Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  “You must be very hungry,” said Taña, watching Wittman load his plate. “It was getting really interesting in there. I want to tell them about my airplane.”

  “World War II was where I came in. I’ve heard their war stories so many times. How Mom and the aunties used their beauty to get this country to go to war, to rescue ladies-in-distress, who looked, for example, like themselves. The next thing, they’ll tell about their parades that stretched from one end of the country to the other and stopped the U.S. selling scrap iron to Japan. And Auntie Doll will do her speech about buying war bonds instead of opium. Taña, you’ll never meet people who love working unless they’re in show business. They used to have work that they loved. Now they’re housewives who have nothing better to do than sit around all day playing mah-jongg until they die. It’s tragic.”

  Taña was looking at him out of sanpaku eyes. He’d been aware all along that she was gwutting his family with that scrutiny from another world. Judy Garland has sanpaku eyes, too much eyewhite under the irises, and John Lennon does too. Elvis and Brando act like their eyes are sanpaku by looking out from lowered heads. Over her chow mein, Taña was feyly giving him lots of eyewhite. If she says “dragon ladies,” definitely divorce.

  “What’s so tragic about mah-jongg?” she asked. “It keeps them home. They’re not out escalating our involvement in Southeast Asia.” Taña’s E.S.P. almost let her foresee that Auntie May-bo, Miss Australia Down Under, would take her troupe to Viet Nam.

  “You don’t have to be so understanding. The highpoint of a life shouldn’t be a war. At the war rallies, they performed their last, then the theater died. I have to make a theater for them without a war.”

  “They would love to perform again, I know it. Your mother and Lily Rose and Peggy and Aunt Bessie—they’re still pretty, and want to show it off. I’m sorry; I’m not going to say ‘still pretty’ about old people anymore. That’s like ‘She’s pretty—for an old lady,’ ‘He’s hard-working—for a Negro.’ Some women get pretty in old age. I plan to be that way.”

  “Did you recognize any of them? You can see them on the late show. Peggy played Anna May Wong’s maid, when Anna May Wong wasn’t playing the maid herself. Come here. I want you to meet a respectable member of my family. I have a granny. She hates mah-jongg. She’s not invited to the front room. Why don’t we bring her some food?”

  They carried plates and bowls to the back of the house, where he called at a door, “PoPo, tadaima-a-a,” Japanese. No little-old-lady voice answered, “Okaerinasai.” She had taught him more phrases than that, but when he tried them out on Japanese speakers, they didn’t seem to mean anything. She spoke language of her own, or she was holding on to a language that was once spoken somewhere, or she was more senile than she appeared. Wittman opened the door, but no little old pipe-smoking lady there. They put the dishes on her coffee table, and sat on her settee and her footstool. The room was webbed with lace that she tatted from thread. The light made shadow webs, everything woofing and wefting in circles and spirals, daisies, snowflakes, the feather eyes of white peacocks. Well, if you’re going to be a string-saver, you can do better than roll it up into a ball. He opened the windows and started the room buoying and drifting.

  GrandMaMa owned a phonograph but mostly Cantonese opera and “Let’s Learn English” records. There were pictures of little Wittman in his disguises—sumo wrestler, Injun with fringe, the Invisible Man (which he had worn only once because everybody felt bad for “the poor burned boy”), opera monkey. “Are you supposed to be a monkey?” asked Taña. “Not ‘supposed to be.’ I am,” said Wittman. “That’s true,” laughed Taña. Pictures of aunties shaking hands with F.D.R. and Truman. A girl—Jade Snow Wong?—christening a liberty ship at the Marin Shipyards. The thermos of hot water sat next to tea glasses, which were jelly glasses caked with what looked like dry dirt. “Want some tea?” Wittman offered. “It’s supposed to look like that. You’re supposed to let the tea residue keep accumulating.” Against the day when you can’t afford tea leaves? So when you drink water, it Zenly reminds you of tea? “Like a wooden salad bowl,” he explained.

  “No, thanks anyway,” she said, which was all right. He didn’t want a girl who would gulp it right down saying, “How interesting. How Zen. Say something Chinese.”

  They sat quiet. He did not turn on the t.v. to watch some Sunday sport. Taña was probably picturing his grandmother as an old bride—Miss Havisham—or a spider woman. They lit up smokes. He hadn’t smoked in front of Mom, who would’ve said, “Quit, you. You quit.”

