The reason he had the radio on was that whenever he stopped typing, he heard someone else nearby tapping, tapping at a typewriter, typing through the night. Yes, it was there, steady but not mechanical. … An intelligence was coming up with words. Someone else, not a poet with a pencil or fountain pen but a workhouse big-novel writer, was staying up, probably done composing already and typing out fair copy. It should be a companionable noise, a jazz challenge to which he could blow out the window his answering jazz. But, no, it's an expensive electric machine-gun typewriter aiming at him, gunning for him, to knock him off in competition.

Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

1. CONSTRUCTING ETHNIC HEROISM: THE KINGSTON-CHIN DEBATE

It is no accident that when Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, sits up all night to begin his first play, he is haunted by the tapping of a rival's typewriter. His author, Maxine Hong Kingston, has responded to over a decade of hostile criticism by creating Wittman in the image of her harshest critic, Frank Chin. Like Chin, Wittman Ah Sing is a Chinese American playwright, idealistic and enraged over racism, with the persona of an angry young man who can be exasperating—especially in his sexism—but is fundamentally decent. Though this portrait could be considered a personal attack, it is best understood as providing a mediating voice by which Kingston expresses her own anger over American racism. This anger, however, is only one of several concerns that Kingston shares with Chin and explores throughout Tripmaster Monkey.

This essay will read Kingston's novel Tripmaster Monkey in terms of an ongoing debate between Kingston and Frank Chin. This debate, about the proper place of Chinese texts in the construction of an emerging Chinese American literature, has been central to Asian American literary studies.¹ It is also crucial to Asian American literature, whose survival and growth depend in part on the writers' ability to inscribe an ethnic consciousness that is distinct from Asian and Euro-American cultures, yet not isolated from them. Also at stake is the question of whether any particular body of literary texts can reasonably be cited as definitive of an ethnic group's consciousness; the selection and significance of particular Chinese texts, which Chin has claimed as definitive of Chinese American ethnic consciousness; his claim that some texts, versions, and readings are “real” while others are “fake”; and, most importantly, who is authorized to determine these issues. In short, I read Tripmaster Monkey as a mediation on the nature of the Chinese “heroic tradition,” as redefined by the two authors, and its relation to Kingston's own authority as a Chinese American woman writer.

Kingston employs various devices to situate Tripmaster Monkey as an American novel set in Berkeley, California, in the sixties, including references to Vietnam, drug culture, local sites, and local writers. Crammed with allusions to Western cultural markers such as James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke, Walt Whitman, the Beats, and American pop culture from vaudeville to West Side Story, the novel also incorporates numerous stories from the sixteenth-century Chinese classics Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, and The Journey to the West. In doing so, Kingston engages sympathetically but skeptically with Frank Chin's construction of a Chinese “heroic tradition,” which emphasizes martial heroism and a masculine code of honor.

This “heroic tradition” is best understood as Frank Chin's response to the anti-Asian racism that he and others find rampant in mainstream American culture. In several essays, some co-signed by friends who have co-edited Asian American anthologies with him （Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong）, Chin has explored the effects of this racism on the Asian American community, focusing especially on cultural denigrations of Asian masculinity.² Chin's most influential argument has been that Asian American consciousness and literary production have been hampered by mainstream stereotypes of Asian American as docile, effeminate, and exotic. In a typical passage of the 1970s, Chin bitterly rejects the conditions of whites' “racist love” for Asian Americans:

[I]t is clear that our acceptability, the affection and renown we supposedly enjoy, is not based on any actual achievements or contributions we have made, but on what we have not done. We have not been black. We have not caused trouble. We have not been men.

The Asian culture we are supposedly preserving is uniquely without masculinity; we are characterized as lacking daring, originality, aggressiveness, assertiveness, vitality, and living art and culture. What art and culture we do enjoy is passive in the popular mind—we don't practice it, we preserve it and are sustained by it. And our lack of cultural achievement and expression in America is explained by the fact that we are sustaining a foreign culture …

[O]ur supposed Asian identity is used to exclude us from American culture, and is imposed upon us as a substitute for participation in American culture … （“Backtalk” 556）

While Chin's initial desire to claim American masculinity by rejecting Chinese culture outright is understandable, it contrasts both with Kingston's early, enduring interest in adapting Chinese sources and with Chin's own insistence, starting in 1985, on defining Chinese American cultural identity through heroic Chinese narratives. That year, Chin argued that the rebels and outlaws of certain Chinese classics, handed down through popular forms, were appropriate heroes for modern Asian Americans, especially males. In contrast to Kingston, whose response to cultural exclusion has generally been to recast cultural narratives to be more inclusive, Chin's impulse has been more directly confrontational. Both his critical and his creative work depict American culture as a site of ideological warfare, in which Chinese American and other Asian American communities are being culturally erased. （See, for instance, Chin's novel Donald Duk.） In Chin's words, the resulting choice for Asian American writers is one between “personal integrity” and “historical extinction.” While not all of Chin's claims have been accepted, the existence and effects of anti-Asian racism have been widely discussed and have been framing assumptions for numerous studies, both cultural and material;³ Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey is both a continuation of her own work and another such study. By incorporating a steady analysis of racial dynamics in American culture, and revisiting the Chinese classics, Kingston admits that Chin's desire to inscribe a Chinese American consciousness in American literature, and to expose and counteract demeaning stereotypes of Asian men, also accords with her own goals; but in terms of the Chinese classics, she substantially alters his paradigms and questions his assumptions.

