Tripmaster Monkey, Frank Chin, and the Chinese Heroic Tradition

PATRICIA P. CHU Tripmaster Monkey, Frank Chin, and the Chinese Heroic Tradition The reason he had the radio on was that whenever he stopped typing, he heard someone else nearby tapping, tapping at a typewriter, typing through the night. Yes, it was there, steady but not mechanical. . . . An intelligence was coming up with words. Someone else, not a poet with a pencil or fountain pen but a workhouse big-novel writer, was staying up, probably done composing already and typing out fair copy. It should be a companionable noise, a jazz challenge to which he could blow out the window his answering jazz. But, no, it's an expensive electric machinegun typewriter aiming at him, gunning for him, to knock him off in competition. Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Money: His Fake Book I. CONSTRUCTING ETHNIC HEROISM: THE KINGSTON-CHIN DEBATE It is no accident that when Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, sits up all night to begin his first play, he is haunted by the tapping of a rival's typewriter. His author, Maxine Hong Kingston, has responded to ovet a decade of hostile criticism by creating Wittman in the image of her harshest critic, Frank Chin. Like Chin, Wittman Ah Sing is a Chinese American playwright, idealistic and enraged over racism, with the persona of an angry young man who can be exasperating—especially in his sexism—but is fundamentally decent. Though this porttait could be considered a personal attack, it is best understood as providing a mediating voice by which Kingston expresses her own anger over American racism. This anger, Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 3, Autumn 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 16 10 ii8Patricia P. Chu however, is only one ofseveral concerns that Kingston shares with Chin and explores throughout Tripmaster Monkey. This essay will read Kingston's novel Tripmaster Monkey in terms of an ongoing debate between Kingston and Frank Chin. This debate, about the proper place ofChinese texts in the construction ofan emerging Chinese American literature, has been central to Asian American literary studies.1 It is also crucial to Asian American literature, whose survival and growth depend in part on the writers' ability to inscribe an ethnic consciousness that is distinct from Asian and Euro-American cultures, yet not isolated from them. Also at stake is the question of whether any particular body of literary texts can reasonably be cited as definitive of an ethnic group's consciousness; the selection and significance of particular Chinese texts, which Chin has claimed as definitive of Chinese American ethnic consciousness; his claim that some texts, versions, and readings are "real" while others are "fake"; and, most importantly , who is authorized to determine these issues. In short, I tead Tripmaster Monkey as a meditation on the nature of the Chinese "heroic tradition," as redefined by the two authors, and its relation to Kingston 's own authority as a Chinese American woman writer. Kingston employs various devices to situate Tripmaster Monkey as an American novel set in Berkeley, California, in the sixties, including references to Vietnam, drug culture, local sites, and local writers. Crammed with allusions to Western cultural markers such as James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke, Walt Whitman, the Beats, and American pop culture from vaudeville to West Side Story, the novel also incorporates numerous stories from the sixteenth-century Chinese classics Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, and The Journey to the West. In doing so, Kingston engages sympathetically but skeptically with Frank Chin's construction of a Chinese "heroic tradition," which emphasizes mattial heroism and a masculine code of honor. This "heroic ttadition" is best understood as Frank Chin's response to the anti-Asian racism that he and others find rampant in mainstream American culture. In several essays, some co-signed by friends who have co-edited Asian American anthologies with him (Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong), Chin has explored the effects of this racism on the Asian American community, focusing especially on cultural denigrations of Asian masculinity.2 Chin's most influential argument has been that Asian Ametican consciousness and The Chinese Heroic Tradition119 literary production have been hampered by...