The story follows Wittman Ah Sing, an American graduate of University of California, Berkeley of Chinese ancestry in his adventures about San Francisco during the 1960s.

Heavily influenced by the Beat movement, and exhibiting many prototypical features of postmodernism, the book retains numerous themes, such as ethnicity and prejudice, addressed in Kingston's other works.

His thoughts become more fixated on the similarities between himself, and the character of a monkey king, Sun Wukong from the Chinese epic novel Journey to the West, giving the novel its name.

After overhearing a woman, Taña De Weese, reciting poetry, Wittman composes the basic structure of a play.

[2] Although the novel is full of allusions to other works of literature, it is mainly based on Ulysses by James Joyce, "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman, and the epic Chinese novel Journey to the West.

[3] Other frequently alluded to works include Griever: An American Monkey King in China by Gerald Vizenor, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke, and Hamlet by William Shakespeare.