Kingston's novel challenges Chin's readings of heroic texts on two levels. In terms of content, she questions his idealization of this tradition's hypermasculine, martial ethos, the seething “ethic of private revenge.” In terms of Chin's model for literary interpretation, she questions his tendency to portray these Chinese texts as completed verbal icons of Chinese culture and character whose meaning is self-evident; instead, she dramatizes an interactive reading strategy that emphasizes the texts' collaboration with various communities of readers. To borrow Roland Barthes' terms, she favors “writerly” texts, which readers help to “write,” over “readerly” texts, which readers passively consume in traditional “readerly” fashion （Barthes 4）.

Kingston's emphasis on the indeterminate, evolving nature of texts is at the heart of Chin's quarrel with her approach to Chinese myths. Throughout her career, she has challenged the authority of both Chinese and American traditions by inscribing Chinese, American, and European narratives into her work, yet transforming and subverting them in ways that have been, or could be, described in terms of feminist revision or postmodern parody.⁴ Kingston's texts have emphasized the labor of interpreting cultural narratives that may be oppressive, rather than accepting those narratives as authoritative fables whose meaning is self-evident. Her suspicion of dogmatic and prescriptive textual readings, and her postmodernist subversions of such readings, are consistent with her suspicion of institutionalized authority and her awareness of the individual subject's capacity to internalize that authority. By contrast, Frank Chin's polemical essays and some of his fiction and drama tend to construct repressive authority and agency as something monolithic and removed from himself; just as he refuses to scrutinize the more oppressive actions of his Chinese heroes, he tends to deny that he himself might be complicit in the system he attacks, or in any other system of oppression. Whenever he rhetorically positions himself as the sole arbiter of truth, he signals that authority itself is not oppressive to him as long as it is in the right few hands. For Kingston, by contrast, the very ideas of authority and cultural authenticity are suspect.

Chin's strongest disagreement with Kingston's work centers around her liberal adaptations of well-known Chinese stories, which the two writers have referred to as “myths,” to elucidate Chinese American experience. Kingston, best known for her provocative feminist revision of the woman warrior “myth,” has been criticized by Chin for her view of Chinese myths as folklore that has been forgotten, changed, or improvised to comment on new circumstances. Articulating an assumption central to his earlier work, Chin wrote in 1990, “Myths are, by nature, immutable and unchanging because they are deeply ingrained in the cultural memory, or they are not myths. New experience breeds new history, new art, and new fiction. The new experience of the Anglo-Saxon in America did not result in confusing Homer with Joan of Arc but in new stories …” （“Come All …” 29）. He has accused Kingston, and others who follow her example of postmodern revisionism, of colluding with white racist stereotypes by portraying the Chinese as less literate and more forgetful of their ancestral culture than other immigrant groups. For him, to tamper with Chinese myth, a component of “true” Chinese American culture, is to invent a “fake” Chinese American culture that will sell better to a racist mainstream public.⁵

Kingston, by contrast, is essentially a writer of postmodern parody, in the terms defined by Linda Hutcheon （The Politics of Postmodernism 93–177）; in freely improvising variations on themes taken from Chinese or other texts, she both celebrates and criticizes her originals. On the whole, she seeks to vest authority in individual readers or communities of readers. While Chinese and other narratives are valuable to her, she sees the texts themselves as open-ended sketches, like the themes and chord progressions in the “fake book” that a musician uses as a basis for improvised performances, or the story outlines offered by the traditional promptbooks of Chinese storytellers. She herself is an improviser whose work enriches and revitalizes her originals by adapting them to address the needs of her audience. Deliberately inverting the negative charge that Chin attributes to “faking” Chinese culture, her novel's subtitle （Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book） takes the trope of jazz improvisation as a metaphor for her view of the Chinese heroic tradition （as well as Western cultures） as a rich but open-ended source of inspiration for her Chinese American cultural creation.

2. THE COMMUNAL TEXT

Kingston's view of representation as a collaborative matter, and texts as the product of collusions （and collisions） between authors and readers, is illustrated within Tripmaster Monkey by her representation of Wittman's own art as a collective rather than individual achievement. This is hinted at by Kingston's naming of her writer-protagonist, Wittman Ah Sing, after the poet Walt Whitman. Wittman, of course, seeks to found a Chinese American tradition that will enter into a dialogue with the American tradition of which Whitman is deemed a founder. Accordingly Kingston Sino-Americanizes Whitman's name, replacing the “whit[e] man” with a man of wit. The Chinese American vocative “Ah Sing,” evokes Whitman's bardic self declarations, “I sing the body electric,” and, more importantly,

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

（“Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass (28)

Whitman's poetry projects a poetic persona that understands and subsumes all Americans by imaginatively identifying with their experiences and giving voice to them, thereby representing his poetic self as an expanded, collective consciousness. The ideal of democratic inclusiveness is challenged throughout Tripmaster, as Wittman voices Kingston's critique of the ways the “universal” texts of American culture subtly exclude or marginalize people of color. On the whole, however, Tripmaster celebrates the ideals of both political and cultural inclusiveness, seeking to envision a new community that is more truly inclusive; it uses the career of its hero, Wittman, to illustrate how a collective consciousness enlivens a writer's work.

