Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  “I’m all right, Ma,” he said, getting to his feet. Eyewitnesses were saying it must have been a force of directed energy. No punch had been thrown; none landed. The champ had been gesturing, and some chi got loose. Ruby Long Legs stuck a long leg out to trip Siew Loong, but he stepped over it. Some of us must be born doves; Wittman had no instinct to hit back. He was glad to learn that his pacifism went deep.

  Siew Loong said, “I have a script here. You help me put on one show?”

  “You’re bound to do it, Wittman,” said Lance. Mrs. Lance was handing out copies. It was only a page long, let him have his say.

  The Little Dragon stood where Wittman had been standing, his gang leaning against the walls; they do the gang swagger standing still. F.O.B.s run in a gang, no cool American independence. Their leader talked-story like so: “A kung fu monk walks into town in old California. He thinks, this be one ghost town. The long long main street is too quiet because the citizens are chickenshit that a gang of bad guys are coming to showdown. They see the monk has no gun, so they haw him for being chinaman. They pull his short pigtail, which he grew for to disguise himself.” Siew Loong pulled out a whipcord—no, it’s a queue—and stuck it to his head. “He is far far away from Shaolin, Hunan, where monks invented kung fu to be strong in body because Buddhism heavy to carry. You understand? How did he come west to here? Okay, backflash: The monk as a kidboy bang-bang on the back gate of the Shaolin temple, and waits and waits. A teacher opens the gate, but there is an inside gate, and another inside gate inside the inside gate. At each back gate, he sees no-good students kicked out or run away. At last, he gets inside the gwoon. Don’t say ‘dojo,’ Japanese. Say ‘gwoon.’ He studies hard years. Training is allthesame hell. Arrows and spears shoot out of walls. Stones and axes fall down. Eagle stars—they look like cutting wheels that cut up pizzapie—whiz-shoot at his eyes. The skeletons are the bones of students who failed tests.” Wittman imagined Billy Batson going down the hallway between the statues of virtues and vices, and reaching Shazam on his throne, who gave him the holy-moly herb and the word that changes him into Captain Marvel. “The monk graduates high. And makes kung fu revolution to kick invaders and opium out of China. One night at the international ball thrown by Empress Suzie—”

  “Kiai!” The kung fu jocks came off the walls and swung into action, chop-socking and barefoot-kicking, and swinging from doorways right side up and upside down. They fought through the crowd, flexing feet, stretching spines, levitating, bilocating, radiating colors, screaming, “Kiai!” They played the good guys, and they played the enemy. Their eyes bulged round and red and saw through darkness. A fast finger plucked out an eyeball, and no evidence of it remained but a coin—a quarter—in the hand. They cracked you up; you could die laughing. A bad guy laughed to death. They attacked a fort, represented by the tall table that had had fruit on it. “Kiai!” They conquered it with their dexterous feet.

  Suddenly, the Little Dragon did the most amazing thing. He sucked in his cheeks and puckered his lips into a tight 8. He knelt and concentrated himself into a ball, from which his hands were flapping—two blurs at his shoulders. He did fly up onto the table. A buzzing came from him, from his mouth or from the whir of wings. Those tiny thalidomide wings flew him up. He landed in a crouch, and looked at everyone with inhuman eyes. It was the weirdest, most foreign thing an American audience will ever see; that man changed into a bee.

  The boxers escape-exited—they had the power to escape anything. They held their hands in front of their chests like paws, and walked sideways heel-and-toe out the front door, their spinal tails whipping. They came back inside to wild applause. Chop-socky flix kix and lix tickle box office. They took bows, all dozen or twenty boxer jox dressed in Hong Kong Pop Art t-shirts. On each chest was an egghead of Gwan Goong’s red face with hood-eyes, like the Hawkman, or Chang Fei’s face, which was a blue-and-black ovoid like the Atom’s; Cho Cho looked like black Dr. Midnight. The gang had given one another those home haircuts, every one with hair that stuck up in black shocks; the chi energy they fool around with does that to hair.

  Squatting on the table, Siew Loong continued talking from his outline or treatment: “Kung fu—hit fair, hit square and courageous. Get you ass near to opponent. Hit him with bare hand. Your own fingers de-eyeball him. But. The enemy—Germans, Austrians, Italians, French, Russians, British, mostly Japanese, mostly Americans—no-fair fight with tanks and gunboats. Us against the world.”

