Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  As the pink feathers settled, here come the bathing beauties down the hanamichi thrust runway. The old-guy judges say, “Beauti-foo. Beauti-foo,” when “foo” means “pants,” and choose Miss Chinatown U.S.A.: the tallest girl with the tightest blackest curls and reddest lips, the roundest nose, the reddest apple cheeks in the whitest face, the plumpest cheongsahm.

  Little girls in loose, fluttery cheongsahms bring Jade Snow Wong a dozen long-stem American Beauty roses, and orchid corsages for her mother and sister. Jade Snow is wearing an embroidered black satin coat with slits, but all you see through them is her pleated skirt. Youngest Sister Wong is sweet in peach-blossom silk, and their mother is dignified in a pale blue gown, everybody’s hair marcelled. “It was almost like a wedding,” says Jade Snow. She reads her essay about absenteeism in factories, which won first prize in a contest sponsored by the War Production Board’s War Production Drive. This essay was sent to President Roosevelt, and you can read it in the Congressional Record. The prizes are a war bond and the christening of a liberty ship on a Sunday, and sending it to war. The loudspeakers play our crash-bang music. Jade Snow hits the ship with a bottle of champagne beribboned in red, white, and blue. “I christen thee the William A. Jones.” Welders cut away the plates that hold the ship to the pier of the Marin County shipyards, where Jade Snow works. “Burn one!” “Burn two!” The maiden ship is free on the water and sails to war.

  The Soong sisters and Anna Chennault, dressed in suits that the bride wears at her wedding reception, travel all over the country and give speeches. “Freedom,” they say. “Liberty.” Their accents were schooled Back East. They prove that the ladies-in-distress aren’t bucktoof myopic pagans. Women not unlike Katharine Hepburn and Myrna Loy are burning the rice fields as they flee the invaders. (The invaders are the ones with the buckteeth and glasses.) These excellent dark women should have overcome dumb blondes forevermore. Women get their wish: War. Men, sexy in uniform, will fight and die for them.

  All hell broke loose on the third night of this play, for which the audience kept growing. The public, including white strangers, came and made the show important. The theater went beyond cracking up family, friends and neighbors come to see one another be different from everyday. The take at the box office paid for the explosives for the climactic blowout. The audience sat on the staircase and windowsills; there was no longer an aisle.

  We are in a show palace on the frontier. We have come down out of the ice fields of the Sierras and the Rockies and the Yukon, and up from Death Valley. Three authentic crescent oil lamps were pulled up and down throughout the evening that seemed endless because time is a dragon that curls and smokes. Trappers, hunters, prospectors, scouts are spending their earnings to see fellow human beings. As still as animals, they suddenly shout because they haven’t talked to anyone for a long time. They need to hear people, and to tune their voices again.

  When the sun is farthest from the Earth, Lantern Festival lights up the five days of deepest winter. Curves of scaffolding form a white dragon; the white lanterns are its scales. Each holding a lantern, children file singing through the ice tunnels. Dragons are playing with flames englobed in ice—the pearl that is the universe or Earth. A thousand lanterns—phoenixes in paper cages—hang from the Blue Cloud Tower, the most famous restaurant ever, with over a hundred dining rooms. At crossroads, shopkeepers and householders build mountains of buns as in Marysville. But this is not Marysville. This is Tai Ming Fu, the Great Bright City, and to this City of Big Lights on the clear silver-and-gold night of the full moon will come the hundred and eight bandits. Or so warns the poem on the gate, scrolls of poetry unfurling on walls and posts. Sung Chiang, the Timely Rain, leader of the hundred and eight, has written a guarantee-poem giving fair warning that the bandits are about to attack. But the innocent shall not be harmed; the imprisoned shall be free. Teams of husband-and-wife knights enter the city from different routes. It’s the Dwarf Tiger and the Tigress, played by Zeppelin and Ruby; the Vegetarian and the Night Ogress, played by Charles Bogard Shaw and Nanci Lee; the Dry Land Water Beast and Devil Face, played by Lance and Sunny Kamiyama; the Pursuing God of Death and the Lively Woman, played by Mr. Lincoln Fong and PoPo. They’re wearing party clothes to account for glamour. They shop and eat until time to reveal themselves as the toughest fighters of all.

