"We make theater, we make community."
Wittman's growth as a human being and as an artist is primarily the result of his coming to terms with the complex equation between individualism and community, to "reconcile unity and identity" (105). Having been born and brought up in a country that promotes rugged individualism, where power, especially male white power, is associated with it, it is inevitable that Wittman has ingested some of this ideology. "An American stands alone. Alienated, tribeless, individual. To be a successful American, leave your tribe ... behind" is the message Wittman gets from the movie he is made to watch in the Unemployment Office (246). But he soon realizes that the power which Purchase Essays comes with white male individualism can never be his as long as he is defined by the color of his skin. Therefore for Wittman, the ideology of individualism can hardly be beneficial and would isolate him even further instead of giving him a sense of identity. He needs to figure out a different way, an alternative concept of identity to the idea of American individualism.
A sense of community guides Wittman in his search, for along with the ideology of individualism he has also imbibed the lessons of communal love and responsibility from his extended Chinese and Chinese-American "family." The basic idea of community, of sharing and togetherness, of belonging and responsibility, is something he has Purchase Essays grown up with. But Wittman never romanticizes the concept of community. In fact, there are several aspects of his ethnic community of which he is critical, for instance, the intolerance of some of the old people in Chinatown who give young college kids like him the "stink-eye" and find fault with their "attee-tood" (10-11). Yet Wittman believes it "would pain a true Chinese to admit that he or she did not have a community, or belonged at the bottom or the margin" (10). He is aware that the Chinese "genius for community" is degenerating (255), and he wants to help preserve this characteristic of his ethnic culture. Asserting the importance of culture for minorities, JanMohamad Purchase Essays and Lloyd say:
to the extent that [Third world and minority] peoples are systematically
marginalized vis-a-vis the global economy, one might see the resort to
cultural modes of struggle as all the more necessary.... For many
minorities, culture is not a mere superstructure; all too often, in an
ironic twist of a Sartrean phenomenology, the physical survival of minority
groups depends on the recognition of its culture as viable. (5-6)
Wittman realizes that in spite of everything, it gives him and other Chinese-Americans a sense of identity and self-definition.
While the traditional Kunstlerroman promotes or endorses the development of an autonomous self, in a Kunstlerroman like Tripmaster Monkey, the maturation of the collective subjectivity assumes a significant Purchase Essays role. The underlying story behind Wittman's growth as an artist is the growing political consciousness of oppressive racial definitions in the Asian American community. Wittman belongs to the Civil Rights and Anti-War era of the sixties, a time when the Asian American Movement began with young Asian American students rallying together for "racial equality, social justice, and political empowerment" (Wei 1). As William Wei in The Asian American Movement points out, they soon realized that in order to be politically effective they needed to act collectively and empower themselves by coming together as one people.
In Tripmaster Monkey Wittman combines his individual artistic goals with a communal vision, and the result is his play. He says Purchase Essays to the "Outcasts of America.... We make theater, we make community" (261), thus finding a way to "entertain and educate the solitaries that make up a community" (288). This is the lesson that Lone, the solitary artist in David Henry Hwang's The Dance and the Railroad, eventually learns. Initially critical of his fellow Chinese workers, whom he believes "are dead," he is alienated from both the dominant and his ethnic societies. Practicing his dance alone at the mountaintop after spending the "whole day chipping half an inch of rock" (Hwang 73), Lone's art separates him even more from the people around him. It is only after Ma convinces him that the strike by the Chinese Purchase Essays railroad workers is the beginning of their growing political consciousness that he uses his art to connect with them, which helps bring about a sense of community and solidarity.
Wittman knows that building community is not easy and everyone has to actively engage in it, for it is "not built once-and-all; people have to imagine, practice and recreate it" (306). He believes he can do this by writing and producing a unique play that involves "everyone and everything" (277). His pluralistic play, some sort of a Chinese-American epic, interweaves elements of Chinese legends and novels along with American tales and history, "high" and "low" culture; it is all-encompassing and "contains multitudes," to use a Whitmanesque phrase.