  He got off the table and stepped to one side, letting Lance, good at English, have the floor to do elegy. “Those on the side of the animals and the wind should have won. Tigers, crabs, white cranes, eagles, monkeys, bees—‘Kiai!’ the fighting cry of cats and of birds—hands and hair moving with the wind, our team blew toward the cannons, which blasted them to pieces. Bare hands, bare feet, the weapons of poor people—bare human bodies lost against machines. Why hadn’t it worked? Right politics ought to make the body bulletproof. They had practiced on blocks of wood and ice, bricks and tiles, materials out of which forts and castles are made. Had the masters cheated their students by firing blanks at them? Are monkey style and white-crane style and wu good for nothing but morning calisthenics? The victorious martial arts are fighter jets and bombs. Clip a coupon and get the secret of the East: A black belt is only good for holding up pants.”

  “So,” continued Siew Loong, “the Shaolin monk crosses the ocean to America to raise money for guns. He leads the townspeople to fight the gang of bad guys, and he has victory, okay. He travels on to the next town, New York, Hawai’i. American ladies wave hankie after him, and hold hankie to eyes and in teeth. He has many adventures, suitable for t.v. series. He goes to university, and studies science.” Using the tail end of his queue as a compass, he drew a perfect circle on the chalkboard. “He gets M.D. He works restaurants, cook and dishwasher. He gives speeches for revolution. He makes parades and flagsful of money. He dances tai chi among sick people in hospital and cures an epidemic. When he moves, the air changes, and sick be well. He meets Two-Gun Cohen, faithful Jewish Canadian sidekick and bodyguard. They go back to China and win revolution this time. You see me before? You see Hong Kong movies, you see me before. I was ming sing—bright star—in Hong Kong, but I have a dream: I go Haw-lee-woot. I bought one Z card, and I trampsteamer out to Little Mexico, and jumpship in the Bay, Fisherman’s Wharf. I been all over this land ball”—“ball” as in “pompon.” “All over this pompon of Earth, I took this script. To Warner Brothers and A.B.C., I said, ‘I be a Hong Kong ming sing. But I like be one Haw-lee-woot ming sing. Have I got a great idea for you—an eastern western—Kung Fu. Every week I be Shaolin monk, and have another eastern-western adventure.’ But. They said No. They said Chinese man has no Star Quality. The hell with them. Good for me. I did not let Haw-lee-woot change me into the dung dung dung dung dung with the little pigtail in back.” His hand slice-whacked off the queue, which a freedom-fighter grandfather had cut off, and his lady saved. “The hell with them. I act you theater; you act me theater.” His fist beat-beat on his hand, then beat-beat on his heart.

  Yes, hurry—do the play now or else the generation of actors that talk like that go unheard. “See the players well bestowed. Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicle of the time.” That chi charge that had come off of him was a blast of actor’s energy. With his presence—his Star Quality—we could have our first Chinese-American male sex symbol. All he’s after is an act or two in a play that will go on for sixty acts lasting forever. Give it to him.

  “Okay,” said Wittman. “I act you theater; you act me theater. Only one thing but. You’re going to stay F.O.B. as long as you hear and say ‘Revolution,’ and be thinking 1911, 1949. Forget Tobacco Shit War and Kung Fu War. Seventeen seventy-six, Siew Loong, July 4—our Revolution. We allthesame Americans, you sabe? Get it?”

  Shut up, Wittman. On with the show already. As promised, Lance read Liu Pei, and Charles Bogard Shaw read Chang Fei, he himself
Gwan Goong as before, and Yale Younger as Sun Ch’üan. He asked Siew Loong to read Cho Cho, and Step-Grandfather Fong to read K’ung Ming. The part about the death of the Chinese kings—the old country, gone—went like this:

  Gwan Goong, one of those people who has to tell his dreams at breakfast, tells his last dream: “A black boar or a black bull charged into my tent, and bit my leg. I leapt out of bed and took up my dagger, but I woke up stabbing the tent.”

  “It’s only a dream,” says a soldier. “A dragon floated through your tent last night.” Another of his men tries to read his character: “It means that you’re alert, and you face difficult problems head on.” Others think dreams are omens: “You’re going to be awarded a large medal with an animal crest on it. You’ll win the tiger-head breastplate.” “You’re not going to be killed in battle.”

  Gwan rubs his leg. “It still hurts. I’m awake, and the pain is still there. I often have aches and pains now. I’m getting old. Sixty this year.”

  Sure enough, their every interpretation turns out true. He isn’t killed in battle. Sun Ch’üan captures him, and executes him. To banish Death, Sun piles up pyramids of grapefruit, oranges, tangerines; he steams flocks of chickens and roasts herds of pigs. Surrounded by altars of food, he wraps up Gwan’s head, and sends it to Cho Cho with this message: “I want to join you against his brothers. I pledge you my kingdom.”

