China and the West

Kingston, Maxine Hong. Tripmaster monkey [ID D29876].
Ezra Greenspan : Kingston's lead character is a 1960s era Chinese American poet-playwright named Wittman Ah Sing, born and raised in San Francisco Chinatown and educated at Berkeley who attempts to put on stage his Chinese American version of his self. Kingston concocts a Chinese-inflected, English-centered discourse fit to express Wittman's hybrid experience – altogether, a language experiment, in its way, as rich and American as Walt Whitman's own.
James T.F. Tanner : Several chapter are based on Whitmanian material from Leaves of grass, especially Song of myself – appropriate because Kingston, like Whitman, is concerned with the construction of two entities, the self and the community, the requirement in a democratic society that the individual have proper scope for development and that the community have means for furthering social goals.