Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), has a problem. Named for the great poet of American individualism and steeped in American cultural history, Wittman wants to be a latter-day Jack Kerouac, but to his chagrin, he comes to realize that the real Kerouac would never have seen him as a protégé. To Kerouac, Wittman could only have been another Victor Wong, preserved for posterity in Kerouac’s novel Big Sur (1962) as “little Chinese buddy Arthur Ma.” In other words, Wittman wants to be an American Artist — he wants to carve a place for himself in American cultural history — but finds that first he must disengage himself from the subordinate place that American culture has made for him on the basis of his ethnicity.

Wittman’s manic narrative registers the pain of being caught between two cultures, of being increasingly drawn away from the Chinese culture of his ancestors, which he admires, by the dominant, mainstream culture of Whitman, Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, and the University of California at Berkeley, which he also admires. Wittman wants to define an identity for himself that can truly be called “Chinese American,” but to do so he must prevent his Chinese inheritance from being transformed into a safely exotic form of cultural residue: he must prevent the “Chinese” from being marginalized by the “American.” Wittman’s goal is to create a form of public art that can redefine what it means to be “Chinese American” — redefine it for himself, his community, and the larger culture of which both he and his community are a part.