A typical scene of composition begins with Wittman, at the end of an all-night party, telling friends about the week-long play he wants to stage with their help. He proposes to begin by inviting the audience to a barbecue, but one that is designed to remind the audience that the Chinese leaders who helped to tame the American West were themselves American pioneers. Though the barbecue trappings are American, the proposed fare—a freshly killed black ox and white horse—commemorates a famous scene from the novel Three Kingdoms, which is also a favorite source for Chinese opera. In this scene, the three heroes celebrate their oath of newly declared fraternity by sacrificing the ox and horse, which they then consume in a bonding ritual with their newly recruited army. As Wittman makes clear, the Chinese opera tradition that the Cantonese brought to the U.S. is for him （and Kingston） a long-lost American tradition. Moreover, the ritual slaughter and feast celebrates the widening of the kinship circle to unrelated people, who are united by a common enterprise. In Three Kingdoms, the new clan established by the newly bound “brothers” is their army; the enterprise is the reunification of China and the founding of a dynasty. In the nineteenth-century American West, the “clan” is the Chinese American community; the enterprise, the making of America and Americans. In Wittman's play, the “clan” is an interracial community brought together to perform and watch the play. This play, in turn, is a metaphor for the Chinese American cultural tradition that Kingston seeks to create.

Among the entertainments Wittman wants to include is an enormous fat lady, a tattooed wrestler who will dance exuberantly naked （146–47）. For Wittman, the fat lady represents untrammeled female energy and power, and her presence onstage will not only revive a kung fu opera tradition （according to Wittman）, but will challenge the equation of female beauty with thinness, as well as stereotypes of Han people （ethnic Chinese） as puritanical nondancers, or fat people as weak, asexual, and generally unfit for stardom. His female listeners （Wittman's potential actors） object, however, that the exposure of so much female flesh is too much like a woman jumping out of a cake at a stag party. Rejecting Wittman's more radical arguments that fat and nakedness signify freedom, strength, beauty, and sexuality, the women reject the fat lady because of her failure to conform to the bourgeois standards of beauty and propriety she is supposed to disrupt. In deference to their reading, Wittman edits the lady from his text—but not from Kingston's—and moves on. But she remains in Kingston's novel as a sign of the ambiguity of texts.

The fat lady incident is not only an act of collective interpretation, however. Because the group is in the process of composing and casting a play, it also represents artistic creation as a dialogic process in which the putative author, Wittman, must incorporate the view of “readers” who are both critics and artistic collaborators. In this case, and in several others, the collaborative process results in the editing （or censorship） of the most radical ideas by more moderate （or conventional） thinkers. In numerous other scenes, Kingston depicts Wittman expanding his audience by responding flexibly to his critics. For instance, he agrees to eliminate references to human dumplings and “bow” （steamed buns with filling）, which would be bad for Chinatown businesses, in exchange for access to a Tong hall as venue for his play （261–62）, and he incorporates his actors' ideas into his play （179–82, 286）. In addition, Wittman ends his play with a monologue in which he comments on the critical reception of his work （307–10）, pointing out the inadvertent racism of critics who reviewed the play in terms of Chinese food, colonialist quotations from Kipling （“East is east and west is west”）, or stereotypes about Asian American exoticism, foreignness, or inscrutability: “There is no East here. West is meeting West. … Do I have to explain why ‘exotic’ pisses me off, and ‘not exotic’ pisses me off? … To be exotic or to be not-exotic is not a question about Americans or about humans” （308）. This monologue identifies Wittman closely, not only with Chin, but also with the author herself, who published an article making the same points about reviews of her first book （“Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers”）. Wittman's discussion of his critics provides a model for the exchange between Kingston and her critics; among other things, this novel incorporates and replies to the voices of these critics, including Chin.

Though Tripmaster depicts the collective fashioning of a play, it also clearly acknowledges novel-writing as an intertextual process. I cannot detail this book's formidable range of Asian and Western references here, but Kingston's arch acknowledgment of Frank Chin's influence may illustrate my point. In the epigraph, we saw how Wittman, who until this point has written only poetry, finds his late-night attempts to compose his first play disturbed by the presence of a competitor; if we continue reading this passage, we find additional commentary about Kingston's relationship with Chin:

It should be a companionable noise, a jazz challenge to which he could blow out the window his answering jazz. But, no, it's an expensive electric machine-gun typewriter aiming at him, gunning for him, to knock him off in competition. But so efficient—it has to be a girl, a clerk typist, he hoped, a secretary, he hopes. A schoolteacher cutting mimeo stencils. A cookbook writer. A guidebook-for-tourists writer. Madam Dim Sum, Madam Chinoiserie, Madam Orientalia knocking out horsey cocky locky astrology, Horatio Algiers Wong—he heard the typing leave him behind. （41）

Here Kingston suggests that, contrary to Chin's film-noirish assertions about the isolation of all Asian American writers （“You write alone, kid” [“This Is …” 129]）, neither she nor Frank Chin writes alone. Even when composing late at night in their separate garrets, each hears and responds to the other's work, thereby creating a tradition. Using the metaphor of jazz, Kingston distinctly suggests that she and Chin should work as colleagues and collaborators, but that instead, they remain separated by a wall. Why? In a parody of Chin's attacks on Kingston, Wittman “tunes out” and tries to dismiss his neighbor as a “girl” whose gender marks her as no true literary rival. Incapable of conceiving original work, the unknown typist is fit （in Wittman's wishful thinking） only to engage in mechanical reproduction of others' words, or to prostitute herself with cookbooks, tourbooks, model minority myths, and other debased genres pandering to Orientalist tastes.⁶ At this point in the novel, Wittman is resistant to intertextual dialogue; nor would the jazz metaphor of improvisation within a tradition appeal to him. No wonder, then, that Kingston, the“workhorse big-novel writer” takes aim at Wittman/Chin and “leaves him behind.”

