Tripmaster Monkey

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years • From the acclaimed author of The Woman Warrior and China Men comes a novel centered on the life of a Chinese-American hippie and aspiring playwright as he explores the complexities of identity, culture, and artistic ambition.

“A dazzling leap of imaginative sympathy [and] narrative magic.”—The New York Times Book Review

Wittman Ah Sing is a young Chinese-American hippie in San Francisco during the late sixties. Named after America’s quintessential poet, indomitably garrulous and free-spirited, Wittman is as American as James Dean. Yet he also bears a strking resemblance to Monkey, the trickster-saint of Chinese legend who helped bring the Buddhist scriptures from India.

Driven by his dream of writing and staging an epic production of interwoven Chinese novels and folktales, Wittman embarks on an extraordinary journey through an era as fantastic as his ambition. Tripmaster Monkey is by turns surreal; exuberantly charged with spectacle, violence, and Chinese “talk-story”; and wildly, bitterly funny. Kingston’s masterful storytelling brings to life the struggles and triumphs of a young man caught between two worlds on a quest for self-discovery and cultural reconciliation.