A Quest For Cultural Identity: A Postcolonial Study Of Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

Tripmaster Monkey is Maxine Hong Kingston's first novel. In this novel, Kingston greatly concerns the theme of Chinese Americans' identity, and shows her neo-cognition of their cultural identity and rethinking of constructing ethnic belonging. This thesis adopts the postcolonialism as its theoretical framework, traces Wittman Ah Sing's pilgrimage to find his self, and elaborates how the Chinese Americans seek and construct their cultural identity. At the beginning, Wittman is deeply influenced by the mainstream ideology, so he accepts the American values and excludes the Chinese culture. But the mainstream ideology intends to homogenize the alien elements, and the whites' racialism to the Chinese Americans still strongly exists. Therefore, Wittman is treated as an "Other" and feels confused about his own identity. In order to be independent in the multicultural context, he realizes the importance of keeping the "Chineseness" and creating his ethnic community. So he tries to establish Chinese Americans' cultural identity on the basis of Chinese culture in the multicultural American society. Obviously, the Chinese Americans' ethnicity can not be fixed rather it can be changed and created; their identity is not static but it is dynamic and fluid; their cultural identity is supposed to embrace the Chinese culture and American culture, which is characterized by hybridity and multiplicity. Indeed, such kind of cultural identity not only belongs to Wittman Ah Sing, but also reflects the real characteristics of all the Chinese Americans in the present era. These characteristics of the identity of Chinese Americans shed much light on today's globalized world, on both the study of other ethnic identity in the globalized society and how the different cultures coexist harmoniously in the multicultural context.