  “Your grandmother’s in show business too.” Taña was looking at the memory village on the dresser. It did look like a stage designer’s model for a set. There were rows of houses with common walls, like railroad flats of New York, like shotgun apartments of the Southwest, except no doors from home to home. The rows were separated by alleys, which were labeled with street names. Two of the houses had thatch stick roofs that opened up; ladders led to lofts. The rungs were numbered; the adobe steps with only two-risers were also numbered, one, two. One of the houses had a brick stove; the next-door had two stoves. Toy pigs, numbered, lived inside the houses and walked in the alleys. The rich man’s house had a larger courtyard and more wings than the others, plus flowered tiles, and parades or boatloads of people and animals atop the horn-curved eaves. In the plaza was a well, and beside the well (where PoPo had fetched water) was the temple (where the men whistled at her and made remarks, and she dropped and broke her water jar, and the men laughed). Away from the houses was the largest building, the music building for the storage and playing of drums and horns. There were numbers on the lanes and paths out to the fields. It was autumn; the fields were shades of gold. One of the fields was edged with thirty-three lichee trees. “Twenty of those trees belonged to my great-great-uncle,” said Wittman, “and three of them belonged to my great-grandfather. He didn’t plant them or ever see them. He sent the money to grow them; some autumns his family thought of him, and mailed him dried lichee. Near harvest time, the boys, my cousins far removed, stayed awake nights guarding the trees with a loaded gun.” A bridge went over a stream. Above the rice fields was a pumpkin patch and a graveyard. “People from this village don’t like Hallowe’en or pumpkin pie. They’ve eaten too much of it. Pumpkins were the only crop that hardly ever failed. Like your Irish potatoes. People’s skin turned orange from eating nothing but pumpkins. Slanty-eyed jack-o’-lanterns. I used to run Crackerjack cars on the paths, and boats on the rivers. Should the I.N.S.—Immigration—raid this room, looking for illegals, they can take this model as evidence, and deport our asses. Everybody who claimed to have come from here studied this model, and described it to Immigration. It is not a model of anything, do you understand? It’s a memory village.” He slid the model onto his open hand and held it like a birthday cake. “This is it. My land. I am a genie who’s escaped from the bottle city of Kandor. I have told you immigration secrets. You can blackmail me. And make me small again, and stopper me up. But if I don’t have a friend to tell them to, where am I?”

  “Thank you, Wittman. I won’t tell.”

  “Thank you. I’m trusting you with my life, Taña, and my grandma’s life.” But he was holding out on her the documentation. In PoPo’s Gold Mountain trunk was the cheat sheet, a scroll like a roll of toilet paper with questions and answers about the people and the pigs who lived in those houses. Nobody had destroyed the scroll or the memory village. Wonder why.

  “This room smells like a grandma’s room,” said Taña. “I have two grandmas, and their houses smell like this. Tell me when I get the old-lady smell, Wittman. Or do they get it from using a powder that’s out of fashion? Orrisroot, lavender.”

  “Salonpas. The old lady who lives here may not be my grandmother. She showed up one day, and we took her in. I’ve tested her for her background: I watched for her to hurt herself, and heard what she said for ‘Ouch!’ She said, ‘Bachigataru.’ Japanese. At New Year’s, she doesn’t go to the po
st office to have her green card renewed, so either she’s an illegal alien or she’s a regular citizen. The night she showed up she brought news about relatives that we shouldn’t have lost touch with. My parents acted like they understood her, ‘Yes, the cousins.’ ‘Of course, the village.’ ‘Yes, three ferries west of the city, there live cousins and village cousins. Anybody knows that.’ They didn’t let on that they’d lost their Chinese. You want to know another secret? She may be my father’s other wife, and they’re putting one over on my mom. Not to get it on sexually, she’s old, but so that my mom will take care of her.” The strange old lady pulled her apron to her back, a cape, and hung a twenty-four-carat gold medallion to her front, a breastplate, and belted herself with a twenty-four-carat gold buckle shield. Waving fans of dollar bills, she danced whirlygiggly the way they danced where she came from. They couldn’t very well turn her away.

