Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

by Maxine Hong Kingston

Overview

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Driven by his dream to write and stage an epic stage production of interwoven Chinese novelsWittman Ah Sing, a Chinese-American hippie in the late ’60s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679727897
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/10/1990
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	783,634
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.76(d)

About the Author

Maxine Hong Kingston is the daughter of Chinese immigrants who operated a gambling house in the 1940s, when Maxine was born, and then a laundry where Kingston and her brothers and sisters toiled long hours. Kingston graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1962 from the University of California at Berkeley, and, in the same year, married actor Earll Kingston, whom she had met in an English course. The couple has one son, Joseph, who was born in 1963. They were active in antiwar activities in Berkeley, but in 1967 the Kingstons headed for Japan to escape the increasing violence and drugs of the antiwar movement. They settled instead in Hawai‘i, where Kingston took various teaching posts. They returned to California seventeen years later, and Kingston resumed teaching writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

While in Hawai‘i, Kingston wrote her first two books. The Woman Warrior, her first book, was published in 1976 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award, making her a literary celebrity at age thirty-six. Her second book, China Men, earned the National Book Award. Still today, both books are widely taught in literature and other classes. Kingston has earned additional awards, including the PEN West Award for Fiction for Tripmaster Monkey, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the National Humanities Medal, which was conferred by President Clinton, as well as the title “Living Treasure of Hawai‘i” bestowed by a Honolulu Buddhist church. Her most recent books include a collection of essays, Hawai‘i One Summer, and latest novel, The Fifth Book of Peace. Kingston is currently Senior Lecturer Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley.

Editorial Reviews

A fifth-generation Californian feels alien to both his Chinese heritage and the American culture that stereotypes him and others of his race . ``The long-awaited novel by the author of China Men and The Woman Warrior is outrageously clever, surrealistically imaginative, mordantly witty and funny--in spots. It is also densely overwritten and tedious,'' argued PW . (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

After graduating from Berkeley in English literature, Wittman Ah Sing searches for his niche in the Bay Area of the 1960s. He is a typical product of this time--pot-smoking, free-loving, draft-dodging, unemployed, anti-big business, long-haired, and sandal-shod. But he is also a Chinese-American fighting Chinese stereotypes--and therein lies the book's strength. Unfortunately, the book's great weakness is Wittman Ah Sing himself--a hippie stereotype difficult to feel for because he does not seem real, certainly less real than some of the characters surrounding him. This first novel by the author of The Woman Warrior is thus not entirely successful, but Kingston's wide popularity makes it an essential purchase for most libraries.-- Kitty Chen Dean, Nassau Coll., Garden City, N.Y.

Library Journal