Trickster History: China Men

If The Woman Warrior 's narrator is a trickster-in-training who grows up learning to distrust received truths, China Men 's narrator steps even further outside of her own point of view to tell the fathers' stories.^[11]China Men combines history, biography, autobiography, myth, fiction, and fantasy to reclaim and recreate Chinese American history as a multilayered story. "What I am doing is putting many kinds of stories and people right next to one another, as they are in real life. Each character is viewed from the vantage point of the others" (Pfaff 26). The work celebrates Kingston's ancestors, and by extension all China men, as tricksters who survived and triumphed despite unjust immigration laws and labor practices.

Like The Woman Warrior , China Men has proved a difficult work to classify under traditional genre categories. Primarily viewed as "biography" or "history," it also contains autobiographical vignettes, western and Chinese myths and legends, and multiple versions of a single life. If The Woman Warrior 's structure reflects a multilayered self China Men 's structure reflects a multilayered community, culture, and history. To truly tell the story of China men, Kingston creates a communal chronicle,

which reminds us that history is composed of many lives and many stories—not his story but their stories. She includes an eight-page section composed of U.S. immigration laws, which she calls "pure history," in order to combat mainstream readers' ignorance of the Chinese American immigrant experience, but the section's dry, official tone emphasizes the limitations of the history genre (Pfaff 25). The collective mode of China Men subverts a traditional, monologic history that—as Kingston's need to include "The Laws" implies—has all but erased Chinese Americans (Goellnicht 196).

In addition to challenging conventional written history, Kingston's work fights to recover an oral legacy that she senses has already been lost. Unlike Kingston's mother, who passes on a rich oral tradition to her daughter, her father remains silent, and she must invent his stories herself. China Men is Kingston's talkstory to her father: "I'll tell you what I suppose from your silences and a few words, and you can tell me that I'm mistaken. You'll just have to speak up with the real stories if I've got you wrong" (CM 15).^[12] This narrative stance recalls trickster Nanapush's direct address to Lulu in Louise Erdrich's Tracks , but here the roles are reversed: rather than a grandfather passing down an oral legacy to his granddaughter, here the daughter must reimagine her father's and grandfathers' stories, underscoring the precariousness of the oral tradition.

That Kingston had to separate the stories of her family into two volumes to reflect the historical and geographic split between Chinese American men's and women's experiences accounts in part for the breach in the oral tradition from father to daughter. Additionally, one incident in China Men suggests that Kingston's

own fear and resentment of her male relatives' misogyny has prevented her from hearing the men's stories in the past. It involves Kau Goong, her grandmother's adventurous brother: "My brothers remember him as a generous old man; he took them to a smoking place where men with silver and wood pipes gave them presents and praised them. The only times he spoke to me were to scold and to give orders. 'Bad girl,' he said" (CM 180).^[13] When Kau Goong comes in the house looking for her one day, his loud shouts send her scurrying to the cellar to avoid "his bossy presence" (CM 180). Though she successfully avoids a confrontation that day, years later at his funeral she muses, "I listened to find out more about Kau Goong's pillages, his plunders, and sackings . . . but they did not mention his crimes though he was safe from deportation now. I should have yelled questions at him. I shouldn't have hidden from him" (CM 185). Kingston imaginatively retells the stories of China men to recover a history silenced by missed communication. As the Kau Goong episode ironically implies, patriarchal misogyny has nearly extinguished this heroic tradition by squelching the female voice that can pass it on.

China Men 's introductory chapter, "On Discovery," foregrounds issues of gender and discovery by adapting an incident from the eighteenth-century Chinese novel Flowers in the Mirror .^[14] The segment demonstrates Kingston's trickster techniques: adaptation, invention, and defamiliarization. In Kingston s version, Tang Ao, a male scholar and traveler, "discovers" the "Land of Women" and is forced to endure the pain and humiliation of becoming a traditional female courtesan, with bound feet, plucked brows, pierced ears, and painted face. Though Kingston preserves the essential details of the eighteenth-century story

(Cheung, Articulate 102), she switches some characters (in the original version the tortures are inflicted on Tang Ao's brother-in-law) and relocates the Land of Women to North America. Several critics have noted the double-edged commentary Kingston's transposition of this story allows, as both a sympathetic allegory for the emasculation of Chinese men in America and (as in the original version) a critique of patriarchy that has subjected Chinese women to similar treatment for centuries.^[15]