  He wandered in back of her shoji screens, opened her closet, walked into her bathroom. No grandma dead or alive. Her long pipe was gone; her shoes were nowhere to be found. In the medicine cabinet was his grandfather’s safety razor. He wet his moustache and beard, soaped up, and shaved his face clean. “That ought to freak my mother out,” he said. “How do I look?”

  “You look better,” said Taña. So why is she looking at herself in the mirror instead? She ought to be touching and kissing his nude face. In any case I felt a certain shyness … such as one feels before a mirror in front of which someone is standing.

  “My mom hasn’t seen my face for a while. I’m going to give her a break. She’s my mother, after all, and has a right to see her son’s face.”

  “Wittman, answer me something,” said Taña. “Honestly. Promise?”

  “Yes. What?”

  “What does ‘pahng yow’ mean? You called me that to your mother.”

  Uh-oh, thought Wittman.

  “It doesn’t mean ‘wife,’ does it?”

  “No, it means ‘friend.’ Let’s go. I’m ready to smoothface my mother.”

  Holding hands with his wife and friend, he led her back to the mah-jongg games. He did not let go of her hand.

  “Ma, what do you think?” he asked, poking his clean-shaven face in front of her mah-jongg tiles.

  “What do I think about what?” said Ruby. “You eat enough, Wit Man? You looking skinny.”

  He straightened up, tucking his wife’s hand under his arm. “Ma, where’s PoPo?”

  “Out.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “To the Joang Wah to see a movie.”

  “I’ll go pick her up, give her a car ride back.” Leave home, come back visit, give the old folks a ride.

  “No need. She’ll get a car ride.”

  “I’ll pick her up anyway.”

  “She may not be there. She does errands.”

  “She’s not in an old-age home, is she, Ma? You didn’t dump her? She’s not dead?” Said in front of the aunties, who were all ears.

  “She’s alive. Strike you dead for saying such a thing.”

  “She isn’t really at the movies. Where is she?”

  “Wit Man, I have taken good care of her for twenty years.” Arranging her tiles. Gin.

  “Ruby took in a poor stranger lady, and gave her food and a home,” said Aunt Lilah.

  “The money you spent on her,” said Auntie Jadine, “you sacrificed your own pleasures.” Her commadres were helping Mom out giving her back-up. Certain aunties who were present needed to loudly let everyone know that they were against bringing a grandma over from China to be a charwoman. They hadn’t talked their old lady into signing her Hong Kong building over to them, then selling it to pay for her expenses in America.

  “And I taught her a skill,” said Ma. “She can run wardrobe anywhere.” Grandma had earned her keep, mending costumes, ironing, sleeping in dressing rooms as dark-night security watchwoman.

  “Oh, you’re too kind, Ruby.” “Ruby has a big heart. Big-hearted Ruby—what they call you behind your back.”

  “Okay, Ma,” said Wittman. “Where is she?”

  “Your father has her.”

  “He took her camping?”

  “He has to take care of her too. He has to take responsibility. She’s from his side.”

  He walked to the door, pulling his lady with him. “I’m going to find her.”

  “I took responsibility long enough,” shouted Ruby. “You find her, you the one responsible. You never took too much responsibility before. What for you care about the old lady all of a sudden?”

  “I want to announce something to her. We gotta go. Bye, everybody.”

  “Tan-ah, go so soon?” “Stay, Wit Man.” “Don’t go already.” “You going?” “Stay eat with us.” “Kiss auntie goodbye.” “What you announcing?” “Where you going so fast, young man?”

  “Going on our honeymoon. Bye.”

  Out to the porch and gate and street, chasing the bride and groom, came the voices and the clacking. “Your what?” “Eeek!” “What’d he say?” “They married.” “Who?” “Congratulations, honey boy.” “Happy long life, Tan-ah!”

  “Married!” shouted Wittman. “Goodbye, Mrs. Ah Sing!” called Taña. “Thank you for the delicious luncheon.”

  Taña got in on the driver’s side, her turn at the wheel. “Steve McQueen taught me how to drive,” she said, and peeled away from the curb. She took her passenger’s cigarette, and sucked hard on it. “Let’s go to Grandma’s rescue.” She sped out of town. Her pointy nose cut into the wind, born for a convertible. He directed her to the American River. At the turn-off, she did a double-clutch downshift from the highway to the frontage road. Her hair was blowing back, a giant brush of a mane painting the hills its own color.

