Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  “And don’t ask: ‘Where do you come from?’ I deign to retort, ‘Sacramento,’ or ‘Hanford,’ or ‘Bakersfield,’ I’m being sarcastic, get it? And don’t ask: ‘How long have you been in the country?’ ‘How do you like our country?’ ”

  “The answer to that,” said Lance, “is ‘Fine. How do you like it?’ ”

  “The one that drives me craziest is ‘Do you speak English?’ Particularly after I’ve been talking for hours, don’t ask, ‘Do you speak English?’ The voice doesn’t go with the face, they don’t hear it. On the phone I sound like anybody, I get the interview, but I get downtown, they see my face, they ask, ‘Do you speak English?’ Watch, as I leave this stage tonight after my filibuster, somebody’s going to ask me, ‘You speak the language?’

  “In the tradition of stand-up comics—I’m a stand-up tragic—I want to pass on to you a true story that Wellington Koo told to Doctor Ng, who told it to me. Wellington Koo was at a state dinner in Washington, D.C. The leaders of the free world were meeting to figure out how to win World War II. Koo was talking to his dinner partners, the ladies on his left and right, when the diplomat across from him says, ‘Likee soupee?’ Wellington nods, slubs his soup, gets up, and delivers the keynote address. The leaders of the free world and their wives give him a standing ovation. He says to the diplomat, ‘Likee speechee?’ After a putdown like that, wouldn’t you think Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head would stop saying, ‘You speakee English?’

  “And I don’t want to hear any more food shit out of anybody. I’m warning you, you ask me food shit, I’ll recommend a dog-shit restaurant. Once when I was in high school, I met one of the great American Beat writers—I’m not saying which one because of protecting his reputation. He’s the one who looks like two of the lohats, beard and eyebrows all over the place. He was standing next to me during a break at the Howl trial. I told him I wanted to be a playwright. I was a kid playwright who could’ve used a guru. While he was shaking my hand, he said, ‘What’s a good Chinese restaurant around here?’ I tell you, my feelings were hurt bad. Here was a poet, he’s got right politics, anti-war, anti-segregation, he writes good, riding all over America making up the words for it, but on me he turned trite. Watch out for him, he’s giving out a fake North Beach. He doesn’t know his Chinatown, he doesn’t know his North Beach. I thought about straightening him out, and almost invited him for crab with black-bean sauce, and long bean with foo yee, and hot-and-sour soup, but I didn’t want to hear him say, ‘I likee soupee. You likee?’

  “I know why they ask those questions. They expect us to go into our Charlie Chan Fu Manchu act. Don’t you hate it when they ask, ‘How about saying something in Chinese?’ If you refuse, you feel stupid, and whatsamatter, you’re ashamed? But if you think of something Chinese to say, and you say it, noises come out of you that are not part of this civilization. Your face contorts out of context. They say, ‘What?’ Like do it again. They want to watch you turn strange and foreign. When I speak my mind, I spill my guts, I want to be understood, I want to be answered. Peter Sellers, starting with the Ying Tong Goon Show and continuing throughout his bucktoof career to this day, and Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Warner Oland and Jerry Lewis and Lon Chaney are cutting off our balls linguistically. ‘Me no likee.’ ‘Me find clue to identity of murderer.’ ‘Ming of Mongo conquers the Earth and the universe,’ says Ming of Mongo. ‘Confucius say,’ says Confucius. ‘Me name-um Li’l Beaver,’ says Li’l Beaver. They depict us with an inability to say ‘I.’ They’re taking the ‘I’ away from us. ‘Me’—that’s the fucked over, the fuckee. ‘I’—that’s the mean-ass motherfucker first-person pronoun of the active voice, and they don’t want us to have it.

  “We used to have a mighty ‘I,’ but we lost it. At one time whenever we said ‘I,’ we said ‘I-warrior.’ You don’t know about it, you lost it. ‘I-warrior’ was the same whether subject or object, ‘I-warrior’ whether the actor or the receiver of action. When the turtles brought writing on their shells, the word for ‘I’ looked like this.” Wittman wrote on the blackboard:

  “It looks almost like ‘Ngo’ today, huh? ‘Wo’ to you Mandarins. This word, maybe pronounced ‘ge,’ was also the word for long weapons such as spears and lances and Ah Monkey’s pole and the longsword. This longest stroke must be the weapon. And ‘ge’ also meant ‘fight.’ To say ‘I’ was to say ‘I fight.’ This isn’t a Rorschach craziness on my part. I’ll bet somewhere in China, a museum has collected that turtle shell in the same exhibit with the longswords. To this day, words to do with fighting and chopping off heads and for long weapons have this component:

  as does the word for ‘I.’ We are the grandchildren of Gwan the Warrior. Don’t let them take the fight out of our spirit and language. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I-warrior win the West and the Earth and the universe.

