Full Circle

By Stefan Kanfer

TRIPMASTER MONKEY: HIS FAKE BOOK by Maxine Hong Kingston

Knopf; 340 pages; $19.95

In China Men (1980), Maxine Hong Kingston recalled a group of immigrant Orientals shoveling foreign ground and shouting "Hello down there in China! . . . Hello, my heart and my liver . . . I want home. Home. Home. Home. Home."

But for most of them, return was a financial and political chimera. Against their wishes and traditions, home became the U.S. Initially, their neighbors regarded them, in Bret Harte's words, as the "Heathen Chinee," an enduring caricature of cheap labor and social isolation, living in towns within cities, operating behind the impenetrable facades of restaurants and laundries. It was decades before the hostility softened to tolerance and, in recent years, to appreciation.

If the applause began with Richard Nixon's famous visit to the People's Republic, it has been intensified by the growing Chinese presence on campuses, in business and the arts. When Kingston published her first account, The Woman Warrior (1976), she was a soloist. Today she is part of a choir of writers concerned with the Chinese experience. On Broadway, David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly explores the boundaries of power, sex and race. In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, published last month, Chinese mothers offer their children a series of poignant confessionals. China's repressive Cultural Revolution is the subject of a forthcoming autobiographical novel, A Generation Lost, by Zi-Ping Luo. The Chinese immigrant, now a professor of chemistry at Caltech, was 14 when the Red Guards closed her school.

But not everyone in Luo's generation was lost. Spring Bamboo, published early this year, is a collection of stories by Chinese writers under 40, gathered and edited by Jeanne Tai, a New York City attorney. The variety of their expressions and subjects indicates that culture has begun to seep back to the mainland. Wesleyan Professor Ann-ping Chin offers more proof of recovery in the recent Children of China, a survey of youth in the People's Republic. "One cannot say that all China's cultural symbols and cultural assumptions were reduced to ruins," she writes. "They seem to be endowed with a life of their own."

Given this feverish interest in China, it was inevitable that Occidental travelers would add their own speculations about the People's Republic. Two years ago, Mark Salzman wrote Iron and Silk, a recollection of his years as an English teacher in Changsha. Next spring he will produce a novel, tentatively titled Journey to the West, that mixes Chinese myth and actuality. And next month will bring The Great Black Dragon Fire, by veteran journalist Harrison Salisbury. The fire was not fiction; it occurred in 1987, and it burned a Manchurian forest "so large that, like China's Great Wall, it could have been seen from the moon."

Appropriately, the Sino-American renaissance has now come full circle with Kingston's first novel, Tripmaster Monkey. Many books have been influenced by her luminous works, and many more are likely to tumble from her new picaresque. The time is the late '60s, the place San Francisco, and the protagonist the wild-eyed Wittman Ah Sing, a recent graduate of Berkeley. Overseas, annihilation beckons as the Viet Nam War escalates. Envious of the black experience, Wittman howls, "Where's our jazz? Where's our blues? Where's our ain't-taking-no-shit-from-nobody street-strutting language? I want so bad to be the first bad-jazz China Man bluesman of America."

To awaken the Chinese-American conscience, Wittman decides to stage a phantasmagorical street theater piece, complete with diving monkeys and realistic thousand-man battle scenes. En route, he caroms off a cast of eccentrics: activist egomaniacs, a new wife and a newer girlfriend, hidebound parents, an ancient grandmother, pot-scented philosophers ("You're going through the delusion of clarity") and a restless audience for his riffs.

Some of Tripmaster owes its atmosphere to Herman Hesse's overheated German vaudeville, Steppenwolf, and a few historical meditations are straight out of Saul Bellow ("The world was splitting up. Tolstoy had noted the surprising gaiety of war. During his time, picnickers and fighters took to the same field"). But Kingston's humor and idiom are her own, and so is the message, buried deep in her complex narrative. When Wittman visits his mother, she offers a succinct appraisal. "He read books," she complains, "when he was three years old. Now look at him. A bum-how." That critique has been made for 200 years by innumerable parents. As the world is discovering, the Chinese American is just like all the other immigrant Americans. Only more so.