Kingston's prominent placement of the Tang Ao myth in a chapter titled "On Discovery" in a book that questions the monologic voice of history raises crucial questions about the nature of historic discoveries. Traditional myths of American history begin with its "discovery" by Christopher Columbus. Kingston's adaptation ends by suggesting that the Land of Women (or North America) was discovered by the Chinese as early as A.D. 441 (CM 5). This casually mentioned "fact" challenges the legitimacy and primacy of western myths of discovery by predating them and claiming the discovery of America for the Chinese, but it also questions the motives of such discovery. Discovery is a primary imperialist euphemism, designed to obscure the issue of prior inhabitancy in order to appropriate land for one's own purposes. When Tang Ao "discovers" the Land of Women, he remains unthreatened even though they immediately capture him: "if he had had male companions, he would've winked over his shoulder" (CM 3). As Tang Ao's fate makes abundantly clear, discovery does not equal possession; in fact, Tang Ao's ignorance of the civilization he "discovers" and his entrapment in his own sexist ideas of women prevent him from seeing them as potentially dangerous and result in his becoming their possession.^[16] By destabilizing the term discovery , Kingston prepares readers to consider the alterna-

tive viewpoints and potential threats that lie behind their unexamined preconceptions.

Kingston not only relocates Chinese stories in North America but also recasts western myths as Chinese tales, most notably pirating Daniel Defoe's enormously popular novel Robinson Crusoe as "The Adventures of Lo Bun Sun." As David Leiwei Li has observed, Kingston faithfully preserves the original story; changing only outward details such as Lo Bun Sun's cultivation of rice ("American Canon" 489). The effects of this transformation are manifold. Defamiliarizing the story forces readers to consider the assumptions underlying this master narrative of western imperialism. Kingston's adaptation reveals Crusoe's justification as "one of protocolonizer, imposer of Western norms. . . . Kingston's creative reproduction of the Robinson myth lays bare the device that rationalizes almost all Western colonization, the workings of language and culture that presuppose the inherent supremacy of European civilization and the barbarous wretchedness of the native" (Li, "American Canon" 489). Exposing the motives of Robinson Crusoe (and by extension western colonization) through parody is a primary trickster strategy. As in The Woman Warrior , where Brave Orchid's view of all whites as ghosts and Moon Orchid's view of America as a "wilderness" of barbarians speak for Kingston's view of ethnocentrism as a human tendency not limited to westerners (WW 158), Kingston wields her trickster critique of ethnocentrism in China Men . By so easily recasting Defoe's tale as the story of a Chinese "Lo Bun Sun," Kingston shows that racism and ethnocentrism are not exclusively western but are fundamentally human foibles. Thus, like the double-edged Tang Ao myth that cuts at both racist treatment of China men in America and sexist treatment of women in China, Kingston's "Adventures of Lo Bun

Sun" parodies the myth of European supremacy while hinting that such blind self-aggrandizement is not exclusive to the western world.

The lives and stories of men of Chinese ancestry in America might easily lend themselves to tragic forms: exploited workers, unwilling bachelors, mocked and degraded "Chinamen" in a racist society. Yet rather than suggesting a history of victimization, Kingston presents the stories of her fathers and grandfathers in a comic mode. They are dauntless, irrepressible tricksters, outwitting a system stacked against them. King-Kok Cheung describes the trickster spirit that pervades China Men: "A subversive imagination and a sense of play enable both the dispossessed natives and the exploited Chinese immigrants to survive despite the odds. The author's own transformation of tragedy into comedy exemplifies the characteristics she attributes to China Men and engages the reader in a way no straight-faced account of peonage could" (Articulate 105). With her own "subversive imagination," Kingston has clearly inherited her trickster sensibility from a long line of trickster ancestors, female and male.

Kingston's father emerges as trickster in China Men in the sheer multiplicity of his life stories. "In the course of the book, I have him coming into this country in five different ways. I'm very proud of that," Kingston comments (Pfaff 26). The early chapter "On Fathers" radically questions a child's ability to know her parent at all. One evening she and her siblings, waiting at the gate for their father to come home, think they see him coming and run to greet him, only to be told that they are mistaken. "Looking closely, we saw that he probably was not [our father]," Kingston remembers. The man walks away, looking "from the back, almost exactly" like their father, and moments later their own father ap-

pears and acknowledges them. Placed prominently as China Men 's second chapter and appearing before any stories of real fathers and grandfathers, "On Fathers" destabilizes the notion of "father" as a fixed, recognizable identity. That his children look to recognize him by his expensive suit and wingtip shoes, and so easily mistake him for someone else, suggests how little they know of the man inside. In a way, both men in this incident are Kingston's father: the one who denies her and walks away and the one who salutes her.

