Chang and Eng
James Edward Smethurst’s “Foreground and Underground: the Left, Nationalism, and the Origins of the Black Arts Matrix” intrigued me to read more into the Asian American constituent, specifically Maxine Hong Kingston. Born and raised in California’s Central Valley to Chinese parents, Kingston attended Berkeley in the 1950s where she studied English and became exposed to the San Francisco Renaissance school of poetry and literature. As a daughter of Confucian parents she was raised into a kind of social awareness that brought her in line with the movement of New American Poetry. Although she is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, her work follows the same ideals found in New American Poetry and build upon those of the San Francisco Renaissance.
In The Guardian’s biography of Kingston she is reportedly aligned with the anti-war movements concerning Vietnam veterans much like the New American Poetry movement and the Beat poets. When she was awarded a humanities medal at the White House in 1997 where she delivered a message of forgiveness from Vietnam veterans to Bill Clinton, much to everyone’s shock. She started an annual writers’ retreat for veterans in both California and New York, which was inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh. Kingston herself came to Buddhism, “partly through the Beat poets, who, she says, went to Asia and brought [it] to the west.” She was accused of being a communist on one occasion, however, and became convinced that she was denied work because of it. She wasn’t, in fact, a communist.
In her article, “Reimagining the Self: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book,” Jamie Calhoun speaks to how Kingston’s novel works as a piece in the New American Poetry movement. The book is a parody of Post War America and is “an exploration of a radical model in the self centered on indebtedness, recognition and hospitality. Kingston’s main character Wittman Ah Sing is a Berkeley graduate and Beat frequenter himself, but is necessarily alienated from this largely white American movement and “must find another model for selfhood beside these literary greats.” The parody of the book comes in through a play Wittman writes about the the conjoined Chinese twins, Chang and Eng, through which he explores the idea of one of them being drafted while the other is not, pitting the confusion of selfhood against itself as Wittman does as a Beat. Calhoun writes that “the figure of the conjoined twins dramatizes this indebtedness that we must affirm for a more just society. Wittman Ah Sing realizes finally that, ‘Community is not built once-and-for-all; people have to imagine, practice and re-create it’ (Kingston 306).”
Kingston was a tangential member of the San Francisco Renaissance, part of the same genealogy that would pioneer the New American Poetry through her experience as a first generation American. With her exposure to communism and being an other in the largely white american literary movements, the parallels between her and the poets in the Black Arts Movement are interesting and prescient. While she builds upon the themes of the Beats, she is as critical of them as she is of mainstream America and its idolization of self.
I lieu of this week’s reading I am wondering if we have yet reached the transition to postmodernism. What does that transition look like and is it as stark as the shift to modernism?
In answer to your question, I think our readings from the New York School mentioned that they were firmly “postmodern,” although I could be wrong about that.
I’m glad you decided to dig into Kingston; I thought it was great how our background text discussed members of other ethnicities and how they were developing alongside and diverging from the poets of the Black Arts movement we focused on for this week. Your summary of her book actually made me want to read said book; maybe this summer when my back is not being broken by teaching and grad school!