Still, the questions remain: what kind of tradition will be constructed by this peculiar dialogue? And how can Kingston take into account Chin's views, particularly his attempt to define Chinese American culture in terms of a few important but ideologically selected texts, without compromising her feminist vision? In order to support Chin's efforts to rehabilitate Asian American manhood, must she （and we readers） also ignore the chauvinism and the absolute tone of such typically Chin-ese assertions as this?

Good or bad, the stereotypical Asian is nothing as a man. At worst, the Asian American is contemptible because he is womanly, effeminate, devoid of all the traditionally masculine qualities of originality, daring, physical courage, and creativity.

（Chin et al., “An Introduction …” 14–15）

When we assess Kingston's incorporation of Chin, and of Chinese heroic texts, into Tripmaster, we must keep in mind that Kingston herself has always mined Chinese sources for models of Chinese American heroism, and has always conveyed, through her revisions, her understanding that the old Chinese stories need to be adapted to convey her personal perspectives to an American readership. When Chin himself came to recognize the richness and importance of such stories, however （“This Is Not …” 1985）, he disavowed Kingston's eclectic, feminist presentation of Chinese stories, insisting instead on the preeminence of three feudal texts in which women were largely irrelevant to, or disruptive of, a predominantly male code of honor: Sun Tzu's Art of War （a war manual）, Luo Guanzhong's Three Kingdoms, and Shi Nai-an's and Luo Guanzhong's Water Margin （two novels）. Water Margin, which features the torture and execution of several unfaithful wives, is most blatantly misogynistic, but Three Kingdoms and Art of War also place women firmly outside the central heroic concerns of war and leadership. In the two novels, even heroic and outlaw women are defined as good only as long as they obey patriarchal authority.⁷

How, then, can Kingston reinscribe such texts within her novel without sharing complicity with the “heroic” values her novel dissents from, notably their patriarchal assumptions about gender, and their celebration of war? In the space remaining, I'll discuss two distinct tropes through which Kingston comments on this issue: the female hero and the empty scrolls.

3. THE FEMALE HERO AND THE CLASSIC HOMOSOCIAL TEXT

I'll now borrow the term “homosocial” from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to describe the primacy of social bonds between heterosexual men within patriarchal （and implicitly homophobic） social systems. Following Sedgwick, my argument will discuss Three Kingdoms' celebration of such bonds as constitutive of male heroism, and Kingston's attempt to appropriate the story's heroic values without accepting its sexism. Although this sixteenth-century Chinese novel, like the other works touted by Chin and Kingston, clearly doesn't belong to the English literary tradition that inspires Sedgwick's analysis, both groups of texts depict societies in which male homosocial bonds are strengthened, and heterosexual bonds rendered subordinate, by patriarchal social structures. Although the homosocial relationships of fraternity, mentorship, fealty, and rivalry I am about to describe are not strictly erotic, Sedgwick's use of the term “homosocial desire” conveys the extent to which such relationships inspire passions that displace heterosexual desires in Chinese as well as English texts. In particular, the following discussion is indebted to Gayle Rubin's account of “the traffic in women” based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' formulation: “The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners” （Lévi-Strauss 115, qtd. in Rubin 174; Sedgwick 25–26）.

In Tripmaster Monkey, Wittman the playwright narrates or restages most of the key episodes from the classic Chinese novel （and opera） Three Kingdoms. The leading female character in Three Kingdoms is Lady Sun, whose marriage to Liu Bei, the hero, marks a major turn in his fortunes. Kingston's feminist revision of this incident tacitly criticizes the original, but ultimately it respects the story's framing ideological assumptions about gender and heroism. Kingston has Wittman tell the story of Lady Sun and Liu Bei to his own newlywed bride, Tana de Weese, to whom he offers the role of Lady Sun in his play. His version goes like this: Lady Sun, a warloving princess from the Southland, proposes to Liu, a famous general who has recently been widowed. On their wedding night, Liu, who suspects a plot against his life, is horrified to find her bedchamber decked with arms, her waiting maids armed. “Afraid of a few swords after half a lifetime of slaughter?” she laughs, and sends the maids away. During the happy year of marriage that follows, the couple fence together and compare their horsemanship, riding into the city together to the acclaim of the people. At last, at New Year's season, the couple determine to flee from the city, which is controlled by his enemies, her kin. Trapped on the road by hostile soldiers from his wife's country, Liu “faces the utter paranoia of marriage” and throws himself upon his wife's mercy. She takes his hand and, walking out among the soldiers sent by her own family, bullies and confuses the men into letting them both go. Pursued again by others, she sends him on, again intimidates the pursuers, and rejoins him just in time to be rescued by his man （Kingston 172–75）.

