MELUS, March 22nd, 1995
Maxine Hong Kingston's 'Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book' parodies the Chinese classic 'Journey to the West' by Wu Cheng-en. Parody is not used in the sense of a work as a destructive mockery of a predecessor, but rather in the sense of similarity to and, at the same time, difference from the thing parodied. Read against the Buddhist/Taoist concept of reality and illusion, the novel critiques those who claim knowledge of these categories. The novel's most important aspect, however, is that it was able to heal the rift between identity and unity, between the individual and the community. There...
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