  Cho Cho silently looks at Gwan’s head. Then out of a piece of wood, he carves a body for the head. He dresses it in the brocades which Gwan had refused as gifts. (He had accepted one gift—the horse Red Rabbit.) Branches of hands and feet stick out from the stubby trunk. Gwan looks to be an ogrish, trollish chunk, which makes perspective crazy. Out of his big head the once-beautiful hair frizzes like lightning. Pinpointy dots stare out of goggle eyes.

  Cho Cho talks to his lifelong enemy: “You’ve been well, I trust, General, since we parted?” Which were the very words that Gwan had said to him after besting him in combat.

  And the Gwan Goong thing—like the votive statue over there—hears Cho Cho. Its eyes roll, and it opens its black mouth as if about to speak. Cho Cho faints in a fit of terror.

  He moves to a clean new house, but a tree that is hundreds of years old bleeds on him—the branches hang over and drip—and a voice comes out of it: “I come to take your life.” And at midnight, into his lighted bedroom walks Lady Fu, a queen he murdered long ago. “You,” she says. “Y-o-o-ou. Y-o-o-ou.” (Taña with her pale hair hanging did that very well.) She calls, “Children. Oh, chi-i-ildren.” Two boys come trailing. The ghosts follow one another through the wall. There’s a tearing sound, and that section of the house breaks off.

  Night after night, voices howl. Those of us who can hear them will perform them for those who don’t have the ear for them. The howls—weeping, groaning—come from wars and hungry children. Some of us can hear the actual sounds no matter how far away. Cho Cho thinks they are the voices of people he’s killed. “For thirty years, I’ve ridden across the empire doing battle against heroes. I have only two equals left to fight. But my health is gone.” He orders seventy-two decoy tombs, appoints his son emperor, and dies at the age of sixty-six.

  Gwan visits Liu Pei. At the sight of the cloud-soul, Liu Pei knows that his brother is dead. Gwan’s voice says, “I beg you raise an army. Avenge me.” “I am getting old,” says Liu Pei, “and I have spent my life at war.” He sings, “I Have Grown Old Waging War.”

  The brothers do not reach death on the same day. Trying to fulfill another part of their vow, Liu Pei declares the three kingdoms united, and himself the emperor. Chang Fei kneels to him, and says, “You’ve achieved our cause, emperor now. Avenge our brother.” Against the advice of their spiritual and military guru, they attack Sun Ch’üan.

  Through the nights, Chang Fei drinks too much, promising that in the morning he will be leading the troops as usual. “Or else tie me to a tree, give me a flogging, and have me beheaded.” He sleeps with his eyes open, but does not see two men steal into his tent. They are men he had flogged with fifty lashes apiece. They stab him to death at the age of fifty-five, and cut off his head, which they take to Sun Ch’üan.

  Sun Ch’üan receives that head, and sends it to Liu Pei. The messengers try to assassinate Liu Pei as they hand it to him. But he chops off their heads, and sends those two heads back. (Hollywood, do not stick pigtails on any of these heads—they were free men, who lived before the Manchus. Set a long table with a row of heads, like the banquet scene in Titus Andronicus.) Liu Pei fights on alone, wearing white armor and flying white flags. His banners in the sun whiten the land for seven hundred leagues.

  Sun receives his assassin-messengers’ heads. With heads on his mind, he leads his army onto the battlefield. Galloping out of the smoke and dust comes Red Rabbit. On his back sits a headless horseman, who wields a blue-dragon sword. The voice of Gwan says, “Give me back my head.”

  That night in his throne room, Sun hears that voice come from one of his men, “My blue-eyed boy. My red-whiskered rodent, have you forgotten me?” The man walks up the steps to the throne, knocks Sun off, and himself sits on it. Gwan no longer looks like a troll or a cloud-soul. His eyebrows and the creases beside his mouth are vertical black lines; his eyes and face are blood red—War incorporated. He speaks out of the earthly body he’s using: “So I crisscrossed the empire for forty years, and fell into your trap. You have me with you, then. I failed to taste your flesh in life; I shall give you no peace in death.”

  Sun leads his army up the Yangtze, setting fire to everything. The trees are torches from which flames jump back and forth. Curtains of flame hang and blow. Liu Pei, running from the heat, enters a grove of woods, which break into fire. Fire chases him to the river, but its banks are burning. Chang’s son leads him through forests of torches up a hill. He sees everywhere below him—fire, which has left the country barren of trees to this day. And then Sun’s army shoots flaming arrows up the hill. Gwan’s son finds a way down it, and Liu escapes.

