Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

Wittman held the banana in his fist so the peelings flapped out like two arms and two wings. “Mako got nominated Best Supporting Actor for his role as the banana. He didn’t win the Oscar but. None of us gets an Oscar except James Wong Howe—for the cinematography on Hud. You guys have got to get your asses out from behind the camera. You’re the most all-around talents in Hollywood, but they don’t give Oscars for what you do best. There ought to be an Oscar for the One Actor Best at Playing a Horde. You run around and around the camera and back and forth across the set. Clutch guts, twitch, spazz out—the bullets hit here and here—fall like trip-wire ankles, roll downhill, dead with face up to the sky and camera. The director sends you back in there for the second-wave attack. ‘I was killed already in the last scene,’ says the conscientious supernumerary. ‘That’s all right,’ says the director: ‘Nobody can tell you apart.’ I accept this Oscar for Most Reincarnations.” Again and again, we’re shot, stabbed, kicked, socked, skinned, machine-gunned, blown up. But not kissed. Nancy Kwan and France Nuyen and Nobu McCarthy kiss white boys. The likes of you and me are unstomachable. The only hands we get to hold are our own up our sleeves. Charlie Chan doesn’t kiss And Keye Luke doesn’t kiss. And Richard Look doesn’t kiss. We’ve got to kiss and fuck and breed in the streets.”

  Poor Wittman Ah Sing, Ah Star. It’s going to get worse. He could spend the rest of his life advocating our stardom. When the Planet of the Apes series begins, the Asian American actors will say, “Here’s our chance. You can look like anything under those ape costumes.” But the roles will go to those who have to wear brown contact lenses. Pat Suzuki, after singing so well in Flower Drum Song, will play an ape-girl in Skullduggery; she roots in the dirt and grunts and squeals, and points, jumping up and down. And John Lone will play the title role in Iceman, a grunting, gesturing Neanderthal; his forehead is built up, his jaw juts prognathously, you won’t recognize a Chinese-American of any kind under there. And when he gets to show his face in Year of the Dragon, John Lone, who has the most classic face amongst us, will have to have it broken on camera, and his eyes beaten shut. The last third of the movie his expressions are indecipherably covered with blood. He begs to be killed, and his co-star cradles his head, then point-blank shoots it off. The U.S. will lose the war in Viet Nam; then the Asian faces large on the screen will be shot, blown up, decapitated, bloodied, mutilated. No more tasteful off-camera deaths. We’re going to have a President who has favorite movies rather than favorite books. The British actor who will bring back Fu Manchu claims not to be a racist because he doles money to the boat people. The actress who plays the dragon lady says that if you people picketing the set want movies from your p.o.v., “make your own movies.” She doesn’t understand that her movies are our movies, and that those horde-like picketers are her fellow SAG members.

  “Thank you,” said Wittman, eating the banana, no waste. “You feed the artist—thank you.” He dropped the peel among the hair and cigarettes. “If there were Oscars for Improvisation and for Directing Oneself, you guys would sweep them. You made four hundred films about some kind of Chinese, whose roles were barely scripted. Maydene Lam and Richard Loo and Keye Luke, all of you, you sized up the scene, and invented the dialogue with appropriate dialects and business. You keep giving your name to the character you’re playing. Whenever the name on the left in the credits is the same as the name on the right, you aren’t getting credit for acting. You just be the oriental you are. They think you behave oriental without having to act. ‘Just say something Chinese,’ says the director, throwing you into the movie. ‘Do something Chinese.’

  “Which gives me an idea. You have the set-up to do some sabotage. Go ahead, take whatever stereotype part. They ask you to do Chinese shtick, make free to say whatever you want. True things. Pass messages. ‘Eat shit, James Bond. Kiss my yellow ass.’ ‘Fuck off, John Wayne. I love Joang Fu.’ ‘Ban the Bomb.’ ‘C.I.A. out of Southeast Asia.’ Gwan’s grandchildren—take over the movies.

