Novel by Maxine Hong Kingston, set in San Francisco in the late sixties. Subtitled: His Fake Book. The protagonist Whittman Ah Sing dreams of bringing true theater to the people. Whittman is painfully american and rails against the notion that he is somehow exotic merely because he is an asian-american. Whittman bears an uncanny resemblance to Monkey, the trickster of Chinese legend who brought Buddhism from India and Kingston skillfully weaves the legend of monkey into the main narrative. Tripmaster Monkey touches on themes of race, culture and sexism and blends legend, poetry and passages from Rainer Maria Rilke's novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge into a surprisingly cohesive story.