Wittman Purchase Essays chooses to write and perform a play, believing it to be a more interactive and social medium than poetry, his initial artistic genre, which is comparatively solitary in nature. He writes a play that is flexible in form, that performers can add to, change, and improvise as they perform: "to do improv, a process as ancient as Chinese opera and as far-out as the theater of spontaneity that was happening in streets and parks" (141). Like the fake book of Jazz musicians, from which they improvise and create new music, Wittman's play is his Fake Book that would inspire others to improvise, add to it, and change it.(13) Significantly, instead of feeling threatened by the Purchase Essays improvisations or resenting the lack of authorial control, he is intrigued that his actors show him "what happens next" (141). Wittman's play, then, is not solely the result of his individual artistic vision but becomes a collaborative effort, a joint venture that combines different people's stories and experiences. This kind of a communal artistic endeavor would be totally out of place within the individualistic paradigm of the traditional Kunstlerroman where isolated individualism is the hallmark of the artist.
Another reason Wittman wants to do theater is because in the theater "he didn't need descriptions that racinated anybody. The actors will walk out on stage and their looks will be self-evident. They will speak dialects and accents, Purchase Essays which the audience will get upon hearing" (34). And since he wants to cast "blind ... the actors can be any race. Each member of the Tyrone family or the Lomans can be of a different color" (52). Through this radical approach, Wittman is making room for actors of diverse ethnicities and race, believing that American theater should represent a multitude of people with different features, skin color, accents, and dialects. As a playwright, director, and actor, Wittman wants to break the existing hegemony of the dominant society in art and literature. He wants to claim his right to be recognized as an Asian American artist with a unique vision, one who neither panders to Purchase Essays the stereotypical expectations of the dominant culture (to be exotic) nor compromises his ethnic identity in any way (not to be exotic). He wants to start a new tradition in American theater that would enable marginalized groups in American society to tell their stories on their own terms.
Evidently for Wittman, art is not an escape from "the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair," nor is it a way to surmount "the house of squalor and subterfuge" (Joyce 174-75). He is not looking for escape or transcendence in art from the "house of squalor," which in his case is the house of racism. On the contrary, Wittman wants to use art to Purchase Essays expose racism, to talk about it openly, and to direct attention toward it with the hope that this awareness will help minorities to fight it. Art is also not the means "to attain the harmonious development of personality," as it is for Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, who believes that only in the theater can he liberate himself from the constraints of a bourgeois existence and begin his quest for self-culture (175). Having an "irresistible desire" to "develop [himself] fully," Wilhelm asserts that only "on the stage a cultured human being can appear in the full splendor of his person, just as in the upper classes of society" (Goethe 175).(14)
Wittman's art, his play, becomes a site of Purchase Essays cultural and political struggle and survival, of resistance and rebellion for all Chinese-Americans. Frantz Fanon calls this kind of literature, a "literature of combat ... because it assumes responsibility, and because it is the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space" (240). Wittman's play is a passionate call for resisting the hegemonic control of the dominant society over the cultural, social, ideological, political, and economic lives of Chinese-Americans. Though in his "One-Man Show" he claims the "I," it is not just an egotistic and individualistic desire. He says, "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 Purchase Essays mean-ass motherfucker first-person pronoun, of the active voice, and they don't want us to have it" (318, emphasis added). Wittman is demanding the right to an individual identity, free from stereotypical constructs of Asian passivity and the images of a linguistically challenged Charlie Chan saying, "me no likee" or the "bucktoof" Mickey Rooney type (318). He is rebelling against the loss of Chinese-American individuality, of diverse and complex being. He is critical of being lumped together as one group of people with the same characteristics, behavior, and mentality. Nancy Hartsock, referring to Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized, says "the Others are not seen [by the colonizer] as fellow individual members of the human Purchase Essays community, but rather as part of a chaotic, disorganized, and anonymous collectivity" (22). This is precisely what Wittman is angry about when he says, "they willfully do not learn us, and blame that on us, that we have an essential unknowableness" (310). The stereotype of the exotic, inscrutable, Oriental, which all "Chinese-looking" people are supposed to be, infuriates him. He explodes,"We're about as exotic as shit" (308).