  “And say who we are. You say our name enough, make them stop asking, ‘Are you Chinese or Japanese?’ That is a straightman’s line, asking for it. Where’s our knockout comeback putdown punchline? Who are we? Where’s our name that shows that we aren’t from anywhere but America? We’re so out of it. It’s our fault they call us gook and chinky chinaman. We’ve been here all this time, before Columbus, and haven’t named ourselves. Look at the Blacks beautifully defining themselves. ‘Black’ is perfect. But we can’t be ‘Yellows.’ ‘Me? I’m Yellow.’ ‘I’m a Gold. We’re Golds.’ Nah, too evocative of tight-fisted Chang. Red’s our color. But the red-hot communists have appropriated red. Even Fruit of Islam, though too fruity like Fruit of the Loom, is catchier than anything we’ve got. The image of a black bulge in the jockey shorts scares the daylights out of the ofay. We want a name like that, not some anthropological sociological name. American of Chinese extraction—bucktoof ethnick. A.J.A. is good—sharp, accurate, symmetrical. The long version sounds good too. Americans of Japanese Ancestry. Makes up for ‘jap.’ And the emphasis is right—‘American,’ the noun in front, and ‘Japanese,’ an adjective, behind. They had the advantage of Relocation Camp to make them think themselves up a name. We don’t have like ‘Americans of Chinese Ancestry.’ Like ‘A.C.A.’ We are not named, and we’re disappearing already. We want a name we can take out in the street and on any occasion. We can’t go by what we call ourselves when we’re among ourselves. Chinese and Hans and Tangs are other people of other times and another place. We can’t go to the passport office and say, ‘I’m a Han Ngun,’ or ‘I’m a Tang Ngun.’ I’ll bet that Tang Ngun are gone anymore even from that red Asiatic country on the opposite side of the planet. Try telling the census taker, ‘I’m a Good Native Papers Boy.’

  “For a moment a hundred years ago, we were China Men. After all, the other people in the new world were Englishmen and Frenchmen and Dutchmen. But they changed themselves into Americans, and wouldn’t let us change into Americans. And they slurred ‘China Man.’ ‘Chinaman,’ they said dactylically. One of the actresses who is giving me a bad time—I’m forsaking her—said, ‘Is China Man like china doll? Like fragile?’ Here I’m trying to give us a Sierra-climbing name, a tree-riding name, a train-building name, and she said, ‘You’re fragile like china?’ She’s a Mississippi Delta Chinese, and says ‘fragile’ like ‘honey chile.’ ‘China Man’ makes echoes of another word.

  “Once and for all: I am not oriental. An oriental is antipodal. I am a human being standing right here on land which I belong to and which belongs to me. I am not an oriental antipode.

  “Without a born-and-belong-in-the-U.S.A. name, they can’t praise us correctly. There’s a favorable review here of our ‘Sino-American’ theater. When the U.S. doesn’t recognize a foreign communist country, that’s Sino-American. There is no such person as a Sino-American.”

  “They used to call us Celestials,” said PoPo, “because at one time they glorified us so.”

  “But you never called yourself a Celestial, did you?” said Wittman. “They called you Celestial hoping that you’d go to heaven rather than stay in America. You called yourselves Wah Q and Gum Sahn Hock and Gum Sahn How.”

  PoPo said, “Gum Sahn Po. Gum Sahn Lo Po Nigh. Sahm Yup Po. Say Yup Po.” The old fut names for Gold Mountain Ladies made people laugh.

  Wittman said, “Sojourners no more but. Immigration got fooled already. You not be Overseas Chinese. You be here. You’re here to stay. I am deeply, indigenously here. And my mother and father are indigenous, and most of my grandparents and great-grandparents, indigenous. Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden State. Which was a name our ancestors made up to counteract those racists, the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West. We want a name somewhat like that but shorter and more than California, the entire U.S.A.—ours.

  “They get us so wrong. ‘Sun Ch’üan, the king of Wu, played by an American.…’ Of course, he’s an American. As opposed to what? We’re all of us Americans here. Why single out the wh
ite guy? How come I didn’t get ‘an American’ after my name? How come no ‘American’ in apposition with my parents and my grandma? An all-American cast here. No un-American activity going on. Not us.

  “When I hear you call yourselves ‘Chinese,’ I take you to mean American-understood, but too lazy to say it. You do mean ‘Chinese’ as short for ‘Chinese-American,’ don’t you? We mustn’t call ourselves ‘Chinese’ among those who are ready to send us back to where they think we came from. But ‘Chinese-American’ takes too long. Nobody says or hears past the first part. And ‘Chinese-American’ is inaccurate—as if we could have two countries. We need to take the hyphen out—‘Chinese American.’ ‘American,’ the noun, and ‘Chinese,’ the adjective. From now on: ‘Chinese Americans.’ However. Not okay yet. ‘Chinese hyphen American’ sounds exactly the same as ‘Chinese no hyphen American.’ No revolution takes place in the mouth or in the ear.

