Wittman Ah Sing, a young Chinese-American hippie in San Francisco in the late 1960s, is as American as James Dean. He also bears a striking resemblance to Monkey, the trickster-saint of Chinese legend. Driven by his dream of writing and staging an epic production of interwoven Chinese novels and folktales, his life becomes an extraordinary journey through an era as fantastic as his ambition--told in a novel by turns surreal, exuberantly charged with spectacle, violence, and Chinese "talk-story," and wildly, bitterly funny.

Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, and The Fifth Book of Peace, among other works. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. She worked for many years as a senior lecturer in creative writing at UC Berkeley. Kingston lives in Oakland, California.

View titles by Maxine Hong Kingston

About

Wittman Ah Sing, a young Chinese-American hippie in San Francisco in the late 1960s, is as American as James Dean. He also bears a striking resemblance to Monkey, the trickster-saint of Chinese legend. Driven by his dream of writing and staging an epic production of interwoven Chinese novels and folktales, his life becomes an extraordinary journey through an era as fantastic as his ambition--told in a novel by turns surreal, exuberantly charged with spectacle, violence, and Chinese "talk-story," and wildly, bitterly funny.

Author

Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, and The Fifth Book of Peace, among other works. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. She worked for many years as a senior lecturer in creative writing at UC Berkeley. Kingston lives in Oakland, California.

View titles by Maxine Hong Kingston

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