monkey city

Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey presents an image of the city of San Francisco through the eyes of a young Chinese-American poet, Wittman Ah Sing. The city Wittman lives in is one of an eclectic mixture of people, poetry, and contradictions. Wittman struggles with his personal identity. He contains within him multiple identities that seem at times to contradict one another. For example, he is a true American; he was born in California and attended Cal, but he is equally Chinese. He relates to his Chinese ancestry and even resembles a saintly monkey found in Chinese legends. Furthermore, his name exemplifies the cohesive juxtaposition of his seemingly contradictory nationalities. His first name comes from the quintessential American poet, Walt Wittman, while his last name is traditionally Chinese. As Wittman traverses through the city, he struggles to accept that his complex personal identity cannot be simply reduced to any one thing in particular. Furthermore, the novel alludes to both Chinese and American literature, music, and pop culture which are interwoven into the fabric of the city. Kingston produces an image of both Wittman and San Francisco as 'living' things that contain multitudes of that may, at first glance, appear to contradict on another. However, it is the ongoing dialog between these opposing realities that make Wittman and San Francisco into such dynamic and complex beings.

Rebecca Solnit's Hollow City presents an image of San Francisco as a city that has culturally and historically been hollowed-out by the rich White yuppies. Solnit shows how gentrification—is the change in an urban area associated with the movement of more affluent individuals into a lower-class area—is transforming the city into an area that looks more like a cookie cutter-perfect façade than a richly multicultural area where the history of a place is more important than its outward appearance. Furthermore, Solnit goes on to note that the inflated real estate prices in the city are making it impossible for the people that build the houses to be able to afford to live there. She argues that the increase of wealth flowing into the city is harming it rather than helping it. She states, “when the new economy arrived in San Francisco, it began to lay waste the city’s existing culture—culture both in th sense of cultural diversity, as in ethnic cultures, and of creative activity, artistic and political” (18). She goes on to argue that the condition necessary for Bohemia to thrive is being squeezed out by gentrification. As new buildings arise, the memory of San Francisco is being evicted. Without the conditions to thrive, the essential quirky eclecticism of the city is struggling to survive.