  “They have an enslavement wish for us, and they have a death wish, that we die. They use the movies to brainwash us into suicide. They started in on us with the first movies, and they’re still at it. D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, originally entitled The Chink and the Child: Lillian Gish as the pure White Child, Richard Barthelmess as the Chink, also called The Yellow Man. They were actually about the same age. The Child has a drunken father, so the Chink takes her into his house to protect her. One moonlit night, she seems to be asleep in a silk Chinese gown. He yearns for her. Ripped on opium, he looks at her out of stoned, taped eyes. His fingernailed hand quivers out for her, and barely touches a wisp of her gossamer hair, lacy and a-splay and golden in the moonbeams. The audience is in nasty anticipation of perversions, but before he can do some sexy oriental fetishy thing to her, his yellow hand stops. He kills himself. The Yellow Man lusts after a white girl, he has to kill himself—that’s a tradition they’ve made up for us. We have this suicide urge and suicide code. They don’t have to bloody their hands. Don’t ever kill yourself. You kill yourself, you play into their hands.”

  Nanci was saying something to Auntie Marleese. “Poor Wittman.” The two of them shook their heads. “He’s so oversensitive.”

  “I am not oversensitive,” he said. “You ought to be hurting too. You’re dead to be insensitive, which is what they wish for you. You think you’re looking good; you think you’re doing fine, they re-run another one of those movies at you. And the morning cartoons get you wearing that pigtail again. And Hop Sing chases after the white man, and begs, ‘Me be your slave. Please let me be your slave.’ John Wayne has a Hop Sing, and the Cartwrights have a Hop Sing. They name him Hop Sing on purpose, the name of the powerful tong, to put us down. Here’s another custom for orientals: Deranged by gratitude, an oriental has to have a master, and will tail after a white man until enslaved. In Vertigo, which could have been my favorite movie, James Stewart dives into the Bay and saves Kim Novak. He brings her back to his apartment that has a railing with the ideograms for joy. He lives within sight of Coit Tower. He tells Kim Novak, who’s wearing his clothes and drying her hair by the fire, ‘Chinese say if you rescue someone, you’re responsible for them forever.’ Think carefully; you’ve never heard a real Chinese say that; the ones in the movies and on t.v. say it over and over again. Every few days they show us a movie or a t.v. episode about us owing them, therefore thankfully doing their laundry and waiting on them, cooking and serving and washing and sewing for John Wayne and the Cartwright boys at the Ponderosa. The way Hop Sing shuffles, I want to hit him. Sock him an uppercut to straighten him up—stand up like a man.

  “I want to punch Charlie Chan too in his pregnant stomach that bellies out his white linen maternity suit. And he’s got a widow’s hump from bowing with humbleness. He has never caught a criminal by fistfighting him. And he doesn’t grab his client-in-distress and kiss her hard, pressing her boobs against his gun. He shuffles up to a clue and hunches over it, holding his own hand behind his back. He mulls in Martian over the clues. Martians from outer space and Chinese monks talk alike. Old futs talking fustian. Confucius say this. Confucius say tha
t. Too clean and too good for sex. The Good Mensch runs all over Setzuan in a dress, then in pants, and fools everybody because Chinese look so alike, we ourselves can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman. We’re de-balled and other-worldly, we don’t have the natural fucking urges of the average, that is, the white human being.