  “I’ve got to tell you about this experiment I volunteered for in college. I answered an ad for ‘Chinese-Americans’ to take a test for fifty bucks an hour, more per hour than I’ve ever made—but hazard pay. So we Chinese-hyphenated-schizoid-dichotomous-Americans were gathered in this lab, which was a classroom. The shrink or lab assistant asked us to fold a piece of paper in half and write ‘Chinese’ at the top of one half and ‘American’ at the top of the other. Then he read off a list of words. Like ‘Daring.’ ‘Reticent.’ ‘Laughter.’ ‘Fearful.’ ‘Easygoing.’ ‘Conscientious.’ ‘Direct.’ ‘Devious.’ ‘Affectionate.’ ‘Standoffish.’ ‘Adventurous.’ ‘Cautious.’ ‘Insouciant.’ ‘Painstaking.’ ‘Open.’ ‘Closed.’ ‘Generous.’ ‘Austere.’ ‘Expressive.’ ‘Inexpressive.’ ‘Playful.’ ‘Studious.’ ‘Athletic’ ‘Industrious.’ ‘Extroverted.’ ‘Introverted.’ ‘Subtle.’ ‘Outgoing.’ We were to write each word either in the left-hand column or the right-hand column. I should have torn up my paper, and other people’s papers, stopped the test. But I went along. Working from the inside, I gave the Chinese side ‘Daring’ and ‘Laughter’ and ‘Spontaneous’ and ‘Easygoing,’ some Star Quality items. But my bold answers were deviated away in the standard deviation. The American side got all the fun traits. It’s scientifically factual truth now—I have a stripe down my back. Here, let me take off my shirt. Check out the yellow side, and the American side. I’m not the same after they experimented on me. I have aftereffects—acid flashbacks. I got imprinted. They treated me no better than any lab animal, who doesn’t get the journals nor invited to the conferences that announce the findings. I happened to pick up the weekly science section of the newspaper, and saw a double-decker headline: ‘Oriental Frosh Stay Virgins Longest / Caucasian Boys Get Most Sex Soonest.’ When I thought they were testing my smarts, élan vital and spelling, they were checking out my virginity. There was this other test where they squeezed my Achilles tendons with calipers. I was to rate the pain from discomfort to unbearable, which level I never reached. I thought it was a pain tolerance test, but maybe they were testing for inscrutability. I’m not making this up. I tell you, there’s a lot of Nazi shit going on in the laboratories. Don’t fall into their castrating hands. Even if you don’t go off into longterm or side effects physically or chemically, you’re fucked philosophically. I’m never going to know what my straight head would have thought unaltered. I’m off, like the roosters you hear crow any time of day or night that you walk past the labs. No more lab gigs.

  “I am this tall. I didn’t get this tall by being experimented on by scientists trying to find the secret of height. They’re looking for a time hormone in the pituitary gland; maybe the chronons are up there. Speeding them up (or slowing them down) may fool the body into growing more. They’re taking unused time from the brains of cadavers and injecting it into the brains of short little orientals. You Sansei kids, stop going to height doctors to fuck with your hypothalamus. How many inches anyway between short and tall? Two. Three. Not many. The price of size—your mind. Don’t be a generation of height freaks.

  “It has to do with looks, doesn’t it? They use ‘American’ interchangeably with ‘white.’ The clean-cut all-American look. This hairless body—I mean, this chest is unhairy; plenty hairy elsewhere—is cleaner than most. I bathe, I dress up; all I get is soo mun and sah chun.

  “Which is not translated ‘Star Quality.’ Do you see it? Is my Star Quality showing nakedly yet? I’ve been trying to acquire it through education, attitude, right words, right work. Don’t trust the movies, that stars are born. In a democracy, Star Quality can be achieved. And it can be conferred; I can love anybody. I’m learning to kiss everyone equally. Do you want to learn too? There’s this theater game we play for warming up. Everybody goes around the circle and kisses everybody else. I judge who gets the title—Best Kisser in All the Land. The kissing contest is too good to keep backstage. Ladies and gentlemen, do I have some volunteers for free kisses? Step right up. That beautiful girl over there, Nanci, holds the title of Best Kisser and all the rights, duties, obligations, and privileges pertaining thereto. She’ll participate. Now do I have some volunteers? Here’s your chance. Come on up and take the championship away from her. Old futs too, come on, come on. I’ll hug and kiss you myself. Nah, nah, nah, just kidding, la. I don’t dig that shit either. But I challenge you old futs. You’ve been scolding me too much for the flagrancies of hugging and kissing going on in this play. You need to be taught a lesson, accusing me of affection. I’m going to unbrainwash you from believing anymore that we’re a people who don’t kiss and don’t hug.”