Turning to Moss Roberts' 1991 translation of Luo Guanzhong's Three Kingdoms, we find that half the story—the arms in the bedroom, the couple's flight, and the princess' fidelity, courage, and intelligence—is true to tradition （409–20, ch. 54–55）. By editing out the narrative frame of the incident, however, Kingston has obscured the fact that in the original Lady Sun is merely a pawn between two of the factions or “kingdoms” competing for dominance in China, one headed by Liu Bei and his legendary military advisor, Zhuge Liang, and the other headed by Lady Sun's brother, Sun Quan. Sun proposes the match between his sister and Liu in order to lure Liu to Nanxu, a city where Sun can capture him; but, forewarned by his advisor, Liu arrives in Nanxu with a highly visible “wedding party” of 500 armed men, thereby compelling Sun to give his sister away in fact. Lady Sun is neither consulted nor present during these prenuptial maneuvers; twenty years Liu's junior, she only appears on the wedding day to fulfill a role predetermined by others.

There is little romance for Lady Sun in Luo's narrative, which clearly subordinates the marriage to two homosocial relationships, Liu's rivalry with Sun Quan, and his homosocial bond with his advisor, Zhuge Liang. Luo's Liu neither courts nor is courted by Lady Sun before marriage, but gains her as a windfall of his competition with Sun Quan. In Luo's account, it is the brother, not the sister, whose horsemanship and whose new alliance with Liu are popularly acclaimed. Though Lady Sun is supposedly the most important woman in Three Kingdoms, she has no part in the action once this wedding episode ends. Not only is she a “medium of exchange” between her husband and her brother, she is also a prize awarded to Liu by his own advisor Zhuge Liang. It is Zhuge whose strategy forces Sun to fulfill the engagement, who masterminds the couple's escape, who anticipates the moment when Liu will need to throw himself on his wife's mercy, and who arrives with the getaway transportation. Before this episode, the advisor has been arduously sought and courted by Liu; once persuaded to join Liu's then-failing cause, Zhuge has guided his leader from obscurity to preeminence. Later, it will be the advisor, not the wife, who is the most trusted and beloved figure at Liu's deathbed, in a famous scene where Liu, now emperor, even considers turning the imperial succession over to Zhuge's son instead of his own. “Through you alone the imperial quest was achieved,” gasps Liu, as both men weep. “My heir is an inconsequential weakling, and so I must entrust you with my cause” （Luo 646, ch. 85; Kingston 284）. Zhuge, of course, begs to be excused from this dangerous “honor,” once more confirming both his political acumen and his undying loyalty.

Clearly, Kingston's omission of Sun's and Zhuge's marital machinations is meant to restore Lady Sun's agency, to supplant the homosocial plots with a heterosexual romance plot, and to reaffirm marriage as a relationship between loving individuals rather than a strategic feint between warring clans. Yet the underlying logic linking women with betrayal, and relegating them to outsider status, remains intact. Given the enmity of her husband and brother, and the Chinese custom that marks wives as the unconditional subjects of their husbands, Lady Sun is bound to become a rebel and an exile from her family and homeland, precisely by fulfilling her duty as a woman. The Chinese text also sanctions Lady Sun's switch to her husband's side on the grounds that her brother is mistreating her; Liu ostensibly is not. Thus the bride's choice of husband over brother dramatizes both her obedience and Liu's personal attractiveness and supposedly superior virtue, but it also marks the prescribed limits of female loyalty. In loving the husband chosen for her, Lady Sun obeys her brother's public command （to marry Liu）, yet also deliberately undermines his private design （to murder Liu）. Hence, the episode is an extreme but telling example of the patriarchal logic that views women as outsiders, born traitors to their birth families. In this story, both Sun Quan and Liu Bei are deceitful toward each other, but politically speaking, neither is a traitor, because each embodies his own cause: they don't betray themselves. But for Lady Sun, the medium for their mutual deceits, loyalty to one requires betrayal of the other. Indeed, the contradiction between Sun's word and his intent poses a koanlike contradiction that Lady Sun must solve at her own and her husband's peril: her very obedience to her brother requires her to rebel against him.

This “divided duty,” and the double bind it poses, governs these medieval texts' attitudes toward women, who are consistently associated with betrayal, ruses, and moral ambiguity, even when they are overtly presented as proper and virtuous （cf. Othello 1.3.181）. If the standard for heroism is integrity, its opposite is duplicity; women operating in these men's texts are linked with doubleness, not only because they must marry, but also because they are privy to and bound by different ethical and behavioral codes than men. But rather than acknowledging the subaltern skills women must develop in order to negotiate between male and female codes, or seriously considering the moral complexity that results, these texts generally view women as inherently deceptive and unreliable outsiders.

