Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  Wittman was quoting from “Stranger in the Village,” which is in Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. After getting educated, a graduate has to find ways to talk to his family and regular people again. It helps, when you want to tell them about your reading, to leave out the title and author. Just start, “I was reading in a book …”

  “We have a story about what to do to those who try to hang on to the jewel of their naïveté. Cho Cho will get them. Once after losing a battle, Cho Cho hides out in a farmhouse with a well-meaning family. So many kids of various sizes run all over the place, they seem like the hundred children. The farm folks are going about their chores and speaking ordinarily, but all is fraught; the birds are stirring and beating their wings. Cho Cho walks here and there, peeping through doors and windows. What are these people up to, treating him so well? They say they are not political; they welcome the stranger as a guest. They certainly laugh a lot. Cho Cho steps into the wine cellar; a tall boy ducks into a jar. ‘Aren’t you too old to be playing hide-and-go-seek?’ And where did the father go? Cho Cho strolls in the fields and orchards. No father. ‘Where is he?’ he asks this kid and that kid. ‘He went to market to buy a fat pig.’ The same answer from everybody. Had they had a meeting, and rehearsed that answer? Some kind of code? They say, ‘He went to market to buy a fat pig,’ and look at one another and laugh. Grandma brings a butcher knife, and a sister brings a boning knife. The mother sharpens them. ‘Why are you sharpening the knives?’ ‘We’re going to slaughter the fat pig that Father is bringing home from market.’ Did she say ‘pig’ like she meant him? Why’s everybody giggling? A brother and a cousin are talking behind a tree. What are they laughing at? What’s so funny? There were eight of them—they could gang up on him. Nothing for it but to pick them off one by one. He catches a brother alone in a lean-to, and quietly kills him, and hides the body behind the storage. Kills the mother, and hides her in the loft above the kitchen. Kills the grandma with her own knife, tucks her behind the grain jars. The rest of the family goes about their routine, not missing the others. He kills them one and all. Got a sister in the courtyard, a brother in the fields, another brother in the barn. Very neatly. No fights, no hysteria. Killed that family clean. Got them from behind, a hand over their eyes, fast. They didn’t know what hit them. Nobody suffered.

  “He leaves the farm, and meets the father on the road. He is trundling a fat pig bundled upside down in a basket. The rattan binds against its human-like skin. A pig’s eye looks out between wickerwork bands. One has to look closely to see that it is a pig and not a naked man; sometimes there are naked men trussed up like this as a punishment for adultery, adulterer in a pigpoke. So the family had been acting secretive and excited because they had been planning a surprise party. The father says, ‘The party’s for you. You’ll act surprised when the ladies tell you, won’t you?’ ‘I’ll do that, yes,’ says Cho Cho. The father will have to go too, a quick stab in the back. The poor man is spared the suffering of finding his family slaughtered. Cho Cho takes the pig and continues his journey.”

  The listeners did not applaud this tale of paranoia. They were not ready to slaughter innocents. The white people were probably getting uncomfortable. The others were watching to see Wittman get struck mute.

  “I think,” he tried explaining, “that history being trapped in people means that history is embodied in physical characteristics, such as skin colors. And do you know what part of our bodies they find so mysteriously inscrutable? It’s our little eyes. They think they can’t see into these little squinny eyes. They think we’re sneaky, squinnying at them through spy eyes. They can’t see inside here past these slits. And that’s why you girls are slicing your eyelids open, isn’t it? Poor girls. I understand. And you glue on the false eyelashes to give your scant eyes some definition. I could sell all this hair for eyelashes. Make a bundle.”

  The girls and women who were wearing them did not lower their eyelashes in abashment. Wittman was just part of a show, which did not upset them; he’s talking about other girls. Bad Wittman did not let up. “I have been requesting my actresses to take off their false eyelashes, to go on bareface and show what we look like. I promise, they will find a new beauty. But every one of them draw on eyeliner, top and bottom rims, and also up here on the bone to make like deep sockets. Then mascara, then—clamp, clamp. They kink their stubby lashes with this metal pincher that looks like a little plow. With spirit gum and tape, they glue on a couple of rows per eye of fake-hair falsies. A bulge of fat swells out over the tape—a crease, a fold—allthesame Caucasoid. That is too much weight for an eyelid to carry. There’s droop. Allthesame Minnie Mouse. Allthesame Daisy Duck.” Wittman held the backs of his hands over his eyes, and opened and shut his fingers, getting laffs.