  “Next time you watch insomnia television, you can see their dreams about us. A racist movie is always running on some channel. Just the other night, I saw another one that kills off the Chinese guy for loving a white lady. I’m not spoiling it by giving away the ending. They always end like that. Barbara Stanwyck is the bride of a missionary, and she is interested in converting this guy with tape on his eyes named General Yin, played by Nils Asther. He talks to himself, rubbing his hands together, plotting, ‘I will convert a missionary.’ Which is racially and religiously very fucked up. Chinese don’t convert white people but vice versa. (Someday I’ll tell you my theory about how everyone is already a Buddhist, only they don’t know it. You’re all Buddhas whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not.) General Yin’s religion has to do with burning incense in braziers and torturing slavegirls. He keeps faking wise sayings about conquering the Earth. I liked him. He seemed intelligent. Whatever his cause, he’s lost. He’s fought his last battle, and lost his army and friends. He’s alone in his palace with Barbara Stanwyck and one last slavegirl, Anna May Wong, whom he has locked up and plans to kill slowly. The right couple would have been General Yin and Anna May, coming to an understanding of each other and living happily ever after. However, Barbara enters his throne/bedroom to plead with him for the life of the poor slavegirl. This is an emergency, and she didn’t have time to dress. She’s wearing her satin nightgown that flows like a bridal train down the stairs of the dais. He’s sitting enthroned, and she kneels at his feet to beg him. Her face comes up to his knee. She asks him for mercy while holding back tears, an actress’s trick that gets to the viewer more than her weeping outright. He denies her pleas. The tears well up and up, and spill. She lifts her face to his face, her lips trembling, eyes, cheeks, and lips moist, her head almost touching a knee of his spread legs, which are draped with the silk of his smoking robe. They don’t touch each other, but they tantalize and agonize nearer and nearer. Smoky snakes of incense entwine them. But she’s a woman of God. She says, crying softly, looking up, looking down, pulsating, daring to teach this general, ‘It’s good to do something when there is no advantage to you, not even gratitude.’ He has no morals; as we were taught from grammar school, life is cheap in Asia. Listening, he moves closer, she moves closer. Two-shots of their heads nearing. He slides past her lips, and gives her a hug. She allows it, her motivation being that she feels sorry for him. They hug, and they part. ‘I will think over what you have said,’ he says. She rushes back to her room, where she takes off her satin nightgown and puts on one of those spangly mermaid-skin evening dresses. She has to try another plea in a different outfit. The general could’ve looked down, as the camera does, and seen pretty far down her décolletage. She’s wet with tears again. This time he touches her. He wipes her eyes and cheeks with a silk hanky. More tears well and fall. He wipes her off again, and again. The audience is catching thrills. Are they going to make out? Are the tails of that silk handkerchief tickling her neck and the tops of her tits? Are his lips going to land on her lips in an inter-racial kiss? Will her heavy head come to rest in his crotch? And he peel off her mermaid skin and carry her to the canopy bed? Which has all along been a large part of the ravishing decor. Will its lush curtains open for them, and close, and two masculine feet and two feminine feet thrash out, his on top of hers, and their four feet kick and stiffen? I saw that once in a Hong Kong movie; he was a demigod and she was a mortal. The wedding bed was in a garden among the flowers and under the sky. The bed was like a chamber or a stage, you could live in there. The actor who played the demigod had Star Quality, not just good-looking-for-a-Chinese—a thin straight nose, eyes which beheld his lover’s ways so that from then on she’s wonderful, even when she’s alone, because watched from the sky whatever she does and wherever she goes. Whatever she asks, he answers, ‘Forever.’ But back to Barbara Stanwyck and General Yin. Are they going to get it on? Or neck or what? He picks up his teacup and drinks, and quietly leans back in his throne. And dies. He has poisoned himself before he can defile her. The name of that movie was The Bitter Tea of General Yin. They named him that to castrate us. General Yin instead of General Yang, get it? Again the chinaman made into a woman.”

  “No, no,” said Charley Bogard Shaw. “That’s Yen. The Bitter Tea of General Yen.”

  “Yen Shmen,” said Wittman. “That movie was a death-wish that Confucius and Lin Yutang take poison as co-operatively as Socrates.”

  Stepgrandfather Lincoln Fong raised his hand. You had to let the old guy talk, and once started, take over. “Yes, Ah Goong,” said good Wittman.

