Christina Garcia's Monkey Hunting Research Paper

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Monkey Hunting

Mixed cultures and mixed ancestries are both a large part of the plot and the theme of Monkey Hunting. The characters of course bear the literary responsibility as to the impact of cross-cultural and mixed ancestries; but the setting, the ironies and the various narratives by various characters carry the messages that the author delivers with both eloquence and coarseness.

On many occasions in this book Cristina Garcia brings the reader into the cultural stew that has resulted from Chen Pan's arrival in Cuba and the offspring he is responsible for. Mixed cultures result in clashes in what to eat and how to love. On pages 203-204 for example, readers are treated to the fact that Vietnamese people love to use fish sauce. Anyone who has visited a Vietnamese restaurant knows that you won't find ketchup or mustard on the table, but there will be fish sauce. And here is Chen Pan's great-great grandson, Domingo Chen, of Cuban, African, and Asian extraction, in Saigon in 1970 with Tham Thanh Lan, a Vietnamese woman.

She spread fish sauce on everything," not the least of which was the ice cream (Neapolitan) that Domingo gave her. She hated peanut butter, hamburgers, Oreo cookies and other traditionally American foods. Worse yet, Domingo couldn't teach her to learn even a few Spanish words, but on the other hand, Domingo couldn't kiss her without having fish sauce on his lips and they couldn't make love unless the fish sauce was "spread...everywhere."

Domingo apparently had too much of a blend of African / Cuban / Asian blood in him to suit the officer's club culture, readers learn on page 209. Mixed cultures in this case were not welcome, albeit as for his hair being "afro," the history of the war in Vietnam shows that many African-Americans were in the front lines and in fact took the brunt of the attacks from enemy soldiers in many instances. "His features [were] not immediately identifiable as one of them" (p. 209), Garcia writes, and in this case it is a matter not that Domingo was darker skin than the "norm" but that they didn't know what ethnicity he was connected to. The nurses in the hospital didn't treat him well either? The cops in Guantanamo arrested him for "practicing 'negritude'"? This has the feel of exaggeration and hyperbole on the part of the author, who is not shy about loading up the narrative with impossible acts (on page 206 General Bishop's fake leg flew off and knocked a "startled peasant off his water buffalo" - really?).

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But meanwhile the U.S. Army discouraged mixed-ancestry partnerships and tried to keep "the couples apart" especially if "children were involved." Those "American-Asian" babies might not fit into the American culture, the military brass was saying, and indeed that was the author's spin on how the war honchos were approaching the issue. No cure for "gook hoodooed" but "death itself" (p. 208). Domingo wondered about all of this, "these cross-cultural lusts"; were people really supposed to "mix with others from themselves?" (p. 209).

Sometimes in her book, Garcia brings people together from two totally different cultures and they become temporarily close - but that closeness becomes elusive, as though you can't always bring opposites together and expect a lasting sense of belonging. On page 140 Chen Fang explains that her lover, the elitist French woman Dauphine, has "long blond hair [that] hung like a voyage"; and on page 145, in a dream, Chen Fang sees Dauphine in a dream after Dauphine has returned to France, and this time Dauphine's "blond hair bobbed like a New Year's lantern as she caught another plum." Blond is very much the opposite of the color of Latino and Asian hair - blond contrasts dramatically with black hair, which perhaps is part of the literary point that the author is making.

Meanwhile, Chen Fang loved green plums, and Dauphine (p. 142) had….....

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