"You Care What People Think of You": Personal and Racial Identity in Tripmaster Monkey

Postmodern American fiction is often characterized by its focus on the issues of personal and ethnic identity in a heterogenous nation.  "Trippers and Askers," the first chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston's 1989 novel Tripmaster Monkey, explores these issues in a day in the life of Wittman Ah Sing, a second-generation Chinese-American poet.  Relentlessly self-centered, self-consciously determined to both distinguish himself from others and claim a place within a group, and often shallow and cruel in his judgments of others, Wittman makes a sometimes unsympathetic character, but a perfect representative of complex humanity in search of a simple answer.  Through him, we see that the search for identity is often an ugly affair:  we judge, reject, and hurt others in our efforts at self-definition, all while mistaking others' perceptions of ourselves for our true identities.

The cruelty towards others that often accompanies a search for one's identity makes itself apparent early on in the chapter.  Out for a walk one fall day, Wittman decides to open himself up to his environment and fellow human beings, to "let it all come in" (2875), perhaps in an effort to connect with his surroundings and community.  As positive as his intentions may be, however, the observations he makes are uniformly negative.  The "old white woman...sitting on a bench selling trivets" (2875) is a grotesque:  "Not eyelids exactly but like skin flaps or membranes covered her eye sockets and quivered from the empty air in the holes or with efforts to see" (2875).  To Wittman, "her thick feet chapped and dirty" (2875) suggest mental illness, for "their sorry feet is how you can tell crazy people who have no place to go and walk everywhere" (2875).  Looking around his world, Wittman sees only ugliness, and reacts by rejecting it, by "[looking] away so that he would not himself get nauseated" (2876).  Rejection is, after all, a method of self-definition, a way of drawing the line between oneself and the Other.

Wittman's use of judgmental rejection as self-definition reveals his conflicted attitude towards his own ethnicity when he turns his gaze upon the pedestrians who next cross his path.  He, despite being Chinese-American, views other Chinese as if he were an outsider:  "Heading toward him from the other end comes a Chinese dude from China, hands clasped behind, bow-legged, loose-seated, out on a stroll--that walk they do in kung fu movies" (2876).  That reference to kung fu movies reads as stereotyping.  One might expect a non-Chinese American to associate the Chinese man with a Western cinematic trope, but to hear it from the perspective of a Chinese-American reveals how distanced Wittman feels from his own ethnic identity.  This distance becomes even clearer with his appraisal of the Chinese family that next crosses his path:

Immigrants.  Fresh Off the Boats out in public.  Didn't know how to walk together.  Spitting seeds.  So uncool.  You wouldn't mislike them on sight if their pants weren't so highwater, gym socks white and noticeable.  F. O. B. fashions--highwaters or puddlecuffs.  Can't get it right.  Uncool.  Uncool.  (2876)

Additionally, the specific details upon which Wittman fixates expose the shallowness of his standards, and whose opinion matters to him.  What bother him about the F. O. B. family are the way they walk and the clothes they wear, and those things bother him because they are "uncool"--because they look ridiculous to others.

Despite rejecting those fellow Chinese he deems as "uncool," however, Wittman sees no conflict in turning to his Chineseness to define himself when doing so can place him above another.  On a date with Nanci Lee, the beautiful Chinese-American girl with whom he has been infatuated since their college days, Wittman deliberately works to make her feel excluded from the community:  "'You must not have been in on the Chinese gossip,' he said, counting on what would hurt her, that at school she had been left out by the main Chinese...He rubbed it in, how much she did not know about her own" (2882-3).  Now, instead of ridiculing members of the community, he identifies himself with the community, and uses that identification to hurt Nanci by showing how she is left out.  He feels the need to prove himself above her precisely because he feels himself below her in the social hierarchy.  As he sees it, "she was no China Man the way he was China Man.  A good-looking chick like her floats above it all.  He [is] out of it" (2882).  Asserting an ethnic identity, Kingston seems to suggest, can sometimes be as negative an act as rejecting one's ethnic identity, depending on the motivation for it.

Wittman's sense of self, after all, is based almost entirely on how he thinks others perceive him.  Nanci recognizes this, and recognizes the reason for his attraction to her.  "'You want to know how you were seen [at college].  What your reputation was.  What people thought of you.  You care what people think of you.  You're interested in my telling you'" (2887).  In other words, he wants her to tell him who he was at college.  His own sense of who he was--"He had been wild...He read aloud on afternoons on the Terrace and at the Mediterraneum...There had been no other playwright.  Of whatever color.  He was the only one" (2887)--is not enough; being misread infuriates him.

It is being misread, in fact, that triggers his rage at the end of the chapter.  After having read some of his poetry to Nanci, an act designed to impress her with the most intense expression of who he really is, Wittman asks her what she thinks.  Her reply?  "'You sound black,' she said.  'I mean like a Black poet.  Jive.  Slang.  Like LeRoi Jones.  Like...like Black'" (2898).  Wittman tries to show Nanci who he is, and she tells him that he sounds like someone he knows he most definitely is not.  In response to that misreading of his personal and ethnic identity, Wittman launches into a tirade in which he first imitates a monkey, then reads aloud in pidgin Chinese, and then claims himself to be not just a monkey, but the King of the Monkeys (2898).  Nanci's misinterpretation of his identity causes him to go over the top in an attempt to reclaim his sense of self.

What becomes clear from Wittman's contortions of identity throughout "Trippers and Askers" is not only the mutability of the postmodern American's ethnic and personal identity, but also the ugliness the quest for it often inspires.  Wittman cannot see himself clearly, or feel confident in himself, without someone else to whom he can feel superior, whether that someone else be a street person of a different ethnicity, recent immigrants of his own ethnicity, or an old flame whose very superiority to him makes finding a way to feel superior to her even more vital.  This need to feel superior comes from the conflation of identity with others' perceptions, a conflation common in the postmodern world, in which the very heterogeneity of society makes finding one's place even more urgent and difficult than it had been in previous eras.  Ultimately, Kingston seems to suggest, one cannot truly find one's place or self until one moves beyond needing to appear a certain way to others.

Edition cited:  Kingston, Maxine Hong.  "Trippers and Askers."  The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. E.  Ed. Nina Baym.  New York:  W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2007.  2874-2900.  Print.