Fragmented San Francisco

In the works Tripmaster Monkey and Poeta en San Francisco by Maxine Hung Kingston and Barbara Jane Reyes, the classic, complete, un-fragmented image of San Francisco as a glorious Mediterranean city of the west is morcellated, and instead represented as a multitude of separate, individual spaces and ideas. Both works attempt to dissociate the surrounding city from its past, by de-romanticizing certain elements, or simply fragmenting the cities landscape or language. Both authors use their work in order to represent the city the way they see it. However, due to the nature of the different forms of the works, they utilize separate techniques in order to achieve this similar representation.

In Tripmaster Monkey, the protaganist Wittman Ah Sing tries to establish himself as a member of a community in the city, while lacking any specific community to attach to. Throughout the novel, he attempts to bond with or become fastened to many different communities, including his Chinese heritage, but without any success. It is only the creation of his own, and constant performance of that community, that Ah Sing is able to find the community he desires. The city of San Francisco is presented in this novel not as one coherent landscape, or one group of “San Franciscans,” but rather as a conglomerated space that is fragmented and torn between its many different cultural diversities.

In Barbara Jane Reyes' Poeta en San Francisco, Reyes takes the fragmentation hinted at in the code switching, and lack of community in Tripmaster Monkey to an even further extreme. Where Kingston would write words in phoenetic Chinese, or make puns between the two languages the text is engaged in (chinese and english), Reyes will simply write in the other language. Her work contains bits of language that are not only disparate, but at times untranslateable. This use of code switching - not as a tool, but as a structure - pushes her representation of San Francisco to a fragmented extreme.

Both works strive to represent the almost unrepresentable, fully multi-dimensional San Francisco, and although they use similar techniques, they do so in unique and exciting ways. The works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Barbara Jane Reyes help to establish a more complete vision of San Francisco than has been presented before.