Maxine Hong Kingston's Novels

This study will examine Maxine Hong Kingston's works China Men and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. The thesis of the study will be that, in moving from the earlier China Men to the later Tripmaster Monkey, Kingston's work came to transcend the question of what it means to be Chinese, or Chinese-American, or American, and to focus instead on what it means to accept one's circumstances and to boldly forge one's personal and cultural identities based on the reality of those circumstances.

The argument of the study will be, then, that Kingston's earlier book focuses on the Chinese traditions which served as the foundation for the culture of Chinese-Americans, while the later book develops the character of one individual who has melded Chinese and American traditions to such a degree that something new emerged, something which, perhaps, transcends both cultures in important ways.

There are, nevertheless, mythical elements in both books, from the very beginning of both of them. "Mythical" here means the attempt on the part of the author to create a reality which is bigger than life, which transcends the mundane concerns of most ordinary human beings as they live out their ordinary lives ordinary day after ordinary day.

Therefore, in China Men, we find this beginning: "Once upon a time, a man, named Tang Ao, looking for the Gold Mountain, crossed an ocean, and came upon the Land of Women" (Kingston, 1980, p. 3). And in Tripmaster Monkey, we find this opening passage: "Ma

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egoing passage, it would seem as fully mysterious to him or her as the passages from China Men would seem to an "American." But to the "American" reading the passages from the Wittman Ah Sing story, the terms are easily managed into something making sense. The man in the ragged coat is some kind of a good-hearted homeless person, maybe a little crazy but mostly harmless, and the father turns the event into one reflecting the best of the Christmas season. The "Chinese" consciousness, on the other hand, would just as immediately "make sense" of the mythical elements of the China Men passages, "connecting the dots" of those elements with ease. What Wittman Ah Sing does, in the creative hands of Kingston, is bring together the elements of both cultures, the styles of both consciousnesses, in order to produce something entirely different. Kingston is clearly too respectful and loving of the Chinese culture to abandon it for another culture, but she is also too realistic to believe that the Chinese culture can remain untouched or unaffected by the American culture when the two come together in the lives of Chinese-Americans. In China Men, Kingston presents what seem to be thoroughly "Chinese" myths, but critics have argued that e

Category: Literature - M