Monkey Business: Revisionist Mythmaking

Kingston's focus on creating the language of a new culture involves inventing new stories, contributing to what she calls an "ever-changing mythology" that evolves from a vast array of cultural sources (Li, "American Canon" 496). Aware of the dangers of pastiche, Tripmaster 's narrator warns that "Wittman, the fool for books, ought to swear off reading for a while, and find his own life" (TM 168). Creating new American stories is sometimes a struggle for Wittman, as Kingston's juxtaposition of new and old stories suggests. After staying up all night inventing adventures as a traveling storyboatman in China, Wittman wakes up to realize that "he had been tripping out on the wrong side of the street. The wrong side of the world. What had he to do with foreigners? With F.O.B. [Fresh-Off-the-Boat] emigres? Fifth generation native Californian that he was. . . . His province is America" (TM 41). The narrative is interrupted at this point with an episode from Journey to the West , which both offers an implicit interpretation of the story itself and illuminates Wittman's difficulties:

It's all right. Wittman was working out what this means: After a thousand days of quest . . . Monkey and his friends, Tripitaka on the white horse, Piggy, and Mr. Sandman, arrive in the West. The Indians give them scrolls, which they load

on the white horse. Partway home, Monkey, a suspicious fellow unrolls the scrolls, and finds that they are blank scrolls. "What's this? We've been cheated. Those pig-catchers gave us nothing. Let's demand an exchange.' So, he and his companions go back, and they get words, including the Heart Sutra. But the empty scrolls had been the right ones all along. (TM 42)

Kingston's interjection of this story at a moment of crisis in Wittman's identity as a writer suggests parallels between Wittman's quest for the right subject and Monkey's quest for the sacred scrolls. Wittman, like Monkey, mistrusts blank scrolls, stories yet unwritten. But because he has arrived in America, another "West," the blank ones are the right ones: Wittman lives in a new place that demands new writing.

Part of that new writing involves updating and changing classic stories to explore contemporary American issues. In Tripmaster Monkey as in The Woman Warrior , Kingston engages in tricksterlike revisionist mythmaking, and in the process she invents "new archetypes" for contemporary America (Fishkin 783). Kingston's revisionist aims in Tripmaster Monkey are threefold: first, she writes new versions of classic Chinese novels to create new, alternative visions of identity and community; second, through Wittman, she examines contemporary cultural myths to critique harmful stereotypes and negative representations of Chinese Americans; and finally, taking her cue from the talkstory of a movie, she invents a new kind of art to reflect her alternative vision.

Several critics have noted Kingston's use of classic Chinese novels, but interestingly, each focuses on a different root novel.^[24]

In fact, Kingston liberally includes elements of Journey to the West , Romance of the Three Kingdoms , and The Water Margin . Each critic's identification of a single source stems perhaps from a desire to simplify a dizzying display of myth or to single out a specific thematic thread. However, Wittman's play cannot be pinned to one particular source because Kingston is not interested in preserving discrete boundaries between myths and stories but in culling whatever is useful in "my American life" (Islas 14).

Kingston transforms various elements of The Water Margin , Romance of the Three Kingdoms , and Journey to the West in order to subvert common stereotypes and assumptions. To one listener, Wittman describes his play as a revision of The Water Margin (TM 261). Kingston focuses on The Water Margin 's 108 bandits to create an image of a cohesive, rebellious Chinese American community that challenges the damaging stereotype of the "model minority." The secret to a strong Chinese American community, Wittman insists, lies in this redefinition of Chinese Americans as outlaws. By putting on a show about the 108 bandits, the community becomes, in a tricksterlike move of resistance, at once a group of outcasts and a force to be reckoned with. During the performance the narrator boldly dares the sheriff to arrest the actors for disturbing the peace, describing with pride and defiance a history of Chinese Americans as victorious outlaws and tricksters:

Jail us for performing without a permit, like our brave theatrical ancestors, who were violators of zoning ordinances; they put on shows, they paraded, they raised chickens within city limits. They were flimflammers of tourists, wildcat miners . . . aliens unqualifiable to apply for citizenship, unrelated

communalists and crowders into single-family dwellings, dwellers and gamblers in the backs of stores, restaurateurs and launderers who didn't pass health inspections . . . payers and takers of less than minimum wage . . . dodgers of the draft of several countries, un-Americans, red-hot communists, unbridled capitalists, look-alikes of japs and Viet Cong, unlicensed manufacturers and exploders of fireworks. Everybody with aliases. More than one hundred and eight outlaws. (TM 301–302)

This long catalogue (of which I have quoted only half) rewrites Chinese American history, presenting it not as a story of victimization and oppression but as a celebration of artful dodgers of the system, who preserved their spirit, their sense of fun, and their will to survive despite unjust labels and unjust laws. Kingston implicitly addresses her own critics when she overturns Grand Opening Ah Sing's fears that Wittman's play will be "bad advertising" for Chinese American culture: creating a sense of shared history, she makes "outlaw" a source of communal identity and pride.

Kingston's use of the war epic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms also allows her to revise aspects of her Chinese American heritage in important ways, in particular by suggesting that trickster strategies—storytelling, jokes, and performance—provide a more viable way of fighting social injustice and building community than does violence. Wittman learns through his production of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms that this war epic contains an antiwar message (TM 340).^[25]Tripmaster Monkey is set during the United States's escalating involvement in Vietnam, and the novel is partly about Wittman's efforts to avoid the draft, even as he wages a private war on racism.^[26] The dramatized war, then,

provides a constructive rather than destructive outlet for real anger and real wars (TM 306). Kingston implicitly associates Wittman's staged war with both racial violence and Vietnam, connecting Wittman's staged fireworks to the Watts riot fires and connecting Vietnam draft dodging to the Chinese Americans hiding out after the L.A. Massacre, which killed nineteen (TM 306, 340). Through performance and storytelling, the play and the novel (the "fake war" recalling the "fake book" of the title) release anger, pain, and frustration caused by racism, as well as desperation and mistrust of the American political system engendered by the Vietnam War.^[27]

The epic Journey to the West also undergoes a metamorphosis in Tripmaster Monkey . Kingston uses her version of this famous trickster legend to blast the common stereotype of Chinese Americans as temporary sojourners, or foreigners, in America. "All you saw was West," Wittman says of his play. "This is The Journey in the West" (TM 308). Whereas the west in the popular American imagination symbolizes the opportunity and adventure of the frontier the west in the popular Chinese imagination is the western paradise to which Monkey and Tripitaka travel in a quest for enlightenment and fame (Chua 146). Kingston's collapse of the two into "Journey in the West" not only reiterates that there's "nobody here but us Americans" (TM 309) but also ironically comments on Chinese immigrants' search for a Gold Mountain in America.

Kingston's other major adaptation of Journey to the West concerns Tripmaster Monkey 's narrative voice. Both fiercely protective of Wittman and quite critical of him, the novel's mercurial narrator resembles Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy who supervises Monkey's journey.^[28] Kingston's choice of a Chinese American goddess narrator radically critiques the Anglo-American

narrative tradition of a white male god and reminds us that neither point of view is neutral. Kuan Yin as narrator also represents a substantial revision of the original Journey to the West , in which Kuan Yin appears sporadically. By giving Kuan Yin voice and authorial control, Kingston creates a dialogic tension within the narrative, often explicitly challenging Wittman's sexism. For example, after Wittman tells the story of his stage-performance birth to his pretty Chinese American date Nanci Lee, Nanci begins to tell her own story of performing magic tricks as a child. Wittman's response, "What's this? She doing geisha shtick for me?" reveals his own entrapment in sexist, racist stereotyping (TM 17). The novel's narrator sharply prods, "You're not the only one, Wittman, who fooled with magic . . . and also not the only one to talk. She had to talk too, make this a conversation" (TM 17).