  Dudes and schoolmarms from Back East, and picture brides from back East, and Frank Cane step out of the stagecoach. “Get back on that stage and keep riding if you know what’s good for you.” See that woman in a poke bonnet leading her workhorses? She’s a runaway slave. She turns around; you see she has a Chinese face. That man walking here and there in a cangue—like locked in stocks that are not stuck into the ground—has committed so many crimes, ten-pound and twenty-five-pound iron weights have been added to his burden; the papers that list his penalties seal the joins and cover the wood. He’s been collared. But on this holiday, kind people are making his cangue into a feasting table—roast duck and buns. Horses have brands on their butts, while men have them on their faces. You can read on cheeks and foreheads their places of exile, where they’re supposed to be. The men with hanks of straw tied around their blades are swords-for-hire, walking up and down the marketplace. The clomp and stomp of boots on wooden sidewalks satisfy the ear, no shuffling and scuttling in slippers.

  Friends and enemies find one another. Agon.

  Into the dungeons Night Ogress Nanci carries paper flowers and paper butterflies, which hide brimstone and saltpeter, the ingredients for gunpowder. Her accomplices are the Forest Dragon and the Horned Dragon, who once knocked down a fir tree with his head. The jailers have gone out to celebrate, having put their poor relations in charge. “Where are my brothers?” asks the Ogress, taking her swords out of her belt. “I’ve come for my brothers. They were framed. It’s time you let them out. Before I deal with you, I want to hear your idea of justice. Should you lock up the man who stole the tiger or the two innocent boys whom he stole it from?” “Let me think. I need to think,” says the amateur jailer, backing away from her. He bumps into a prisoner, who bangs him over the head with his cangue. The Ogress fights the guards while the dragons free prisoners and set gunpowder. Outside, the Vegetable Gardener ties the jailhouse bars to his pommel. His horse pulls the wall down. The other Perfect Couples of the Battlefield open all the city gates, just as, amid fireworks, the Blue Cloud Tower blows up. At the sight of that flambeau, Miss Hu the Pure, played by Judy Louis, spurs her ash-grey horse. Twirling her red silk lasso overhead, she leads the main army of four thousand men and amazons into the city. Snow falls. A fire dragon and a snow dragon have come at once.

  As in real life, things were happening all over the place. The audience looked left, right, up and down, in and about the round, everywhere, the flies, the wings, all the while hearing reports from off stage. Too much goings-on, they miss some, okay, like life.

  Inside a grocery store, some bad Caucasians plant dope among the mayjing and the black-bean sauce, then call the cops. A lynch mob raids the store, where the grocers both work and live. They jerk the chinamen through the streets by their long hair. Ropes hang from lampposts and fire escapes. Nooses are lowered over heads. The accusation and sentence are read: To be hung by the neck until he dies for dealing opium, which debauches white girls for the slave trade. The kung fu gang leaps to the rescue. Everybody dukes it out. The opium war in the West. John Wayne rides into town, asking, “Where’s the chinaman? Gotta see the chinaman about some opium.” The police break up the riot, and arrest the grocers for assaulting officers. So Chinese-Americans founded the Joang Wah for the purpose of filing legal complaints with the City of New York against lynchings, illegal arrests, opium, slavery, and grocery-store licensing. A tong is not a crime syndicate and not a burial society. It is organization of community, for which Chinese-Americans have genius.

