'Journey to the West'

This book explores specific novels by Maxine Hong Kingston Amy Tan and Gish Jen three Chinese American women writers with a specific focus on Tan and Jen who have been inspired by Kingston’s writing their predecessor. All three novelists utilize trickster strategies through characters and narratives that have Sunwukong as a common inspiration. They use his characteristics of inversion to expose and deconstruct essentialist and monolithic views of Asian / Chinese American ethnic identity and to voice their views on ethnicity and gendered racism particularly in the ways these two concepts relate to stereotypes of Asian American people and specific stereotypes of Chinese women.