  Judy, the awfully beautiful pigwoman, was agreeing with him, nodding her natural head. And Taña, who did not have an eye problem, also understood. She will let that tactless husband of hers have it later in private. The ladies with the mink eyelashes ought to speak up for themselves. But through the make-up they did not feel assaults on their looks.

  “Worse than make-up,” said Wittman, “is the eye operation. There’s an actress who dropped out of the show because she was having it done—the first Chinese-American I know to cut herself up like an A.J.A., who have a thing about knives. I won’t tell you her name. Too shame. She’s hiding out in a Booth home for girls during double-eye post-op. She didn’t want to show her face with black stitches across her reddish swollen Vaselined eyelids X’ed across like cut along the dotted line. You girls shouldn’t do that to yourselves. It’s supposed to make you more attractive to men, right? Speaking as a man, I don’t want to kiss eyes that have been cut and sewn; I’d be thinking Bride of Frankenstein. But I guess you’re not trying to attract my type. I can tell when somebody’s had her lids done. After she gets her stitches pulled and the puffiness goes down, she doesn’t have a fold exactly, it’s a scar line across each roundish lid. And her mien has been like lifted. Like she ate something too hot. The jalapeño look. She’ll have to meet new guys who will believe she was born like that. She’ll draw black lines on top of the scars, and date white guys, who don’t care one way or the other single-lid double-lid.”

  Several pioneer showgirls were present who had secretly had that operation done long ago. They were laughing at the girl with the jalapeño expression. They did not admit that all you have to do is leave your eyes alone, and grow old; the lids will naturally develop a nice wrinkle.

  “As a responsible director, as a man, I try to stop my actresses from mutilating themselves. I take them for coffee one at a time, and talk to them. You guys need to help me out, there’s too many beautiful girls who think they’re ugly. You’re friends of a raccoon-eyed girl, tell her how beautiful she might be without make-up. She says, ‘No, I look washed out. I look sick.’ You say, ‘You shouldn’t wear stage make-up out in the street. Will you take it off for me? I want to see what you look like. Go to the ladies’ room with this jar of Abolene cream, and come out with a nude face. Be brave. Go about bareface. Find your face. You have enormous eyes, not enormous-for-a-Chinese but for anyone. I want to kiss your naked eyelids, and not feel false eyelashes on my lips.’ Okay, I get nowhere. Maybe I say it wrong, you laugh, they laugh. But you guys who get chicks to listen to you better than I do should give them a talking to.

  “Please don’t end up like a wife of some military dictator of a nowhere Southeast Asian country. Trip out on the before-and-after Madame Sukarno and Madame Thieu and Madame Ky and Madame Nhu. Their eyes have been Americanized. They wear shades, like everything is cool, man. They’ve been hiding stitches or maybe a botch job. They have round noses but Madame Nhu’s is the roundest, hardly enough bridge to hang her glasses on. Any Mongolian type you see fucking with their eyes, you know they’ve got big problems. You girls ought to step right up here, and peel those false eyelashes off, and cast them down amongst this other hair.”

  Nobody took him up on that, but
they didn’t walk out either, and Wittman went on:

  “Speaking of plastic surgery, did you see on t.v. this dentist named Dr. Angle, D.D.S., who invented a way to straighten buckteeth? He’s fixed thousands of people—the champion bucktooth fixer in the world. He brought along audio-visual aids, shots of make-overs. The interviewer asked him what his standards are for a good bite. He said, ‘That’s a good question. I thought hard about that very question.’ His answer did not have to do with chewing, or being able to talk better, or teeth in relation to the rest of the face. He said, ‘I use my own teeth as the model. Because they’re perfect. I’ve got perfect teeth.’ And he does. Dr. Angle looks just right. Regular eyes, regular nose, regular teeth. No mole or birthmark or crookedness I can use to describe him so’s you’d recognize him.