Clearly there is a difference between the quest for an "I" of the centered individualist belonging to the dominant society and that of the "I" of the marginalized and stereotyped minority. The minority's demand for an "I" becomes a war-cry to revolutionize the way the dominant culture perceives it Purchase Essays by resisting the oppressive essentialized definitions of identity promoted by that culture, to make room for complexities and contradictions, for multiplicities and differences. Barbara Christian discusses the politically charged quest for an "I" by women of color, who "are struggling to define themselves (i.e. gain the `I') within a material and historical reality that would render them `other'" (338). More than just a search for self-definition, this becomes a strategy for survival, an endeavor to render visible what is deemed invisible by the dominant society. Trying to promote a sense of identity and self-worth, Wittman says to his audience:
We used to have a mighty "I," but we lost it. At one time whenever we said
Purchase Essays "I," we said "I-warrior".... To say "I" was to say "I fight" .... 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. (319)
Being a pacifist at heart, Wittman is not advocating violence and killing but is appropriating a martial trope paradoxically to bring about a peaceful revolution, believing "what's crazy is the idea that revolutionaries must shoot and bomb and kill, that revolution is the same as war" (305).
Like the trickster Monkey, Wittman too "brings chaos to established order" (Kingston, MELUS Interview 61), upsetting the Purchase Essays status quo, and urging other minority groups to do the same. "Let me help you get offended" (308), he says to his fellow actors who, having internalized the stereotypes about Chinese-Americans, cheer at the reviews of the play. Discussing the ideological significance of the "tendency to assimilate others' discourse," Bakhtin says, "another's discourse performs here no longer as information, directions, rules, models and so forth--but strives rather to determine the very basis of our behavior; it performs here as authoritative discourse and an internally persuasive discourse" (342). Trying to decolonize the minds(15) of the people who have absorbed the "authoritative discourse," Wittman angrily asks, "What's to cheer about?" as he lists phrases from the reviews: Purchase Essays "`East meets West.' `Exotic.' `Sweet and sour.'" (307). It "pisses" him off that some reviewers call the play "exotic" while others call it "not exotic" (308). Appropriating Hamlet's eternal question, Wittman says, "To be exotic or to be not-exotic is not a question." Once again he demands recognition as an American artist, free from preconceived and socially constructed notions of a Chinese-American artist. Wittman's cry echoes Kingston's own frustrations at the gross misreadings of Woman Warrior and China Men by some critics who saw the books as a guided tour of Chinatown and as an explanation of the "exotic" and the "inscrutable" Chinese values and traditions ("Cultural Misreadings").
Wittman passionately urges all Chinese-Americans to come together Purchase Essays as one people, believing it will give them a sense of solidarity and empower them to contest and eventually disempower the oppressive forces within the dominant culture. However, he is certainly not advocating any essentialist Chinese-Americanness, for he is very aware that the identity politics of sameness could be limiting and may preclude diversity. Further, it would unwittingly support the dominant society's continuing attempts to categorize Asian Americans as one fixed category. Lisa Lowe stresses the importance of asserting the "hetereogeneity, hybridity and multiplicity in the characterization of Asian American culture" and sees it as "a strategy to destabilize the dominant discursive construction and determination of Asian Americans as a homogeneous group" (28). Thus, Wittman Purchase Essays is proposing to Chinese-Americans the seemingly paradoxical concept of having specificity in unity, and separateness in togetherness.
Wittman presents these views to his audience partly through talk-story, an integral feature of his ethnic culture that he incorporates in his play. Talk-story by nature is communal and instills bonding. It is inclusive and democratic, cutting across boundaries of age, literacy, gender, and class. Within the socio-historic context of Chinese immigrants in America, it becomes a tool for survival: giving a sense of solidarity, preserving ethnic culture, allowing self-expression, as well as providing entertainment and reprieve from the oppressive "white demon" society. Discussing the importance of talk-story in Kingston, Linda Ching Sledge says that Kingston has a "notion Purchase Essays of the ethnic literary artist as one in a long line of performers shaping a recalcitrant history into talk-story form" (146). Wittman Ah Sing is surely a part of that literary tradition of oral story-telling, for he too is reshaping history as he recounts his experiences and that of his ancestors in his play. He becomes the maker of "history and not just the objects of those who have made history until now" (Hartsock 34).(16) Not only is Wittman rewriting the old stories, but he is creating new ones as he imagines the next stage in the old story that must evolve and change in order to remain meaningful and alive. Kingston says:
[In Tripmaster Purchase Essays Monkey] I want to write a prose book similar in a way to
those music fake books. I give many basic melodies. I tell people ideas for
more books.... they can improvise from those basic plots and they can
finish the stories for me. (Hurley 85)
In a complex manner, Kingston is writing a novel with a flexible form to which readers can add to, delete, digress, or change, and participate in the process of storytelling that goes on with infinite possibilities for new stories.