  Led by PoPo, quite a few old futs stepped right on up. Nanci and Taña volunteered, the show-offs, and Sunny and Lance, good at parties, fielded a contingent—“We’re game.”—including Caucasians who had tuned out during the racial business.

  To help everybody over shyness, Wittman went first. He kissed his wife, and got ready to kiss this girl he’d had a crush on, an obsession for, wanted but can’t have, quite a few girls of the unattainable type, and a girl that was always making him puzzle over her physicality, and his mother, and his grandmother. Test his rule: Kiss the one you love for as many seconds—five six seven eight—as you kiss anyone you can’t stand, an ugly girl the same hardness you kiss a pretty one. Equality in food, jobs, and amount of loving. He touched a rough complexion, pores all wrecked by too much stage make-up, hot lights and late hours, and liked the feel of zits on his fingertips. A man of principle kisses everybody as though they’re the same beautiful. Everybody was getting the same kiss off of him. This girl he was trying to forget put her hand on his face and her other hand on his naked, feeling chest, maneuvering. Is this going to be a cheek smack, or are we going to land on the lips? They kissed mouth to mouth, she turning aside, imperceptible to onlookers but felt by him, her move away from him. All he had to do was prolong that kiss, pull her to him for half a second too long, and it would slide into another meaning. He put his hands on her waist, and tickled her. He pounced on the next girl, and tickled her in the armpits. And somebody ambushed him from behind, Taña tickling him. Wittman laughed. Whereby his community shouted out a title for him—Most Laughable.

  To cheers and comments, each man went around and kissed each of the ladies, and each lady kissed all the men. Because everybody excelled at kissing, Wittman gave all of them titles—Most Juicy Kisser, Most Sincere, Best Technique, Most Succulent, Most Experienced, Most Passionate, Mr. and Miss Congeniality, Most Promising, Most Style, Coolest, Hottest, the One Who Causes the Most Dreams, Most Motherly (not won by Ruby Long Legs), Most Sisterly, Most Brotherly, Most Troublemaker, Most Suave, Most Dangerous. Those whom Wittman didn’t personally kiss, he dubbed-thee by observation.

  So these champion kissers were practicing a custom of a country they were intuiting. If ever it happens that the Government lets us take vacations to China, we’re going to find: everywhere friends and relatives who will embrace us in welcome. Everywhere demonstrative customs of affection—holding hands, sitting in laps, pats and strokes on heads and backs, ar
ms around waists, fingers and cheeks touching cheeks. It has to be that way. Chinese live crowded, don’t have enough chairs, or space on the sofa, so sit close and all sleep together in the one bed at inns and at home. In a land where words are pictures and have tones, there’s music everywhere all the time, and a party going on. Whenever they need affection during the labor of the day or the insomnia of the night, why, they betake themselves publicly, and the crowds receive them with camaraderie and food. The whole country—on all its streets—is an outdoor café. Commadres and compadres are always around for some talk, a card game, and a midnight snack. A billion communalists eating and discussing. They’re never lonely. Men are brothers holding hands, and women hold hands, and mothers and fathers kiss children. We see evidence of their practices here: The day people from that country step off the boat, or off the plane, they walk up and down Grant Avenue holding hands with one another, or arm in arm, or one’s arm around the other’s neck and the other’s arm around the waist, walking and talking close face-to-face. You have to look fast. The next time you see them, they’re walking apart. They’ve learned not to go about so queer. They have come to a lonely country, where men get killed for holding hands. Well, let them start a new country where such opposite creatures as a man and a woman might go about the streets holding each other’s hand in friendship.

  Given heart by a loving community, Wittman confided to them his marriage. “While off guard, I got married, she married me. I have a wife to support. I’m having a bad time of it. I’ve been looking for a job. The other day I was at an interview, and trying not to smoke, I set my socks on fire. I had my foot over my knee like this. I was rubbing up the fuzz on my new socks. Gotta match? My face and your ass. I mean your ass and my face. I mean, nevermind. The next thing I knew, I’d lit my match on the bottom of my shoe, and touched it to my sock, like so. Whoosh. Flambé. Flaming foot of fire. Flash fire.” As he talked, Wittman did what he was saying, and for a moment looked like Prince Na Zhen, the malicious baby, who runs on wheels of fire. Fire rushed around his ankle and leg. The kids yelled for an encore. The mothers yelled at him for burning himself. “I’m all right. It doesn’t hurt. I’m okay. See? My ankle’s fine. Flame out so fast, it didn’t burn through. I didn’t feel a thing. The interviewer probably thought he was seeing things. No, I can’t do fire socks again. You can only do it once per sock. This other sock I fired up already. I didn’t get the job.