  “Like Dr. Angle, I declare my looks—teeth, eyes, nose, profile—perfect. Take a good look at these eyes. Check them out in profile too. And the other profile. Dig the three-quarter view. So it’s not Mount Rushmore, but it’s an American face. Notice as I profile, you can see both my eyes at once. I see more than most people—no bridge that blocks the view between the eyes. I have a wide-angle windshield. Take a good look. These are the type of eyes most preferred for the movies. Eyes like mine sight along rifles and scan the plains and squint up into the high noon sun from under a Stetson. Yes, these are movie-star eyes. Picture extreme close-ups of the following cowboys: Roy Rogers. Buck Jones. John Wayne. John Payne. Randolph Scott. Hopalong Cassidy. Rex Allen. John Huston. John Carradine. Gabby Hayes. Donald O’Connor, if Francis the Talking Mule counts as a western. Chinese eyes. Chinese eyes. Like mine. Like yours. These eyes are cowboy eyes with which I’m looking at you, and you are looking back at me with cowboy eyes. We have the eyes that won the West.”

  Now, Wittman was giving out what he thought was his craziest riff, the weirdest take of his life at the movies. But the audience stayed with him. His community was madder than he was. They named more cowboys with Chinese eyes—Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen, Gary Cooper. And more—Alan Ladd and Jack Palance in Shane, a movie about a Chinese against a Chinese. Gregory Peck. Robert Mitchum. Richard Boone. Have you heard: James Coburn is taking Chinese lessons from Bruce Lee, his “little brother.” There’s this guy, Clint Eastwood, who can’t get work in Hollywood because of Chinese eyes, working in Italian westerns now. Some are traitors to their Chinese heritage. Richard Widmark took a role as a U.S. Cavalry expert on Indians in Two Rode Together, where he says, “I’ve lived among the Apache. They don’t feel pain.” The Lone Ranger masks his Chinese eyes. So does Cato.

  The poets who sit zazen get Japanese eyes: Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder.

  The ladies refused to be left out. They found for themselves actresses who have Chinese fox eyes: Luise Rainer and Myrna Loy and Merle Oberon and Gene Tierney and Bette Davis and Jennifer Jones and Katharine Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. Rita Hayworth is Chinese. The showgirls have a souvenir program of the Forbidden City’s All-Chinese Review, and there she is, Rita Hayworth, in the middle of the front row.

  “Marlon Brando,” said Wittman, “is not Chinese, and he’s not Japanese either. To turn him Japanese, they pulled back his hair and skin and clamped the sides of his head with clips. They shaved his eyebrows clean off, and drew antennae like an insect’s, like an elf’s. Sekiya scoot-scoots about, procuring his sisters for the all-white American armed services.”

  Lance Kamiyama stood up from the throne-chair where he was sitting at the back of the room. Sunny sat in the other one. He held up a banana, and made as if to throw it. “For you,” he said. He tried to walk with it up to the stage area, but the floor was too crowded. He handed the banana off, “Pass it on, no pass back.” It went from hand to hand up to Wittman. What signifies a banana? If I were Black, would I be getting an Oreo? If I were a red man, a radish?

  “ ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?’ ” said Shakespearean Wittman. “No, it’s a banana. My pay? Thank you. Just like olden days—two streetcar tokens, two sandwiches, one dollar, and one banana—pay movie star allthesame pay railroad man. Oh, I get it—top banana. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen of the Academy, I thank you. Hello. Hello. Nobody home in either ear. I feel like Krapp. I mean, the Krapp of Krapp’s Last Tape by Ah Bik Giht. He wears his banana sticking out of his waistcoat pocket. I’m going to wear mine down in my pants. Have you heard the one about these two oriental guys who saved enough money for a vacation at the seashore? They’re walking on the beach and desiring all the bathing beauties. They make no eye contact with bullies who kick sand in faces. The smaller oriental says, ‘I strike out with the chicks. I try and I try but. How you do it?’ The bigger oriental says, ‘I been studying your situation, brother. I recommend, you put one banana in your bathing suit.’ ‘Ah, so that be the secret. I’ll go buy a banana and try it.’ He does that, and too soon returns in disappointment. ‘I don’t understand. I buy one big ripe banana. I stick it in my swimsuit. I walk on the beach—and the chicks laugh at me. What be wrong?’ The big oriental says, ‘I think you’re supposed to wear the banana in front.’

