[Fic] American Gods: The Journey West

[springgreen]

Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: Not mine!
Summary: Listen, and I will tell you how Monkey comes to America.
Notes: Written for st_aurafina for Yuletide 2007. Rachel, Yoon, Vom Marlowe, and Mely all guessed me correctly! (I felt so obvious writing this!)

Read The Journey West

Fandom information

American Gods is a book by Neil Gaiman about old myths

Comments

[fmanalyst]

It's a lovely story, but I have something to add, call it a gift for the story. I was organizing my home office this afternoon and came across a binder of articles I collected when I was writing a paper on Monkey in anime and other forms. One of them was an interview with Maxine Hong Kingston, conducted by Marilyn Chin, about the oral transmission of stories. It's in the journal Melus 16:5 (Winter 1989-90). The interview is just after the publication of Tripmaster Monkey. You would love this article (assuming you haven't already seen it).

[springgreen]

Oh, that's awesome! (Also, you wrote a paper on Monkey? So cool!) I'll have to look that up somewhere; I've never seen it. Also, uh, I should really read Maxine Hong Kingston, heh.

[fmanalyst]

I don't think I've ever published my paper on Monkey. It was a conference presentation at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts 2 or 3 years ago. I'll post it to my blog in the next couple of days.

I would recommend Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston. It's set in '60s San Francisco. Wittman Ah Sing is a Chinese-American writer who decides to write a play based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It has been a few years since I read it, but I remember it as looking at Asian-American identity in that period across ethnicities.

[springgreen]

I'll post it to my blog in the next couple of days.

Yay! Looking forward to it.

[smillaraaq]

Oh, this was you! *hearts* I haven't been following a lot of folks' Yuletide recs because so many of them have been for fandoms I'm unfamiliar with, and *almost* passed this one by because I've never read any of Gaiman's novels, but I gave it a shot hoping that knowing a little about Monkey would be enough to counterbalance not knowing the Gaiman novel, and I was so, so glad I did. Thank you for writing this!

(And yes, FWIW, I've always heard that the "Sandalwood Mountain" name applied to Hawai'i as a whole. Long before the days of the sugar and pineapple plantations, sandalwood was the first great post-contact export; the trade was so frenzied that the sandalwood forests were overharvested to near-extinction by the early 1800s.)

[springgreen]

Thanks so much for the info! I tried to do some quick googles while writing but ran out of time =(. And oh, I'm so glad you liked the story! I think it is one of the most personal ones I have written and also the one where people's feedback meant so much.

[jinian]

It's a good story. Sometimes they don't take long, and I expect that burning latkes stands in karmically for other forms of agonizing.

I also grew up reading and hearing about Monkey and Li Bai, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Yellow River and Xi'an

This gives me a strange and perhaps counterproductive urge to have a kid so that she can grow up hearing about all those things from her auntie Oyce. :)

[springgreen]

Thank you!

Also, bwahaha. I shudder at the thought of what I would do to a kid... ;)

[gement]

I just found this story recced from a list of really powerful fics. The story moved me. The explanations in this post moved me even more. Thanks.