In Maxine Hong Kingston's novel, Tripmaster Monkey, the protagonist, Wittman Ah Sing, serves as a striking example of what postcolonial theorists would call an interpellated subject as well as one who experiences what African-American theorists refer to as double-consciousness. Ambivalence brews in Wittman throughout the beginning of the novel as he navigates what he has internalized to be idiosyncrasies within himself. For instance, his own Chinese heritage perplexes him deeply as he gravitates toward while also distancing himself from this conflicted ancestry. On the one hand he graduated from UC Berkeley and lives in a gentrified part of San Francisco, a prime location for Asian and Pacific immigrants whom he looks down upon, referring to them as "FOB's" as he passes them on the streets, however on the other hand he experiences frequent and sudden outbursts of anger toward perpetrators of racism against Chinese immigrants, often railing against literary figures whom he clearly admires, like when he comes to the realization that Jack Kerouac would only have seen him for his ethnicity, a token foreign presence, like his, "little Chinese buddy Arthur Ma," from Big Sur, even going so far as to say, "If King Kerouac, King of the Beats, were walking here tonight, he'd see Wittman and think, "Twinkling little Chinese." Refute "little." Gainsay "twinkling.""
It's realizations like these in conjunction with certain characteristics that allow Wittman to pass racially as white, like for example his height at 6 feet tall and his bohemian attire which was common for mostly white hippies but not Asian-Americans, all of which engender an instability in Wittman's ontology by creating a significant cognitive dissonance; that fundamental tear in Wittman between a part of him representing his namesake and its mutual constitution with another part of him paralleling the Monkey King from the Chinese novel Journey to the West. From a psychological perspective this may illuminate his surreal solopsistic hallucinatory play-within-a-play trip towards the end of the novel, a vision catalyzed by his attending a Beatnik party where he feels out of place among all of the white, literary faces.
No other form of interpellation is more pervasive than when an individual participates, and is in fact dependent upon, the discourse of an ideology for deriving their sense of self. As such many postcolonial novelists are faced with the burden of choosing whether or not to write their works in English, for example Chinua Achebe's having to justify such a decision. Wittman's hyper awareness of language as a mediating presence in experience, and his desire to break away from the discourse which controls him, yet his inability to do so is instanced in his contemplation of the numerous different words describing varying hues of blond hair, but conversely how few words the english language has for black haired individuals, and he exclaims, "Hey, wait just a minute. Hold everything. Are there all those kinds of blondes or are there lots of words?" What the readers begins to realize as the novel progresses, despite Wittman's many apprehensions, as he continues to embrace the many sides of himself, foreshowed in moments when he declares his love for all races and peoples and his inclusionary visions for society, Wittman achieves a democracy-of-self in Western terms, and transcends his confines as postcolonial subject by living the high life of the mind. Here Wittman represents everything the Beat movement could have been, Beatific at its best, both in terms of Kingston's prose (definitely better than Kerouac's), but more importantly, as a much more subjective, sympathetic individual, which Kerouac and Ginsberg and company were too white to have accomplished.
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