American Born Chinese
In American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang weaves three seemingly unconnected narratives into one seamless coming-of-age story. There’s the legend of the Monkey King, a Chinese folk hero who longs to transcend his primate nature and be worshiped as “the great sage, equal of heaven.” Then there’s the saga of Jin Wang, a Chinese-American boy struggling to find his place at his ultra-white elementary school. Finally, there are scenes from a sitcom about a sporty, medium-cool white boy who changes schools out of shame every time his cartoonishly clichéd Chinese cousin Chink-kee comes to visit. Chink-kee has buckteeth, packs dead cats for lunch, goes pee-pee in Cokes, excels at school, and lusts after a “pletty Amellican girl wif bountiful Amellican bosom.” Reminiscent of the character Long Duk Dong in John Hughes’s Sixteen Candles, Chink-kee embodies every possible pop-culture stereotype about Asians, while Jin Wang’s experiences highlight how damaging and mean-spirited these kinds of stereotypes really are. The Monkey King, Jin Wang, and Chink-kee represent, respectively, fable, reality and kitsch, and as a whole Yang’s graphic novel concerns the way that we, as individuals, have to sort through our own delusions of grandeur as well as other people’s limiting preconceptions of us in order to understand and accept ourselves and make connections with others. The three plotlines in American Born Chinese converge perfectly at the book’s end, and, despite its short length and relatively straightforward structure and graphics, it comes vividly alive. Yang even manages to turn Transformers into a moving metaphor for self-acceptance and personal growth.