  In hiding, badly burned, he mourns his brothers. Spots appear in front of his eyes, and he blacks out. On a still night, a draft blows against him. He sees two figures in the candlelight. “I thought I dismissed you,” he says to servants. He looks again. “Then you are still alive.”

  Gwan Goong, who has a more normal shape now, says, “We are ghosts, not men. The time is not far off when we shall be together again.”

  “We will the three of us all go home,” says Liu Pei.

  O home-returning powers, where might home be? How to find it and dwell there?

  In the morning, Liu calls for K’ung Ming. “I am dying,” he says, “and my children are not wise enough to rule. You be emperor after me.” The wizard of the wind knocks his forehead on the ground until blood runs. Liu tells his sons to serve the new ruler, and dies in 223 A.D.

  This was not the end, only the end of a night’s performance. Just because they all die, it isn’t the end. Gwan’s grandchildren were gathered to find out: Then what? Gwan Goong has the ability to travel anywhere; crossing back and forth the River of Stars to visit his brothers and his enemies. An ocean-going ship will cross the stage behind a scrim of time, and he will be on it. Gwan Goong on Angel Island. Gwan Goong on Ellis Island.

  The night was growing late, yet people who had to go to work graveyard or in the morning were taking up lines of a play that the savage world beyond the black windows didn’t know or care about. Look at their heads bowed over words. The oldest ladies have the blackest hair. Too many older women—a chorus line of beautiful ladies—without men friends. If only we could match them up with the kung fu boys. Everybody should leave with somebody—a bad boy placing his jacket on the shoulders of a Flora Dora girl, and a stage kiss becoming a real kiss.

  At the inconclusive ending of this first rehearsal, Wittman tried out on the crowd—actors make the best audience—an intermezzo (that he had practiced and set in front of the mirror). He took both parts.

  Ah Monkey is bra
gging to Tripitaka, “I crashed the party in the sky, and ate up the food. I’ve been cooked in the pot on the moon. I’m a chase-master, and catch arrows in my teeth. I climb skyscrapers. I bet you I can polevault over those clouds.”

  Wittman turned facing where he’d been standing, and said in a different voice, “I bet that you can’t clear this hand.” Tripitaka holds an open hand at waist level.

  The monkey laughs, opening wide his big mouth and showing his big teeth. “It’s a bet.” His pole elongates between his hands, and shoots up into the air, his eyes following its enormous growth. “Watch. At the height of my parabolic jump, you won’t be able to see me. Watch now. Watch.” He rocks heel-and-toe, his tail and nose twitching. “I’m off!” He polevaults into the sky. Clouds go by. The moon and sun and stars go by. He arrives on a mass of pink-and-white ether and meteorite dust. If this were a decent theater, he would be up in the catwalk. “Ha,” he breathes, waving his tail like a flag. “Look at me. Nothing to it. I can do anything. Higher than his hand, ha!” He strolls among clouds of many levels and shapes. “These must be the white columns that hold up the sky. I’m going to leave proof that I’ve been here.” At the tall middle pillar, he pulls out one of his hairs. “Presto be-e-e-en change-o!” The hair becomes a pen wet with ink. He writes his graffito: “The Greatest Wisest Man wuz here.” He saunters over to the thickest pillar, turns his back to the audience, unzips, and takes a piss. He returns his pen to his hair, and his penis to his pants, and jumps down off the cloud. “I jumped clear of your hand and your head and of Earth,” he brags, “all the way to the top of the sky.”

  “Fool ape,” says Tripitaka. “You never left my hand.” He holds up his hand to the monkey’s nose, and to the noses of the audience, who said, “Pee-yew.” Wittman dangled his hand out there like it was somebody else’s, looked at it, sniffed it, “Pee-yew! Monkey piss.” Then Tripitaka sticks up his middle finger. “What’s this?” He studies that middle finger, holds it to his eyes for a close look-see. “Why, there’s writing on my middle finger. ‘The Greatest Wisest Man wuz here.’ ” With thumb and finger, he picks up the monkey, and lowers him into his other hand. “You never left my hand.” And to the audience, “Do you see the tiny monkey on my hand? See? See? A teenyweeny gorilla? See his little hat with the feathers? See his cute tail?” Like King Kong with Fay Wray in his hand, but vice versa. At the table where the bee had sat, he suddenly smashes his hand down. Bang! The audience jumped, some let out a scream, and laughed. “A mountain holds Ah Monkey imprisoned for five hundred years.” (James Dean covers with his red windbreaker the toy monkey broken in the gutter.)