“In the bathroom, I drape my washcloth on the rim of the sink, flat and neat, and she puts hers on top of it. Mine never dries. It took me days to detect that the mildew I was smelling was coming off of me. The newspapers for reading on the john get wet and print the tiles black. The black in the shower stall is an alga, and a strain of red alga is growing too.
“On Wednesdays, she says, ‘Tonight’s garbage night.’ She knows the schedule. On her way to her car for work, she could pick up a bag of garbage and beat the scavengers to the cans. I’ve never believed the stereotype that Caucasians are dirty, but. Her place wasn’t a dumpyard when I first went over there. Cleaned up for visitors, I guess. Good thing I haven’t given up my own apartment until she learns better habits. The broom is missing. We need to hose the place out, or burn it down—a good fire—and start over. She isn’t house-proud. I won’t ask her to clean up. Our conversation has got to transcend garbage and laundry and cat shit. I don’t want to live for garbage night. Domesticity is fucked. I am in a state of fucked domesticity. I am trying for a marriage of convenience, which you would think would make life convenient at least.
“Each of us announces to the other which room he’s walking to. ‘Well, I think I’ll watch t.v. while I eat this t.v. dinner.’ ‘I’m going to read in the bathroom.’ We don’t want to lose track of each other’s whereabouts. Things sure don’t feel like they’re about to end up in sex again. Yet how am I going to leave her? I ought to go out the door with my laundrybag and my toothbrush, and keep walking.” He held his thumb and forefinger in a downward ring, as if holding his toothbrush by a suitcase-type handle.
“I had thought that one advantage of marrying a white chick would be that she’d say, ‘I love you,’ easily and often. It’s part of their culture. They say ‘I love you’ like ‘Hi, there,’ nothing to it, to any friend, neighbor, family member, husband. You know how verbal they are. No skin off their pointy noses to say ‘I love you.’ But all I’m getting is, ‘I’m not in love with you, Wittman.’
“The marriage is about two months old. I know what will happen next. I’m going to stay married to her; we’re going to grow old. At our deathbed scene, whoever’s not too gone to talk—she, I hope—will say at last, ‘I love you.’ I’ll hear her. (The ears are the last to go.) And I’ll think, Do you mean in love with me? Have you now or at any time in our life together ever loved me? Did you finally fall in love with me for a few moments during our long marriage? And since she has E.S.P. on me, she’ll answer, ‘Sure. Do you love me back? If you love me back, nod or blink.’ I’ll die suspicious and being suspected of loving and loving back. I’ll nod, I’ll blink. So I lied.
“Taña, if you’re listening in the wings, you’re free to leave if you want to leave me. But I’ll always love you unromantically. I’ll clean up the place, I get the hint. You don’t have to be the housewife. I’ll do one-half of the housewife stuff. But you can’t call me your wife. You don’t have to be the wife either. See how much I love you? Unromantically but.”
Out of all that mess of talk, people heard “I love you” and “I’ll always love you” and that about dying and still loving after a lifelong marriage. They took Wittman to mean that he was announcing his marriage to Taña, and doing so with a new clever wedding ritual of his own making. His community and family applauded. They congratulated him. They pushed and pulled the shy bride on stage, and shot pictures of her and of the couple. They hugged the groom, and kissed the bride. They teased them into kissing each other. More cameras flashed and popped. They threw rice. They congratulated their parents and grandparents. Their parents congratulated one another. Friends were carrying tables of food through the doors, and spreading a cast party and wedding banquet. And more firecrackers went off. And champagne corks popped. To Wittman and Taña—long life, happy marriage, many children. Taña and Wittman Ah Sing were stars in a lavish, generous wedding celebration. To drums and horns, the dragons and lions were dancing again, a bunny-hopping conga line that danced out of the house and into the street. Wittman’s community was blessing him, whether he liked it or not.
And he was having a good time. He still had choices of action, more maybe. If he wanted to drop out and hide out, he had heard of the tunnel that goes under a hill between the old Army Presidio and the Marina for a subway never built. And somewhere in Fresno, there’s an underground garden of fifty rooms. And he himself had been beneath the Merced Theater in Los Angeles. He had memories of dug-out dressing rooms that were part of an underground city where Chinese Americans lived and did business after the L.A. Massacre, nineteen killed. He and other draft dodgers could hide in such places until the war was over. But better yet, now that he had Taña—she could be the paper-wife escort who will run him across the U.S.-Canada border at Niagara Falls. He had made up his mind: he will not go to Viet Nam or to any war. He had staged the War of the Three Kingdoms as heroically as he could, which made him start to understand: The three brothers and Cho Cho were masters of war; they had worked out strategies and justifications for war so brilliantly that their policies and their tactics are used today, even by governments with nuclear-powered weapons. And they lost. The clanging and banging fooled us, but now we know—they lost. Studying the mightiest war epic of all time, Wittman changed—beeen!—into a pacifist. Dear American monkey, don’t be afraid. Here, let us tweak your ear, and kiss your other ear.
