Writing the Asian American Artist: Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

Maxine Hong Kingston's genre crossing between autobiography, memoir, and fiction in The Woman Warrior: A Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts generated a rethinking of the traditional expectations of autobiography as a "truthful" representation of a writer's life, problematized the constructed nature of identity, and brought attention to the existence of collective literary protagonists and multiple points of view, thus raising questions about the need for revision of genres that were often androcentric and Eurocentric in nature.(1) In Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, Kingston forces a similar re-viewing of the traditional Kunstlerroman, the novel about the growth and maturation of an artist, as she tells the story of a fifth-generation native Californian Chinese-American, Wittman Ah Sing. Set in the sixties, this multi-layered, densely textured novel, with its multiplicity of interpretation and fluidity of meaning, challenges the reader into using his/her wit--to become a `wit man/woman'--in order to make sense of the seemingly rambling narrative.(2) The traditional Kunstlerroman highlights the marginality of the artist in its portrayal of the typical image of a sensitive alienated soul at odds with a hostile world (see Beebe). More often than not, it is the artist's unique artistic and intellectual sensibility that leads to this alienation from society. However, in most Kunstlerromane by American writers of color, not only are the artists estranged from society because of that artistic sensibility, but they also suffer extreme marginalization as a result of race, gender, and/or class. Significantly, the racially, ethnically, and/or sexually marginalized artist-protagonists in these Kunstlerromane want to move from the margin to the center or to help change the existing meaning of margin and make it a site of agency and empowerment. Instead of retiring to an ivory tower or separating from society, as does the protagonist in the traditional Kunstlerroman, the artist-protagonists work toward establishing identities as artists and Americans within society, not as outsiders, but as involved members of that society. Further, American artists of color seek equal participation in the dominant American society not only for themselves but also for the entire group and use their art to help realize this communal vision. Most importantly, they want to achieve this goal without compromising their ethnic, racial, and/or gender identity(ies). While this is not an essentialized paradigm for all Kunstlerromane by American writers of color, and it is necessary to take inter-minority and intraminority differences into account, many of them show these characteristics.(3) In his discussion of the revision or parodying of traditional forms or genres by writers, Henry Louis Gates Jr. asserts that it is an act of "rhetorical self-definition" (294). Kingston's redefinition of the traditional Kunstlerroman in Tripmaster Monkey reflects such a purpose as she subverts and resists the dominant discourse while envisioning new, non-stereotypical images of men and women, races and ethnic groups, believing that if we can "imagine" them, then we can work "toward building them and becoming them" (Kingston, "Interview" 783). I "His province is America. America, his province." Armed with a wild imagination, a caustic tongue, and intense fervor, Wittman Ah Sing, the artist-protagonist of Tripmaster Monkey, is on a mission of self-definition and is out to subvert the dominant society's attempts to stereotype him and his ethnic community. It is not, however, an easy task, and he is constantly in conflict with the dominant society that spurs in him feelings of anger and frustration, alienation and despair. Not just a typical alienated artist, Wittman is a person who has never had a viable sense of self since he has lived in the margins all his life. Suffering from social and psychological isolation, he even "entertain[s]" the idea of suicide, though in the next instant dismisses it as only a fantasy, saying it was just "the run of his mind. …