  A storyman arrives on I Street, and unpacks a troupe of puppets, the tribe and clan that he carries with him. Pretty wife doll and courtes
ans and warrior girls and faeries. With puppets, you can bind their feet as tiny as you like, ladies’ slippers on their feet, foxgloves on their hands. The troupe has a hundred bodies and a thousand switchable heads. The gambling house is in front; the hundred-seat theater is in back. The gamblers drink and play pai gow standing up, one boot on the railing, which has U’s like stirrups, worn into it. Guns are at-ready in holsters. Motivated by human nature, the poker players sock one another across the tables, and crash through the wall. Puppets whack the live actors on their heads and in their faces. The set spins about; another life is going on on the reverse side. The bar mirror falls in a sleet of crashing reflections. Gamblers and cheaters swipe at one another’s eyes with jagged bottles. Puppets lose their heads. Hand-puppets lose their insides, which change into fists. The puppet master, invisible black ninja, kicks ass. Wail. Bang.

  The floor caves in, and those who don’t fall in jump into the hole—gold dust has been raining down through the floorboards for years.

  Meanwhile, Rudyard Kipling (played by the Yale Younger Poet), the first white explorer to write an account of crossing America from west to east, sets foot in “the Chinese quarter of San Francisco, which is a ward of the city of Canton set down in the most eligible business-quarter of the place.” He guides a tour group of ladies and gentlemen through our town. Look at how strange the tourists are, pale outsiders abroad in their own country. Sir Kipling gives them American Notes: “The Chinaman with his usual skill has possessed himself of good brick fireproof buildings and, following instinct, has packed each tenement with hundreds of souls, all living in filth and squalor not to be appreciated save by you in India.” The poor tourists follow him down into a basement. “I wanted to know how deep in the earth the Pig-tail had taken root. I struck a house about four stories high full of celestial abominations, and began to burrow down.…” He descends a level below the cellar, and another one below that. He goes into what Frank Norris called the Third Circle of Evil. (The First Circle is the shops and restaurants; the Second Circle is the home life.) Three levels down, Kipling discovers that “a poker club had assembled and was in full swing. The Chinaman loves ‘pokel,’ and plays it with great skill, swearing like a cat when he loses. One of the company looked like a Eurasian, whence I argued that he was a Mexican—a supposition that later inquiries confirmed. They were a picturesque set of fiends and polite, being too absorbed in their game to look at a stranger.” A fate of the cards set the Eurasian Mexican (played by Mr. Leroy Sanchez of the Office of Human Development) and a chinaman against each other. “The latter shifted his place to put the table between himself and his opponent, and stretched a lean yellow hand towards the Mexican’s winnings.” A pistol shot bangs out. Smoke obscures the scene. Kipling and the Eurasian-Mexican hit the floor. The smoke clears. “The Chinaman was gripping the table with both hands and staring in front of him at an empty chair. The Mexican had gone, and a little whirl of smoke was floating near the roof. Still gripping the table, the Chinaman said: ‘Ah!’ in the tone that a man would use when, looking up from his work suddenly, he sees a well-known friend in the doorway. Then he coughed and fell over to his own right, and I saw that he had been shot in the stomach. I became aware that, save for two men leaning over the stricken one, the room was empty. It was possible that the Chinamen would mistake me for the Mexican—everything horrible seemed possible just then—and it was more than possible that the stairways would be closed while they were hunting for the murderer. The man on the floor coughed a sickening cough. I heard it as I fled, and one of his companions turned out the lamp.… I found the doorway, and my legs trembling under me, reached the protection of the clear cool light, the fog, and the rain. I dared not run, and for the life of me I could not walk. I must have effected a compromise, for I remember the light of a street lamp showed the shadow of one half skipping—caracoling along the pavements in what seemed to be an ecstasy of suppressed happiness. But it was fear—deadly fear. Fear compounded of past knowledge of the Oriental—only other white man—available witness—three stories underground—and the cough of the Chinaman now some forty feet under my clattering boot-heels. Not for anything would I have informed the police, because I firmly believed that the Mexican had been dealt with somewhere down there on the third floor long ere I had reached the air; and, moreover, once clear of the place, I could not for the life of me tell where it was. My ill-considered flight brought me out somewhere a mile distant from the hotel; and the clank of the lift that bore me to a bed six stories above ground was music in my ears. Wherefore I would impress it upon you who follow after, do not knock about the Chinese quarters at night and alone. You may stumble across a picturesque piece of human nature that will unsteady your nerves for half a day.”