Hence, these martial texts virtually supplant patriarchies, which they consider the norm, with fraternities, because the best and purest clan is an all-male clan: an army. This is why Liu, on his deathbed, has the impulse to favor Zhuge Liang over his own son, and why the most important social unit in Luo's Three Kingdoms is a homosocial “menage-a-trois,” the sworn brotherhood of Liu Bei, Guan Yu （called Gwan Goong by Kingston）, and Zhang Fei. The entire trajectory of Three Kingdoms is shaped by the famous Peach Orchard Oath, in which Liu, Guan, and Zhang adopt each other as “brothers” and pledge to die on the same day—that is, to take immediate vengeance to the death against each others' enemies. Of course, neither Liu nor any other hero worth his soy sauce ever extends such a place to his wife or any woman, though a good wife commits herself absolutely to her husband. When Zhang Fei, thinking he has lost Liu's land and family, offers his own life in atonement, Liu consoles him by explaining the fundamental priorities of their world:

“A brother is a limb. Wives and children are but clothes, which torn can be mended. But who can restore a broken limb? We linked our destinies in the Peach Garden when we vowed to die as one. My land, my family, I can spare, but not you, midway in our course.” （Roberts, “Introduction” xxiii）

In short, Kingston's feminist critique-through-revision of the episode is suggestive but incomplete, because the story's patriarchal assumptions are too deeply embedded in its plot. Taken alone, Kingston's romantic, modern treatment of the heroic couple as an independent unit does not address the largest feminist problem of these texts' fundamental mistrust and marginalization of women, and their idealization of fraternities defined by their exclusion of the feminine. To understand one way Kingston transcends this impasse, we must turn to The Journey to the West.

4. THE EMPTY SCROLLS AND THE WRITERLY TEXT

At the risk of some oversimplification, I have so far characterized Chin as a “textual fundamentalist” who seeks to vest authority in more or less univocal classical texts, and to replace hegemonic mainstream narratives about Asians with his own, equally hegemonic narrative separating Asian Americans and their cultural productions into two groups, the heroic “real” and the self-abasing “fake.” By contrast, I argue, Kingston has always taken the postmodern stance of celebrating rather than denying or attacking the importance and complexity of the interpretive process; her work tends to affirm the authority of individual readers, interpretive communities, and contemporary authors to engage dialogically with traditional texts; in Tripmaster Monkey and other texts, she portrays literary composition as a process enriched rather than threatened by dialogue, whether between a text and its predecessors, or between an author and her audience. Like many postmodern fiction writers, Kingston understands history and culture as complex, multivocal social constructs, yet does not deny the existence or importance of specific past events, specific literary texts, or the history of anti-Asian racism in this country. （Indeed, racism is a central subject or subtext for all three of her major books.）

Like other postmodern writers, Kingston uses the postmodern techniques of parody and revision, not to distort or obliterate our understanding of Chinese American history and culture, as Chin charges, but to focus our attention on the process of constructing that culture, and the subjectivities it underwrites, through texts. For Kingston, in short, the complexity of those textual webs, through which we know culture and history, is an invitation to explore texts, not through rote learning and repetition, but by imaginatively entering and actively “writing” texts in an effort to understand and, in some cases, to update or contest their essences. But for Kingston, to alter a text, to transplant it, or otherwise to struggle with it is not an act of erasure or disrespect; rather, it is a way of affirming and exploring the power and resilience of the original and reinscribing it into her own American vision. This is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in her treatment of the episode of the blank texts, taken from Journey to the West, a classic Chinese novel ignored in Chin's initial account of the Chinese heroic tradition.

In claiming Journey to the West as a classical source for Chinese American culture, Kingston critiques Chin's insistence that Chinese American consciousness be defined by martial virtues. Journey to the West is a text whose central action is not one of war or conquest, but a quest for Buddhist scriptures to be transplanted from India （“the West”） to China, in an act of cross-cultural insemination. Journey's scripture pilgrims, of which Monkey is the most important, all mature and experience inner transformation as a result of their efforts throughout the journey. Though Monkey is widely beloved by audiences for his combativeness and martial prowess, his actions in the story are monitored and if necessary, disciplined, by the character of Kuan-yin, the Goddess of Mercy. Like the author or narrator, Kuan-yin also instigates and watches over the pilgrimage. As a result of her discipline, Monkey gradually learns the Buddhist virtues of humility and detachment, and becomes less quarrelsome, ultimately attaining enlightenment by shedding his attachment to his mortal self or ego. Journey's overall emphasis on spiritual enlightenment provides a powerful alternative to the more overtly martial texts Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin, which Frank Chin has chosen as the touchstones for Asian American character. Indeed, by linking Wittman to Monkey, Kingston hints that Wittman, like her combative rival Chin, also needs lessons in humility and detachment. Kingston herself, figured by the typist in the epigraph, seems closely identifiable with her novel's narrator, a distinctively feminist, maternal voice that evaluates and manages Wittman in a clear analogue to Kuan-yin's direction of Monkey and his progress.

Directly after hearing the rival typist and shutting out the implied possibility of dialogue, Wittman is shown vainly trying to grasp the culminating episode—that of the empty scrolls—from The Journey to the West. Clearly this scene is a direct comment on the two writers' shared project of transporting Chinese classics into the American literary landscape. Journey, unlike Chin's chosen “heroic” texts, both revels in martial heroism and views it with playful irony, as Kingston's novel does. Of course, Wittman, the monkey and “tripmaster” of Kingston's title, is closely identified with the quarrelsome but brilliant hero of Journey to the West, Monkey; but the pilgrims, who bring “sacred” texts from a tutelary culture to enrich their own, can be seen, surprisingly, as legendary Chinese archetypes for both Chin and Kingston, both of whom call upon Chinese texts as touchstones for portraying and transforming Chinese American and American culture. What is involved in such an act of transport/transplantation/translation? Kingston's retelling of the empty scrolls episode suggests a key difference between her views and Chin's.