  Mr. Fong stood, waited for attention, and addressed each dignitary, “President Ah Sing”—that is, Grand Opening Ah Sing—“Mr. Chairman”—that’s Wittman—“ladies and gentlemen, Lin Tse Hsü was General Commissioner of Canton Against Narcotics. He stopped the opium from coming in for five months. He arrested two thousand Chinese dealers. He executed addicts. Nine out of ten Cantonese were addicted to opium. He wrote to Queen Victoria, held meetings with the British and American Tobacco Company, and led a raid on a factory, confiscated the shit, and detained the British manufacturers for seven weeks. There are paintings of Lin burying opium in trenches half a football field long and seventy-five feet wide and seven feet deep. The Queen fired Lin from his office, and sent her navy to enforce opium sales. Your grandmothers and grandfathers, using Cho Cho’s tactic, chained sixty junks across the Boca Tigris. Ten thousand of our Cantonese relatives fought with hoes, pitchforks, and two hundred new guns. They dumped opium into Canton Harbor like the Boston Tea Party. The British broke through into the Pearl River Delta and up the Yangtze to the rest of China. The famous joke of the nineteenth century: the West brought three lights—Fiat Lux, Standard Oil, and the British and American Tobacco Company. Why China went communist was to build an economy that does not run on opium.”

  “Thank you, Ah Goong,” said Wittman. “Let’s give Mr. Lincoln Fong a big hand.” PoPo’s old man took his bows and sat down. Please, don’t another competitive old fut get up, and another, orating through all the wars, war after war, won and lost. “I’m doing dope no more, no, sir. Lest our grandparents dumped Brit shit in vain. We don’t need dope because we’re naturally high. We come from a race of opium heads. Nine out of ten—wow!—of our immediate ancestors were stoned heads. We’re naturally hip. Trippiness is in our genes and blood. In fact, we need kung fu for coming down to Earth, and kung fu is all we need for flight. I’m quitting cigarettes too. Ah Goong, you have given me the political strength to take a stand against the American Tobacco Company.” Wittman turned his pack upside down, and strewed cigarettes amongst the hair.

  “The Delta they’re blowing us out of nowadays is the San Joaquin Delta. The footage of John Wayne beating his way through the hordes on Blood River, they shot on the San Joaquin River. They keep celebrating that they won the Opium Wars. All we do in the movies is die. I watch for you, Charley; your face appears, but before I can barely admire you, they’ve shot you dead. Our actors have careers of getting killed and playing dead bodies. You’re targets for James Bond to blow to pieces. Did you know that J.F.K.’s favorite reading is James Bond books? The books are worse than the movies. Have you read one? You should, and dig what the President gets off on. He has ideas for what you can do for your country, and empire. There are these ‘Chigroes’—what you get when you crossbreed a Chinese and a Negro—mule men with flat noses and cho cho lips and little eyes and yellow-black skin. They’re avid to be killer-slaves. ‘Chigroes.’ It makes my mouth sick to say that out loud. You actresses have got to refuse to play pearl divers in love with James Bond. You have to get together with Odd Job. That’s where t
he love story ought to be. That’s not funny. A face as big as Odd Job’s should star on the Cinerama screen for the audience to fall in love with, for girls to kiss, for the nation to cherish, for me to learn how to hold my face. Take seven pictures of a face, take twelve, twenty of any face, hold it up there, you will fall in love with it. Mako got his face up there, filling the screen with shades of oak and gold, this-color wongsky skin, and these eyes, and this nose, and his cho cho lips. What should be done with a face in close-up is to behold and adore it. They skin Mako alive. They peel him alive. He’s skinned by his fellow Chinese. Hearing their voices making vulture-like sounds of an inhuman language, and watching Mako’s screaming face, you imagine the skinning. You don’t see it on camera. Where’s my banana? Here, I’ll show you, like so—peeling yellow skin. A strip, another yellow strip. And Mako is screaming, ‘AAaaa! AaaAAagh! AAaaaaiyaaa!’ His solo screams fill the sound track. ‘AaaaaAAAaah! Aaaaaieeeeee!’ We’ve been watching his face directly, then we watch it through the crosshairs of Steve McQueen’s rifle. The audience wants to kill him so badly. We’re in an agony of mercy to shoot him out of his pain. Steve McQueen, to whom he has been a faithful sidekick, does him the favor. Bang! Here’s what they really think of their little buddy. Squanto and Tonto and Li’l Beaver. They have skinned and shot their loyal little tagalong buddy. Die, Hop Sing, Wing Ding, Chop Chop, Charlie Two Shoes, Tan Sing. Skin that cute li’l Sherpa. Like the banana he is! And no Pocahontas to save him. She’s busy sticking her neck out for John Smith.”