The struggle to forge a new identity recurs as a central theme in American minority literature. Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) problematizes, subverts, and displaces restrictive ethnic definitions by emphasizing the complex processes of cultural and linguistic representation and interpretation. Kingston writes to reconstitute the American experience through the strategy of "difference," highlighting the importance of difference within American cultures by challenging the status quo of American identity. By investigating Kingston's emphasis on the hyphen of ethnicity and cultural transformation/translation in the novel, this essay explores the problematic valorization of the hybrid ethnic/national equation and offers an alternative cultural "space" between the hyphenated Chinese and Americans. Incessantly reformulated and reformulating itself through languages and breaking boundaries, Kingston's narrative offers an alternative trickster space. Such space resists the homogenizing and unifying conflation to define "ethnicity" through her protagonist taking on multiple roles and constantly enacting versions of ethnicity.