The two chapters dedicated to her father's life, "The Father from China" and "The American Father," presented as if they concerned different people, reflect the father's multiple identities. Both chapters present him as a man of resilience and invention. Despite Kingston's ambivalence toward his misogyny and stony silence, her portrayal of her father as a heroic trickster speaks for her admiration of him. Like the Chinese trickster Monkey, he studies rigorously for years, successfully passes his examinations (Monkey's earn him the knowledge of immortality), grows dissatisfied with the mediocrity and bureaucracy that surround him, and makes his own "Journey to the West."^[17] In America the father renames himself Edison, claiming for himself the cunning and resourcefulness of the famous inventor. After being duped out of the laundry business by his friends in New York, dodging arrest as manager of a gambling house, and enduring a depression that keeps him rooted to his chair as immovably as Monkey trapped for five hundred years under a mountain, Ed springs back to life and builds a new laundry in California, a self-made man many times over.

Kingston's other male ancestors are also heroic tricksters. Kingston's "crazy" grandfather, Ah Goong, shares the trickster's

traditional position at the bottom of the social ladder, scorned by a family who calls him "Fleaman" and disregarded as crazy by many of his fellow railroad workers.^[18] Filled with the trickster's comic and arrogant sexuality, aloft in a basket blasting into the side of a cliff, Ah Goong shouts "I am fucking the world" (CM 133). Though discredited as crazy, Ah Goong wisely recognizes that his work on the railroad makes him an American. He tells the men who die building the railroad, "This is the Gold Mountain. We're marking the land now. The track sections are numbered, and your family will know where we leave you" (CM 138). Ah Goong helps organize the railroad workers, passing along the encoded message to strike by tying holiday food bundles with a "special pattern of red string" (CM 140). Kingston uses Ah Goong to subtly challenge stereotyped images of Chinese men and replace them with images of strength and heroism: "Ah Goong acquired another idea that added to his reputation for craziness: The pale, thin Chinese scholars and the rich men fat like Buddhas were less beautiful, less manly than these brown muscular railroad men, of whom he was one. One of ten thousand heroes" (CM 142). With their strike, Ah Goong and his compatriots overturn the oppressive power structure, demanding and securing a measure of freedom and respect.

Bak Goong, the "Great Grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains," is also a trickster.^[19] He fights a no-talking rule at the Hawaiian labor camp by singing subversive messages to his compatriots, a trickster technique often used by African American slaves. After he is whipped for singing, he eventually finds his solution in the less articulate but equally effective technique of coughing out his thoughts. Like Nanapush of Erdrich's Tracks ,

Bak Goong soon discovers that his life depends on talking. He becomes the camp storyteller, a "talk addict" who inspires the men with stories of trickster Chan Moong Gut. During one comic episode, Bak Goong and his friends mock female missionaries, making lewd comments in a dialect they don't understand and offering them more and more tea to force them to urinate.^[20] Later, Bak Goong explains to the men that they have reenacted a trickster story, "Chan Moong Gut and the Gambling Wives," which connects them to a comic, subversive trickster tradition. In a hilarious defamiliarization of one of western culture's most sacred images, Bak Goong observes the "Jesus demonesses" hand out "grisly cards with a demon nailed to a cross, probably a warning about what happened to you if you didn't convert" (CM 112).

When Bak Goong becomes ill, he attributes it to pent-up speech: "His tongue was heavy and his throat blocked. He awoke certain that he had to cure himself by talking whenever he pleased. . . . 'Uncles and Brothers, I have diagnosed our illness. It is a congestion from not talking. What we have to do is talk and talk'" (CM 115). He then tells them a story that "cannot be left unsaid," about a king who relieves himself by shouting his secret into the ground (CM 116).^[21] The story inspires the men to dig an "ear into the world," into which they shout all their secrets, frustrations, joys, and sorrows (CM 117). A trickster who invents and creates culture, Bak Goong tells the men, "That wasn't a custom. We made it up. We can make up customs because we're the founding ancestors of this place" (CM 117). Their new custom has the positive effects of a trickster strategy: their show of anger, rage, despair, and joy wins them more freedom and independence from the intimidated whites.

Like Bak Goong's shouting party, Kingston's art is collaborative, and it simultaneously expresses rage at her forefathers' mistreatment and joy at their victories. One of the few women's stories recounted in China Men —the singing and crying ritual performed before her mother's wedding—perhaps best captures the novel's trickster spirit. Since the trickster opposes entrenched oppression of all kinds, it is not surprising to find feminist critique alongside tribute to male ancestors. The women gather to listen to the bride's lament, a litany of anger, sorrow, and hope at the prospect of a new life with her husband and his family: "The women punctuated her long complaints with clangs of pot lids for cymbals. The rhymes made them laugh. MaMa wailed, her eyes wet, and sang as she laughed and cried, mourned, joked, praised, found the appropriate old songs and invented new songs in melismata of singing and keening. She sang for three evenings. The length of her laments that ended in sobs and laughter was wonderful to hear" (CM 31). Balancing sobs and laughter, finding appropriate old songs and inventing new ones, Kingston's China Men continues this dynamic, self-renewing, trickster-inspired tradition.