After many adventures （Kingston tells us）, “Monkey and his friends” arrive safely in India, where they are cordially received and given scrolls to take back to China. But on the way back, they discover that the scrolls are all blank. Feeling cheated, they return, demand an exchange, and get scrolls with words. “But,” Kingston concludes, “the empty scrolls had been the right ones all along” （42）. This highly compressed version both captures the essence of the original and is tellingly altered. For one thing, she suppresses almost all indications that this is a religious quest: for her the scrolls are not sacred. Moreover, she elides a basic hierarchy built into the Chinese story, in which one culture possesses truths, set in texts, that the other must learn. These assumptions are challenged in the original, however, by the blank scriptures themselves. In Anthony C. Yu's translation, the Buddhists explain that the blank scriptures were initially selected in response to the pilgrims' failure to provide an “offering” or bribe to the monks selecting their scriptures; when the pilgrims return and offer an alms bowl, they are rewarded with what they desire, scriptures with words. Amused rather than provoked, the Buddhist patriarchs say that those people back East （the Chinese） are “so stupid and blind,” and “so foolish and unenlightened,” that they will be unable to use or appreciate these “true, wordless scriptures” that are “just as good as those with words” （The Journey to the West 4:391, 393）. These lines, though seemingly aimed at the Chinese, really invite all readers to question their own preferences for orthodox truths in fixed forms. Kingston, in essence, makes the same point more succinctly: “But the empty scrolls had been the right ones all along.”

In other words, the blank scriptures embody the essence of the higher wisdom that scriptures are supposed to teach, the wisdom that recognizes that “the real form is that form which has no form.” Hence the Buddhist disciple must learn to distinguish outward forms from the essence of truth, which has no form or body in itself but can be outwardly “like ten thousand things” （Yu 2:297）. Not only must individual desires, status, and achievements be seen as ultimately insignificant to the whole of reality; verbal texts, like individual bodies, must be understood as shells, outward forms of understanding, rather than its essence. In this sense, to focus one's learning on individual texts, isolated from the broader teaching or practice of a community, may be seen as a clumsy, second-hand practice. This is why the blank texts are “the right ones,” and why the Buddhists in the story treat the two sets of scrolls as readily fungible.

In the context of Kingston's and Chin's debate about the use and authority of classical texts, Chin's search for an authentic “heroic tradition,” and broader debates about the construction, or deconstruction, of literary canons, the lighthearted Buddhists of Journey to the West are distinctly refreshing. The Chinese pilgrims have traveled for many years and braved many dangers to bring home a body of sacred texts for the emperor's scholars to study. Whereas the three brothers of Three Kingdoms seek to found a new Chinese dynasty, the pilgrims are in effect commissioned to bring the founding texts that, presumably, will influence the direction of Buddhism in China for all posterity. Yet the canon they receive is arbitrary, its final selection contingent upon a single alms bowl. If the pilgrims had offered a different gift, would they have been given a whole different set of scrolls, a different founding canon? And, if American-born writers choose to invoke stories from the Chinese classics as the foundation, or an enriching source, for a Chinese American literary tradition, how will we decide whose stories, whose choices and interpretations, are “the true” ones?

In book after book, Kingston inscribes the struggles of the artist, an outlaw interpreter, to challenge and transform institutionalized texts and orthodox readings of those texts—including, in Tripmaster Monkey, Frank Chin's reading of Chinese literature as a “heroic tradition” that defines Chinese American experience in martial terms. In her own writing, she celebrates the transience of oral storytelling and the possibility of endless invention, endless variations; for her, variability and ambiguity are both enjoyable and edifying. The author is not an authority or a solo creator, but a producer or director who gives voice and shape to a collective artistic effort that in turn defines an interpretive community. The interaction between the artist and his community is central to the creative process.

In 1970 Roland Barthes introduced the idea of the “writerly” text, a text that is perpetually being created by the reader, and hence vests writerly authority in the reader; its opposite is the “readerly” text, the “classic,” well-made text whose predetermined meanings force the reader into a passive posture of “readerly” consumption. Wrote Barthes,

Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work （of literature as work） is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness … instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing, he is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text; reading is nothing more than a referendum. （4）

Kingston's hero Wittman is confounded by the story of the empty scrolls; her colleague, Frank Chin, might not be, but he has clearly voiced his preference for the Chinese classics as readerly texts with foreclosed or self-evident meanings （even though his actual readings are more complex than his rhetoric might suggest）. For Kingston, the ideal text is writerly, not readerly. The Chinese heroic tradition is a rich source, but it is hardly a ready-made medium for her ideas. The empty scrolls may symbolize her preference for a Chinese tradition whose greatest worth comes from its refusal of texts as authorities, its questioning the very aim of the scripture pilgrimage. The empty scrolls—no longer scriptures—overtly return writerly authority to the reader. For Kingston, a Chinese American feminist reading and reinscribing the Chinese “heroic” tradition, they are the right ones.

