Tripmaster Monkey and Hollow City

Alejandro Herrera
SF Literature
December 5, 2008

Hollow City & Tripmaster Monkey

Both authors offer accounts of displacement in order to give a new perception on a city which is generally known as a safe haven for many, including immigrants, artists and those looking for opportunity.
Tripmaster Monkey’s Whittman is a ghost in his home city. As an educated Chinese-American hippie, Whittman is constantly struggling in finding his own space in a vast city which, though it contains each fragment of his identity (hippie, American, Chinese, college graduate), has no place for his entire person. Amongst his peers, Whittman is expected to either fulfill the role of a successful college graduate or part of the loyal fraternity of Chinese-American youth in his community. While Whittman pursues social engagements, he is always faces the rejection of his complex identity which causes him to further isolate himself from others. Whittman is a character neither completely apart nor connected from his city and those around him. He becomes Ferlinghetti’s Dog character who is left alone to observe and label things without directly coming into contact with his surroundings.
In Hollow City, an image of San Francisco without artistic and cultural embrace is given. A city that has traditionally been a space for artists and the poor has turned into another part of the Silicon Valley. That artistic and beat culture is also a ghost in its own home. Traces of it can be found in upscale bars such as the Fly, which attract the bohemian bourgeois with the very culture and people it does not allow in its establishment.
San Francisco has become a symbol of refuge for immigrants, tolerance, and culture. However, in Tripmaster Monkey and Hollow City we see a place where a rich culture and peoples are now struggling to keep a space for themselves. Wittman is both an outcast to his fellow students and his people in Chinatown. Hollow City depicts residents losing their homes to gentrification and a bulldozer capitalist economy. Both authors depict a city which only has faint traces of what it once stood for.