Tripmaster Monkey and Hollow City Illuminate S.F. Culture

Tripmaster Monkey and Hollow City are both novels dealing with problems facing the culture of San Francisco: how it is fragmented, how that leads to the alienation of its own parts, and in Tripmaster Monkey a means of solving and mending such problems.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey gives a compelling and ambivalent portrait of San Francisco and the Bay Area in the 1960’s as a subversive and multicultural home to all walks of life. The same way that Wittman Ah Sing struggles throughout the novel to synthesize his own heritage and identity of being both American and Chinese, the city of San Francisco reveals the conflicts that arise from being both a Chinese community and a major metropolitan west coast city. This conflict is portrayed in Wittman himself at the beginning of the novel where he “considered suicide every day. Entertained it” (pg. 1). He does so because he does not know who he is, hence his attempt to identify with Hemingway (pg. 1), and in doing so create an identity. The scene where Wittman with his scruffy beard is given the “stink eye” from a more orthodox Chinese person in Chinatown (Stephanie’s lecture, 11/25) shows the cultural conflicts present in the community. They resent Wittman because he represents to them a push away from his culture, rather than a synthesis of two cultures, which is what he is, or yearns to be. San Francisco is shown as a place of conflict due to its insensitivity and misunderstanding of its own multiculturalism. This can be seen in the stereotypically Chinese looking phone booth that offends Wittman.

Hollow City is an analysis of the ways in which the more dominant and richer communities in San Francisco push out and make it harder for the more undesirable populations to live there. What this leads to is an overall lack of interesting people, art culture, and diversity. This ties into Tripmaster Monkey because the chapter “The Shopping Cart and The Lexus” of Hollow City deals with the attempts of the San Franciscan government programs to move the poor to other areas. This translates into campaigns against minority communities (especially Asians or Latinos for being undocumented), African Americans, seniors, and the homeless. Rather than encourage the growth and reconciliation of such communities into the rest of the population, the government tries to drive them out.

This is the exact opposite of what Wittman Ah Sing is attempting in Tripmaster Monkey. I find it quite interesting that both of these books are approaching the same problem, but from different angles, making the subject all the more illuminating.