Notes

1. The debate has been addressed by King-kok Cheung （“The Woman Warrior …”）, Elaine H. Kim （“‘Such Opposite Creatures’ …”）, Robert G. Lee, Sauling Cynthia Wong （“Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour? …”）, Deborah Woo, and others.

2. A representative sample of these essays includes “Come All Ye …” （Chin 1991）, “This is Not …” （Chin 1985）, “Preface” and “An Introduction …” （Chin et al. 1974）. Chin also published a hostile parody of The Woman Warrior and its defenders, “The Most Popular Book in China” （1984）. These essays, and the anthologies of Asian American literature in which the 1974 and 1991 essays appear, are Chin's principal critical contribution to Asian American studies. His critical work is well known but considered controversial within Asian American studies; the 1974 anthology and essays may be considered a formative influence on Asian American literary studies. Chin's attacks on Kingston may usefully be compared to Ishmael Reed's critiques of Alice Walker.

3. See, for example, Elaine H. Kim （Asian American Literature）, James S. Moy, and Sucheng Chan.

4. Postmodern parody is a term I have borrowed from Linda Hutcheon （93–117）. For analyses of Kingston's revisions of traditional plots, see King-kok Cheung （Articulate Silences）, Patricia Chu, David Leiwei Li, and Shu-mei Shih.

5. In fact, the textual scholarship for these Chinese classics points to a collaborative process of composition similar to the process Kingston describes and Chin attacks; Kingston makes this creative process the central action of Tripmaster Monkey.

   The scholarship tells us that the ancient Chinese novelists combined official histories, promptbooks, and popular legends with their own inventions to produce these “original” works. Translator Moss Roberts provides a thorough introduction to the textual history of Three Kingdoms in his afterword （Roberts, “Afterword” 937–86）. Translator Anthony C. Yu provides a similar survey for The Journey to the West in his introduction （Yu, “Introduction” 1–21）. For The Water Margin, translator Sidney Shapiro merely notes, “Since its original publication, [this novel] has appeared in numerous editions ranging from seventy to 124 chapters, the denouement sometimes changing with the political temper of the ruling monarch” （Shapiro, translator's note, no page）. More complete textual histories of all three novels are provided, however, by Lu Hsun and C. T. Hsia in their authoritative surveys of Chinese fiction. Hsia's scholarship incorporates Lu's. On The Water Margin see Lu 180–97, Hsia 75–82.

   The Art of War, an older, nonnarrative text, has been more visibly transformed by its readers; centuries of commentary have been incorporated into the text itself.

6. “Horatio Algiers Wong” is an allusion to Chin's attacks on Jade Snow Wong, author of Fifth Chinese Daughter, who has been criticized for presenting herself as a model minority author. On another note, critic Sau-ling Wong has identified accommodationist genres as “food pornography,” which she finds is a central trope of Frank Chin's writing; both tropes, prostitution and pornography, convey Chin's feeling that packaging and selling one's ethnicity can be analogous to sexual commodification （Reading Asian American Literature 55）.

7. In light of Chin's critical arguments, it must be recalled that these texts were all written centuries ago, under circumstances that are now matters of scholarly conjecture. For these texts and Wu Ch'eng-en's The Journey to the West, the authorship is disputed but traditionally attributed to these figures. Without delving deeply into Chinese history, a rough survey of these texts' estimated dates of origin will support my argument that the texts convey feudal social values （both Buddhist and Confucian） from ancient China, and are therefore problematic for the project of defining contemporary Chinese American culture and character.

   According to Bruce Cleary, The Art of War （Sun-tzu ping fa） is believed to have originated in the Warring States period （c. 403–221 B. C.）, with commentaries added by readers through the Sung Dynasty （C. A. D. 960–1279）. Moss Roberts' unabridged （1991） translation of Three Kingdoms （San kuo chih yen i） is based on the Mao Zonggang edition, believed to have been published in the mid-1660s, based on a text from c. 1522. Sidney Shapiro's translation of The Water Margin （Shui hu zhuan）, which he calls Outlaws of the Marsh, does not explicitly identify the two versions he used, but C. T. Hsia offers approximate dates in this novel's development, the Kuo Hsün version （c. 1550） and the Chin Sheng-t'an edition （c. 1628–43）. Anthony C. Yu's translation of The Journey to the West （Hsi yu chi） uses a version based on a text from c. 1592.

   A full discussion of the three texts' differences in ethical standards is impossible here, but C. T. Hsia's study gives a good idea of the contrast between the tragically idealistic ethical standards of the brothers in Three Kingdoms and the “gang morality” of the sadistic outlaws in The Water Margin. My argument will follow Chin's 1985 essay in grouping The Art of War, Three Kingdoms, and The Water Margin together as a “heroic tradition,” which I contrast with the more spiritual Journey to the West.

   After the publication of Tripmaster Monkey, Frank Chin published another essay insisting on the centrality of “the three classics of the heroic tradition” （“Come All …” 34）, but he cited three different classics. Without acknowledging Kingston's influence directly, he substituted The Journey to the West for The Art of War. Thus, the Chinese heroic tradition improved greatly between 1985 and 1991.

I am grateful to Norman Bock, Angela Pao, Mark Scroggins, Gayle Wald, Priscilla Wald, K. Scott Wong, and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong for their invaluable responses to earlier versions of this essay.

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