  “You’re the only one who noticed I shaved,” he said. “See how neglectful of her family my mother is? I wouldn’t put it past her to give Grandma the old heave-ho.”

  “You have the same custom as Eskimos?” asked Taña. “You have a ‘leading out of the old citizen’? I read that in William Burroughs.”

  “I don’t know. How many times does something have to be done for it to be a tradition? There has to be ceremony. You can’t just toss a grandmother on an iceberg, and run. Eskimos probably had an aloha ceremony with torches and honors, and the old citizen sat on a lit-up birthday cake of ice. She would feel bad without her farewell.”

  “And her body heat warms up her piece of glacier. It breaks off, calves, and Grandma is riding away on a white calf. Like Europa. It melts, and she falls into the water and has ecstasy of the deep.” She put her hands over her eyes. He took the wheel, steering from the side until she got a-hold of herself.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Once Wittman saw the inside of an old-age home, a board-and-care. The beautiful aunties were dancing. The t.v. set had been left on out of respect for those whose heads were turned toward it. Out of a mouth hole with no teeth, an old guy farted, “Niggers.” His face and eyes hadn’t looked like he meant it. He hadn’t meant anything; vibes from other people who had sat in that same padded wheelchair had come emanating out of it and through his body and out of his open mouth. “Nigger” is in the American air and will use any zombie mouth. Bust Grandma out of a place like that.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me anything about your dad?” asked Taña. “I could use some preparation.”

  “His name’s Zeppelin.”

  “Who?”

  “Zeppelin.”

  “Like in dirigible?”

  “It’s a perfectly respectable Chinese-American given name. Spondaic, heroic, presidential. Say your poems to him. He’ll like you. He likes unusual people. You guys are really going to get along. He’s the one started me on my trips. He used to play this hand organ that he won off a Gypsy for the line in front of theaters. He cranked out music, like grinding rice or coffee or wringing the wash. He didn’t need music lessons. But where to put the money box? He tried leaving a guitar case open at his feet, but people are too shy to come up during the con
cert. They don’t like to interrupt. They can toss coins, they can’t toss bills. But the music’s over, they go, forget to pay. And passing a hat unaccompanied, they take money out. A helper to follow the hat has to be paid. So he made little Wittman his money monkey. He paid me in peanuts. You don’t have to split the take with the monkey, which is cute in itself. People like to give it money and watch its fingers take the coins, and it bites the coins with its teeth. Nowadays he does a lot of fishing. He watches ‘American Bandstand’ with the sound off.”

  On Slough Road, they passed houseboats, fishing boats, a two-room motel For Sale, piers, rafts, truck-size inner tubes, all attached to the shore. Beyond the settled part of the river, Wittman looked for a tree with familiar clothes in its branches. There. Pop’s river camp. Two bird cages with a java finch in each swung side by side. A pick-up truck, hood up like its mouth open for dental work, was connected by jumper cables to a V.W., wings open for its backseat battery. Neither engine was running; the truck had drained the bug battery. Fishing poles were staked at the water. Taña parked behind the mobile home, from which came masculine rumble and laughter; you feel like a child listening to the wolf-bear sounds of Father and men friends. Does a girl walking into this camp think about raping sites? The trailer bounced on its shocks and springs. “Son of a bitchee!” That was Pop; he’d learned to swear from Harry S. Truman. “Naygemagehai!” That was Uncle Bingie saying, “Your mother’s cunt!” “Say lo! Say, la!” Uncle Sagacious Jack losing, and shouting about death. “Kill the commies!” Big Uncle Constant Fong winning. (He used to yell, “Kill the japs!,” slap down his cards, scoop up his money. If it weren’t for the Japanese and the red-hot communists, these old futs would have lost their spirit.) “My pop and his friends are gambling,” Wittman explained. “Poker.”

  He led the way through the grass to the open door of the trailer, Taña behind and to the side of him. Be careful not to trip over the siphoning hoses and extension cords, which were circulating juices from buckets and machines to other buckets and machines. A cookout grill sat level on top of black rocks. Pot-shaped rice crusts drying in the screenbox. Father is a string-bailer and rice-crust saver. The shouting stopped. Ha! Got the drop on the old futs. We could have been robbers, County Sheriff’s men, Immigration, Fish and Game.