It is clear that work of art cannot itself be asked to change world or to transform itself into political praxis; on other hand, it would be desirable to develop a keener sense of complexity and ambiguity of that process loosely termed reflection or expression. --Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious Using metaphors or images such as woman Warrior, butterfly, monkey, and floating world to dramatize transformation of central character(s), in both psychological and physical terms, has been a key narrative strategy for American writers. The double, reversing metamorphosis at end of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, for example, evokes emotional responses from audience: after Song Liling reveals herself as not only a spy but a man, Monsieur Rene Gallimard sadly turns himself into Butterfly by putting on a kimono and committing suicide. Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey narrates a story equally compelling, if not as heart-breaking. Struggling to avoid being fixed in any single category, Wittman Ah Sing chooses to be Monkey King, a popular half-animal and half-divine trickster figure in Chinese mythology, by attempting to stage, presumably, as many as seventy-two identity transformations. These drastic changes of character, tragic, comic, or tragicomic, signify consequences of difference with regard to culture, gender, race, class, sexuality, and ideology. As a narrative strategy, employing metaphors to enact character transformations to convey important thematic messages, particularly for authors such as Hwang, Kingston, Amy Tan, and Cynthia Kadohata, has proven quite effective. However, tendency to misread, appropriate and co-optate American materials for mainstream consumption, observes Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, sometimes reaches an unbearable degree: even those works that attempt to break free of constraining expectations are constantly in danger of being read just for their `difference' (4, 211).(1) Meanwhile, emotional charge from within American communities that some writers, catering to dominant culture's expectations, have faked traditions and perpetuated racist stereotypes, raises further questions about how to read and interpret American texts from different reading positions.(2) Although waves of charge and defense, a few years ago appearing to polarize American communities, now seem to have ebbed, same debate may erupt any moment when major American critics are introduced and issue of cultural authenticity enters classroom discussion. The critical and pedagogical task in a multiethnic setting, therefore, requires communal efforts to cross of difference, as Barbara Johnson puts it, and to register the dynamics of any encounter between an inside and an outside (318). What has happened in American studies actually reflects various and often controversial dimensions and directions of American ethnic studies as a whole. Indeed, so-called minority literatures, African American, American, Native American, Latino/Latina American, etc., share much in common. An inter-ethnic perspective is only natural and certainly helpful in dealing with complexity of some American controversies. In studying American narratives of transformation, for instance, it is potentially fruitful if we bring across thresholds of Asian America ever-changing image of African American Signifying Monkey. It is amazing yet not simply accidental that African American Signifying Monkey finds counterparts in American fiction, particularly in case of Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey. A careful comparison of Tripmaster Monkey with Signifying Monkey ought to shed light on other American metaphors symbolizing uncertaining of being,(3) and on similar phenomena in reality and literature that challenge American ethnic studies in general. …