity.

Critics have claimed that Kingston's dialogic texts celebrate the ideals of inclusiveness and pacifism through postmodern parody (Chang, Cheung, Chu, Kim, Williams), which "destabilizes static binary oppositions" (Chang 15) and envisions the world "in a state of constant transformation and flux" (Furth 37). I agree that Kingston's enterprise is so complex that it leads to many different readings, but her playfulness also veils contradictions in ways that are problematic for a self-proclaimed pacifist communitarian. The text that raises the most difficult questions yet to be addressed by Kingston criticism is Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. Critic Irma Maini suggests, "By insisting on the primacy of an artist's ethnic and racial identity . . . Kingston in Tripmaster Monkey rewrites the discourse of a 'typical' individualistic and alienated artist-protagonist" (260). But such claims are difficult to assess, because Tripmaster Monkey presents a somewhat confused picture of ethnic/ racial identity.

In order to understand the elusiveness of Kingston's politics in Tripmaster Monkey, we need to recognize that the novel's highly praised fluctuating identifications are a feature of the comic mode, an approach well suited to enact the complexity the novel portrays. Satire, hyperbole, invective, bawdiness, and pastiche produce a sharp-edged, Marvel-style comic book about an imagined sixties-style carnival of American literary production. According to Patricia Chu, "Kingston uses the postmodern techniques of parody and revision, not to distort or obliterate our understanding of Chinese American history and culture . . . but to focus our attention on the process of constructing that culture" (131). As John Lowe points out, postmodern ethnic writers in America frequently choose comedy to break out of the "prisons of 'representation' and 'taste'—that is, the requirement placed on ethnic writers to provide protagonists and situations that accurately reflect the conventionally accepted reality of ethnic identity and culture" (106). Lowe also proposes that Kingston's humor is therapeutic, "exposing" the whirling vortex in order to "heal": "fool, wastrel, and dramatist, [Wittman] stands in the 'public square' [a reference to Mikhail Bakhtin] that his all-embracing drama has created for the community and proclaims a view of life that is intended . . . to be 'good health'" (110).⁴

These are welcome insights, but humor's trickster nature appears to have played its joke on critics who too quickly close down the ongoing whirl of comic transactions and prematurely declare the creation of "community," ill-defined as that term remains. As we know so well from...