Since Tripmaster Monkey is a Journey in the West, its search for new, community-building stories involves a reworking not only of classic Chinese novels but also of American popular culture. Movies pose a huge threat to Chinese American cultural identity because they are such pervasive purveyors of damaging stereotypes ("All we do in the movies is die" [TM 323]), yet at the same time they carry enormous potential for culture building. Wittman expends much dramatic energy in critiquing the damaging stereotypes of Chinese Americans in popular culture and in finding ways to celebrate and emphasize Chinese American participation in American culture. He advocates trickster strategies for actors in stereotyped roles: "Pass messages. 'Eat shit, James Bond'" (TM 325). He revises American film history to find evidence of Chinese American participation, noting the "Chinese eyes" of cowboy heroes in western films (TM 314). Yet recognizing Chinese traits in Caucasian stars is not enough; it

doesn't fulfill Wittman's search for a Chinese American role model in popular culture, someone who will teach him "how to hold my face" (TM 324). Finally Wittman realizes that he must create new roles for all those left out of the "Hogan Tyrone Loman Big Daddy family" and revise the Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller theatrical canon to reflect his own experience of American culture (TM 25).

Movies in Tripmaster Monkey provide models not only for cultural critique but also for the narrative process. The Saragossa Manuscript , as told in Tripmaster Monkey , becomes a model for a contemporary form of talk-story and for the transformative possibilities of art. Charley's retelling of the film is an intricate metaphor for and guide to Tripmaster Monkey and to life. The "story inside a story inside a story inside a story" contains "tricksters" who "change costumes and rearrange their poses" between scenes, and the movie itself contains layers of "hoodwink" that the viewer must break through (TM 102). Charlie realizes in successive viewings of the film that "between scenes and cuts and juxtapositions are strict cause-and-effect links. Nothing is missing. The main link chain, though, is spoken" (TM 102).

We might say the same thing about Tripmaster Monkey . Despite its apparently loose, anecdotal construction, each juxtaposition intricately signifies on its context, and orally transmitted talk-stories link the episodes together. The movie inspires a vision of human interaction as a web of interconnected stories, suggesting to Charley that "we are connected to one another in time and by blood. Each of us is so related, we're practically the same

person living infinite versions of the great human adventure." Charley explains that "as I walked home . . . I understood that inside each door and window someone was leading an entire amazing life. . . . I can follow anybody into a strange other world. He or she will lead the way to another part of the story we're all inside of" (TM 103). The narrator of Tripmaster Monkey reiterates this idea: "Here we are, miraculously on Earth at the same moment, walking in and out of one another's lifestories, no problems of double exposure, no difficulties crossing the frame. Life is ultimately fun and doesn't repeat and doesn't end" (TM 103). This vision validates the novel's structure, which is full of snapshots of other lives, other perspectives. The notion that each person is the protagonist in his or her own life describes Kingston's purpose in constructing a multivocal, tricksterlike narrative that subverts the comfortable notion of a central character or a unified identity. Although "we're all inside of" the same story, each person can only tell a part of it, in much the same way that the girl in The Woman Warrior can only infer the whole dragon from a few visible parts. The movie has indeed helped "cure" Wittman, who comes away from Charley's performance with the feeling that "Yes, life is tricky and thick" (TM 103). So, too, is Tripmaster Monkey .

Charley's emphasis on what happened to him after he left the cinema—"I am a changed person. It's been two years, and I continue changing" (TM 100)—underlines a central emphasis in Tripmaster Monkey on the social and political aspects of creative production: the ability of art to effect change. As the movie cures Wittman, reviving in him a sense of possibility and connection, so the novel works to effect the same change in the reader. As Wittman is the trickster protagonist of Tripmaster Monkey , working to create a fictional community through his retelling of sto-

ries, so Kingston is Tripmaster Monkey 's trickster author, stepping in and out of various perspectives, catching her reader in successive layers of hoodwink, and inviting the reader to join the "community" of her novel.

Kingston draws a parallel between the changing aims of Wittman's and her own artistic careers: they both begin as poets and move toward more social art forms (M. Chin 61). Whereas the flesh-and-blood immediacy of theater makes playwriting clearly a social art, the novel has its own power to engage its audience. Kingston prizes the tricksterlike ability of the written word to cross boundaries that real social interactions cannot. "Words can get through all kinds of barriers," Kingston comments; "they can get through skin color and culture" (Fishkin 787). Through the gender- and color-blind medium of print, Kingston reaches readers whose entrapment in stereotyped thinking might otherwise prevent her from reaching.^[29]