The Chinatown and the City: Kingston, Kerouac, and the Bohemian Bay Area
This article is about the influence of Jack Kerouac's prose on Maxine Hong Kingston's novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. It looks closely at the way Kingston acknowledges Kerouac's impact both on her own prose style and on the "bohemian" sensibility of the 1960s Bay Area. Specifically, the article examines Kingston's integration into her novel of a prose passage from Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, and finds imbedded in what looks like a critique of Kerouac an endorsement and renewal of Kerouac's commitment to "delocalizing" the way urban, multicultural realities get represented in fiction.