"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.