  You would think that that Chinese guy had killed somebody instead of having gotten killed himself. Rudyard Kipling exits, chased off by cherry bombs and cymbal clangs. Nobel Prize winner. No wonder the Yale Younger Poet was depressed in spite of honors.

  At the Fook Tai Lottery Co., Liang Kai Hee, an actor and a gambling man, has broken the bank. Everybody stops fighting as they recount in wonder how he did it, which is a legend to this day. He bought a ticket for fifty cents, and picked six numbers, like a hexagram out of the Ching, and won ten dollars. He put those ten dollars on the same six numbers and won the jackpot—ten thousand dollars. The stagecoach with wheels spinning like coins and its belly sagging with the gold and silver weight of the fortune rolls to him. Black and white boys are chanting, “Ching chong chinaman sitting on a fence, trying to make a dollar out of fifty cents,” caterwauling the vowels and honking the “n”s, slurring us. The kung fu guys chase them, and they run like the cowards they are.

  Firecrackers boomed in the chimney. A mother-and-sons bomb ricocheted crazily inside a garbage can—a big mother bang detonating and creating seventy-five scatter bombs that bounced about for a long time. An M-80 barrel bomb went off. Night mirages filled the windows, reflecting and magnifying—a city at war and carnival. All aflare and so bright that we understand: Why we go to war is to make explosions and lights, which are more beautiful than anything.

  At the climactic free-for-all—everybody fights everybody everywhere at once. The hundred and eight bandits and their enemies (played by twenty-five actors) knock one another in and out all entrances and exits, sword-fighting up and down the stairs and out amongst the audience, take that and that, kicking the mandarin-duck kick, swinging the jeweled-ring swing, drums and cymbals backing up the punches. The intellectuals grasp their five-pronged pen holders, and make of their hands claw-fists. Everybody chased one another outside and battled on 22nd Avenue among the cars. Audience hung out of window. Ten thousand San Franciscans, armed with knives and shouting, “Death to capitalists,” attack the railroad office, and set fire to Chinatown. Four thousand Sacramento’s Order of Caucasians sing a scab song, “Ching chong chinaman sitting on the fence.” Bullets and arrows zing from the false fronts of the sharpshooter roofs. Gunslingers and archers jump from balconies into the saddle. Rain barrels explode. Puppets pummel and cudgel and wack-wack. Tenderfoot drinkers of lemonade and sarsaparilla and milk bust out through swinging doors and over hitching posts into water troughs and rain barrels and Ali Baba wine jars. Through the smoke, a juggernaut, an iron roller with spikes, thunders across a hollow floor. The audience got to its feet in participation. The sheriff will surely come soon to stop the show with a cease-and-desist-disturbing-the-peace order. Jail us for performing without a permit, like our brave theatrical ancestors, who were violators of zoning ordinances; they put on shows, they paraded, they raised chickens within city limits. They were flimflammers of tourists, wildcat miners, cigar makers without the white label, carriers of baskets on poles, cubic air breathers, miscegenists, landsquatters and landlords without deeds, kangaroo jurists, medical and legal practitioners without degrees, unconvertible pagans and heathens, gamblers with God and one another, aliens unqualifiable to apply for citizenship, unrelated communalists a
nd crowders into single-family dwellings, dwellers and gamblers in the backs of stores, restaurateurs and launderers who didn’t pass health inspections, droppers of garbage into other people’s cans, payers and takers of less than minimum wage, founders of martial-arts schools with wall certificates from the Shaolin Temple of Hunan, China, but no accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, Unemployment-check collectors, dodgers of the draft of several countries, un-Americans, red-hot communists, unbridled capitalists, look-alikes of japs and Viet Cong, unlicensed manufacturers and exploders of fireworks. Everybody with aliases. More than one hundred and eight outlaws.