Storytelling, language, and words are powerful instruments of communication, and Kingston seems to be suggesting that it is possible to substitute discourse for weapons of war, to resolve conflicts without resorting to Purchase Essays violent means. Wong sees in Wittman's play a "faith in the performative power of language to talk something into existence--word magic" (207). Wittman is, in fact, trying to build a community and bring about change through language and words as he discards instruments of "blasting and blazing [which] are too wordless" (306).
Though writing and staging a modern day Chinese-American version of the classic Chinese war epic, The Three Kingdoms, Wittman is not promoting a martial identity in an attempt to counteract the racist stereotype of the emasculated Asian American male in American society. He is, however, extremely conscious of his Asian American manhood and sarcastically says, "We're deballed and other worldly, we don't have the Purchase Essays natural fucking urges of the average, that is the white human being" (320). Haunted by images of emasculation, he finds them even in Kerouac, who refers to the "twinkling little Chinese" in his poem (69). Wittman, along with Lance "the dove brother" who is the true pacifist in Tripmaster Monkey, improvises the heroic and military code of The Three Kingdoms, making a "parody of warfare" (Noelle Williams 93). Pacifism does not mean non-action or passivity; neither does it mean to be weak or ineffectual. Subverting the traditional heroic meaning associated with martial activity, Kingston is making a case for an alternative identity. At the same time she is taking a dig at her most vocal Purchase Essays critic, Frank Chin, who, along with some of his colleagues, promotes a warrior identity for Asian American males as the only way to regain their manhood in American society. Kingston is underscoring the destructive nature of such a recourse and is proposing an active non-violent identity as a viable alternative.
Though it may be arguable whether any writing is indeed entirely devoid of a political position, writings by most contemporary American writers of color have an overt political agenda. They are writing not simply to expose the multiple oppression that their communities suffer, but to demand and assert their rightful position in American society today. Minority writers do not have the luxury to indulge in art Purchase Essays for art's sake, which Chinua Achebe says, "is just another piece of deodorised dog-shit" (19). For most writers of color, the role of a neutral or uninvolved spectator-artist is just not possible when the cultural, social, and economic survival of their communities are in jeopardy. Emphasizing the political intent of Tripmaster Monkey, Kingston says that she meant Wittman to be very political, to figure out a way to bring community and harmony amidst the chaos of American society (Moyers). At the end of Tripmaster Monkey, though Wittman is still in the process of developing his artistic and political identities, there is little doubt that they are inextricably linked together. Just as his play becomes a Purchase Essays site of political struggle and contestation for all Asian Americans, Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey also seeks to fill in the gaps within the dominant discourse that ignores or suppresses the narratives of Asian Americans and renders them powerless and disenfranchised. Kingston is not simply deconstructing received notions of stereotypes of Asian Americans promoted by the hegemonic society, but is validating an alternative vision of an Asian American artist.(17)
Wittman Ah Sing represents Kingston's image of an Asian American artist as a person who is not necessarily a genius or a god-like figure separated from society, but one who is intimately involved with the lives of the people around him, who is committed to bring about change in Purchase Essays American society, and who uses art as a medium to achieve the goal of equality for all minorities in the U.S. More than just an exercise in aesthetic experimentation, art becomes a site of resistance and rebellion in the hands of such an artist. By foregrounding the racial identity and the communal impulse in an artist rather than the artistic sensibility and individualistic goal, Kingston is not only deviating from the traditional Kunstlerroman, but she is forcing a re-evaluation of that tradition. Challenging the idea that artists feel alienated in a hostile society primarily because of unique artistic and intellectual sensibility, she shows how artists' racial identities can marginalize and disenfranchise them from the moment Purchase Essays of birth in a racist and hegemonic society. Moreover, she shatters the image of artists on autonomous quests for artistic fulfillment, suggesting instead artists whose artistic goals are intrinsically connected with a communal vision. Instead of separating from family and society in order to pursue their art, they find a deeper connection with the community as they use art to bring about a positive change in American society. By insisting on the primacy of an artist's ethnic and racial identity, which as Gloria Anzaldua says one "can't take off" and leave at the door of a "study or studio" (xxiv), Kingston in Tripmaster Monkey rewrites the discourse of a "typical" individualistic and alienated artist-protagonist.
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