THANKS To friends whose stories inspire my stories:
EARLL KINGSTON for the railroad reader of the West, the man with the addictive sperm, the Osaka Stock Exchange, and more.
JAMES HONG for his role in The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
JOHN CRONIN for the man whose Dear John letter falls out of the P.D.R.
JAMES D. HOUSTON for the fool-for-literature’s reading list from West Coast Fiction, Bantam Books, Inc., 1979.
MARGARET MITCHELL DUKORE for “I’d rather be dead than boring,” from A Novel Called Heritage, Simon and Schuster, 1982.
SUSIE QUINN GANIGAN and DUSTY on the train.
BRITT PYLAND for his arrangements of postcards at the airport.
VICTORIA NELSON for her recall of The Saragossa Manuscript.
STEPHEN SUMIDA for the four-act play, which is his novel-in-progress about being lost in the archipelago and the return of the fox, and for his luaus.
PHYLLIS N. THOMPSON for the wisdom about vows from “Blue Flowers,” a poem in The Ghosts of Who We Were, University of Illinois Press, 1986.
L. LEWIS STOUT for the Electric Cassandra from Trolling in America, a screenplay.
AURORA PUTSY HONG for how to tell left from right.
GARY AND MOLLY MCCLURG WONG for Gavino McWong.
JACK CHEN for his Pear Garden in the West.
ROBERT WINKLEY for his memory of the Sun Yat Sen Hallowe’en tradition.
JACK PRESLEY for his contribution to R.N.A.-D.N.A.
RICHARD DI GRAZIA for “the marriage of Death and Fun” from “The Witness,” a poem, and for fire socks.
DENIS KELLY for his dancing bouillon cube.
RHODA FEINBERG for the papier-mâché missiles.
JOHN VECLIA for asking after that land where words are pictures and have tones.
To the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the M. Thelma McAndless Distinguished Professor Chair in the Humanities at Eastern Michigan University for generous financial support.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of two earlier books: The Woman Warrior—Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction, and China Men, winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction. Tripmaster Monkey—His Fake Book is her first novel. She lives in Oakland, California, and is married to Earll Kingston, an actor; they have a son, Joseph Kingston, a musician.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Portions of this work have been previously published in Caliban, Conjunctions, Sulfur, Witness, and ZYZZYVA.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the follow
ing for permission to reprint previously published material:
Audre Mae Music: Excerpt from “Young Man” from “Back Country Suite,” by Mose Allison. Copyright © 1959 by Jazz Editions, Inc., renewed 1987 by Audre Mae Music. Used by permission.
Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.: Excerpts from “Jet Song,” “America,” “Maria,” and “One Hand, One Heart” from “West Side Story,” lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and music by Leonard Bernstein. Copyright © 1957 by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim; copyright renewed. Jalni Publications, Inc., Publisher; Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., Sole Agent. Reprinted by permission.
City Lights: Excerpts from a poem by Peter Orlovsky from Selected Poems by Peter Orlovsky. Copyright © 1978 by Peter Orlovsky. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.
Columbia Pictures Publications and International Music Publications: Excerpt from “Follow the Yellow Brick Road,” music by Harold Arlen and words by E. Y. Harburg. Copyright 1938, 1939 (renewed 1966, 1967) by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. Rights assigned to SBK Catalogue Partnership. All rights throughout the world controlled and administered by SBK Feist Catalog Inc. International copyright secured. Made in U.S.A. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Feinman & Krasilovsky, P.C.: Excerpts from “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Men That Don’t Fit In,” from The Complete Poems of Robert Service. Copyright 1907 by Dodd, Mead and Company. Reprinted by permission of The Estate of Robert Service.
Music Sales Corporation and World Music, Inc.: Excerpt from “We’ll Meet Again,” by Ross Parket and Hughie Charles. Copyright 1939 for all countries by the Irwin Dash Music Co., Ltd. Publication rights for U.S. and Canada assigned 1940 to Dash Connelly, Inc. Publication rights for U.S. and Canada assigned 1943 to World Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. Used by permission.
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: Excerpts from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by M. D. Herter Norton. Copyright 1949 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright renewed 1977 by M. D. Herter Norton. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Rockaway Music Corp.: Excerpt from “Don’t Get Scared,” music by Stan Getz and lyrics by Jon Hendricks. Class E copyright # EU758352. Reprinted by permission of Rockaway Music Corp.
Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. and MCA Music Publishing: Excerpt from “P. S. I Love You,” words by Johnny Mercer and music by Gordon Jenkins. Copyright 1934 by LaSalle Music Publishers, Inc. Copyright renewed. Copyright © 1961 by WB Music Corp. & MCA Music Publishing, A Division of MCA Inc., New York, NY 10019. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The Welk Music Group: Excerpt from “I Won’t Dance,” music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Dorothy Fields, Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach, and Jimmy McHugh. Copyright 1935 by T. B. Harms Company (c/o The Welk Music Group, Santa Monica, CA 90401). Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Williamson Music: Excepts from “Oklahoma!” and “People Will Say We’re in Love,” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright 1943 by Williamson Music Co. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International) Page 46