  “Seriously, folks, this banana suggests two parts of the anatomy that are deficient in orientals. The nose and the penis. Do you think if I attached it between my eyes I’d get to be a movie star? Do you think if I attach it between my legs, I’d get the girls?

  “I ought to unzip and show you—one penis. Large. Star Quality. Larger than this banana. Let me whip out the evidence that belies smallness. Nah. Nah. Nah. Just kidding, la. I’d only be able to astound the front rows; the people in back will tell everybody they didn’t see much. I’ve got to get it up on the big screen. The stage is not the medium for the penis or for the details of this face. For the appreciation of eyelids, double-eye or single-eye, we need movie close-ups. So you can learn to love this face.

  “Is there anybody out there who’s heard the joke all the way through that has the line, ‘The chinaman don’t dig that shit either!’? That may be the punchline. All my life, I’ve heard pieces of jokes—maybe the same joke in fragments—that they quit telling when I walk in. They’re trying to drive me pre-psychotic. I’m already getting paranoid. I’m wishing for a cloak of invisibility. I want to hear the jokes they tell at the parties that I’m not invited to. Americans celebrate business and holidays with orgies of race jokes. A white friend of mine has volunteered to hear for me what comes before ‘The chinaman don’t dig that shit either!’ Don’t dig what shit?”

  “It’s about this horny bushy guy who comes down out of the Arctic Circle,” said Lance.

  “He wants a girl for fifty cents,” said Zeppelin. “But she costs too much—one dollar.”

  “No,” said Lance. “No girls available, but for one dollar, you can have the chinaman. This manly guy doesn’t want the chinaman. He says, ‘I don’t dig that shit.’ ”

  “No, no, that’s not the way it goes,” said Zeppelin. “He can afford fifty cents but they up it on him to one dollar.”

  “The exact amount of money,” said Charley, “is beside the point. Whatever they say the cost is, this guy thinks it’s too much, especially since he wouldn’t even be getting a girl. He goes away. He’s very horny, so comes back for the deal on the chinaman. But now they want to charge three times as much. Let’s make it simple, three dollars.”

  “Three dollars?!” said Zeppelin. “How come three dollars. Awhile ago, you offered one dollar. I don’t dig that shit.”

  “One dollar for the chinaman, and two dollars for the two guys to hold him down,” said Lance. “The chinaman don’t dig that shit either.”

  “American jokes too dry,” said Siew Loong.

  “No wonder they call you inscrutable, you don’t laugh at jokes,” said Wittman.

  “You guys feel so sorry for youself,” said Auntie Dolly. “But you tell tit twat cunt chick hom sup low jokes.”

  “All you joke experts be here, why don’t you men tell us, ‘Is it true what they say about Chinese girls?’ ”
said Auntie Bessie. “Is what true?”

  “The full line,” said Wittman, “is, ‘Is it true what they say about Chinese girls’ twats?’ They think they’re sideways, that they slant like eyes. As in Chinese Japanese Koreean.” He put his fingers on the tails of his eyes, and pulled them up, “Chinese,” pulled them down, “Japanese,” pulled them sideways, “Koreean.” He felt immediately sorry. He had pulled tears of anger and sorrow up into his eyes. White men let little yellow men overhear that twat joke to make them littler and yellower. And they fuck over the women too. Kick ass, Wittman. “The King of Monkeys hereby announces: I’m crashing parties wherever these jokes are told, and I’m going to do some spoilsporting. Let me educate you, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, on what isn’t funny. Never ask me or anyone who looks like me, ‘Are you Chinese or Japanese?’ I know what they’re after who ask that question. They want to hear me answer something obscene, something bodily. Some disgusting admission about our anatomy. About daikon legs and short waist or long waist, and that the twat goes sideways, slanting like her eyes. They want me to show them the Mongoloidian spot on my ass. They want to measure the length of my ape arms and compare them to Negers’ arms.