American Born Chinese

American Born Chinese is a graphic novel that looks simple and is not. Gene Luen Yang published it in 2006, and it has three stories running through it, drawn in three different registers. One is a myth about the Monkey King. One is a realistic school story about a Chinese-American boy named Jin Wang. One is a sitcom about a white teenager named Danny and his grotesque Chinese cousin, Chin-Kee. The stories seem unrelated for most of the book. Then they meet, and the meeting changes how you read everything that came before.

I came to the book after seeing it taught in schools and recommended as a gateway graphic novel. It is easy to see why. Yang's line is clean and expressive, the panels are easy to follow, and the humor is broad. But the book is also willing to make the reader uncomfortable. Chin-Kee is drawn as a walking racist caricature, and the story frames his visits with canned laughter and applause. The laughter is the point. Yang is showing how stereotypes become entertainment, and how easily an audience can laugh along without noticing what it is laughing at.

The Monkey King

The first strand is a retelling of the Monkey King from Journey to the West, with some changes. The Monkey King rules the monkeys of Flower-Fruit Mountain. He hears music and smells food from Heaven and goes to a divine dinner party. A guard stops him at the door. The guard does not care that the Monkey King is powerful or famous. He says the Monkey King is a monkey, and monkeys are not allowed. The guard also mentions shoes, which is a small detail that becomes a running joke and a symbol.

The Monkey King is humiliated. He attacks the party, then goes home and becomes obsessed with his own fur and smell. He orders his subjects to wear shoes. He isolates himself and studies kung fu for eighty days. He masters invulnerability and the ability to change his shape. When he emerges, he looks larger and more human. He declares himself the Great Sage, Equal to Heaven, and forces the other deities to use the title.

Tze-Yo-Tzuh, the creator, confronts him. The creator tells the Monkey King that he is still what he was made to be. The Monkey King refuses the lesson and tries to escape the universe. He reaches five golden pillars, marks one with his name, and returns triumphant. Tze-Yo-Tzuh reveals that the pillars were his fingers. The Monkey King never escaped. He is buried under a mountain for five hundred years, unable to practice kung fu.

That story is funny and sad at the same time. The Monkey King's desire to be recognized is understandable. His refusal to accept his own nature is the problem. The mountain is not just a punishment. It is a lesson he has to learn in his body. Five hundred years later, the monk Wong Lai-Tsao arrives with a mission from Tze-Yo-Tzuh. He tells the Monkey King that he can free himself by releasing his kung fu and returning to his original monkey form. The Monkey King resists, then does it. He defeats the demons threatening the monk, leaves his shoes behind, and joins the journey. The shoes are a beautiful detail. He does not need them anymore.

Jin Wang

The second strand is Jin Wang's story. Jin is born in San Francisco's Chinatown. His parents are immigrants. He plays with Transformers and goes with his mother to an herbalist. At the herbalist's shop, the herbalist's wife asks him what he wants to be when he grows up. Jin says he wants to be a Transformer. She tells him that he can become anything he wants if he is willing to forfeit his soul. It is a joke, or a warning, or both. The line comes back later in a dream.

Jin's family moves to a suburb. He starts third grade as the only Chinese-American student in his class. His teacher mispronounces his name, assumes he is from China, and tells the class that he stopped eating dogs when he came to America. The other kids repeat the joke. The only other Asian student is Suzy Nakamura, who is Japanese-American, and she is not much comfort. Jin is lonely.

He makes a friend named Peter, but Peter's friendship is full of small humiliations. Peter moves away. Jin meets Wei-Chen Sun, a new boy from Taiwan. Wei-Chen speaks little English and tries to be friendly. Jin initially rejects him, telling him to speak English and refusing his hand. Then Wei-Chen shows him a Transformer toy, and Jin changes his mind. The toy is a bridge between them. It is also a symbol of transformation, which the book uses deliberately.

Jin and Wei-Chen become best friends. They grow up together. In seventh grade, Jin develops a crush on a white classmate named Amelia Harris. Wei-Chen starts dating Suzy. Jin is awkward around Amelia. He gets a perm to look more like Greg, a confident white boy who sits near her. The perm is painful and silly, but it gives Jin enough confidence to ask Amelia out. She says yes.

Their date is a small masterpiece of embarrassment. Jin is worried about his body odor because his parents will not let him use deodorant. He tries dry soap under his arms. The soap leaves a trail of bubbles, and Amelia does not notice, or pretends not to. They ride bikes, see a movie, drink milkshakes. For a few hours, Jin is a normal kid on a normal date. Then Greg tells him to stay away from Amelia. Greg says he is not interested in her himself, but he worries about her social standing. The implication is racial, and Jin knows it. He agrees, then hates himself for agreeing.

The Jin sections are painful because they are so recognizable. Yang captures the way a kid can absorb the surrounding prejudice and turn it into self-disgust. Jin does not need a villain. The ordinary classroom, the ordinary friends, and the ordinary desire to fit in are enough. The book shows how racism works through small jokes, assumptions, and social rules that no one has to say out loud.

Danny and Chin-Kee

The third strand is the strangest. It is presented as a sitcom called Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee, complete with a laugh track and applause. Danny is a white American teenager. Every year his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee comes to visit, and every year Danny is humiliated. Chin-Kee is drawn with yellow skin, buckteeth, a queue, and traditional clothing. He speaks in an exaggerated accent, eats grotesque food, urinates in a drink, and answers every academic question correctly. He is a collection of anti-Chinese stereotypes, and the sitcom format makes the stereotypes seem like harmless fun.

Danny is ashamed of Chin-Kee. He changes schools every year because his classmates associate him with his cousin. He tries to hide, to be cool, to be the white kid he appears to be. Chin-Kee follows him everywhere. He sings and dances in the library. He embarrasses Danny in front of Steve, a student Danny admires. Finally Danny attacks him. Chin-Kee fights back with kung fu techniques named after Chinese restaurant dishes. Danny throws a punch that knocks Chin-Kee's head off.

The head comes off, and the story changes. Chin-Kee is the Monkey King. Danny's white identity dissolves, and Jin Wang is underneath. The Monkey King explains that he has been visiting Jin in the form of Chin-Kee because Chin-Kee was a signpost to Jin's soul. The racist image Jin feared and rejected was also a part of himself, or a part of how the world saw him. The Monkey King did not come to punish him. He came to make him look.

That reveal is the book's biggest risk and its biggest payoff. For most of the Danny section, the reader is laughing at a caricature. The laugh track encourages it. Then Yang turns the joke around. The caricature was a mask worn by a mythic figure, and the white boy was a mask worn by a Chinese-American boy. The masks come off, and the reader has to think about why the first mask was funny and the second one was sad.

The reveal also connects to Wei-Chen. The Monkey King tells Jin that Wei-Chen is his son, sent to live among humans as an emissary of Tze-Yo-Tzuh. Wei-Chen's test was to spend forty years among mortals without succumbing to human vice. He mostly succeeds, but he lies to Jin's mother to cover for Jin's date, and the lie is a breach. After Jin kisses Suzy and says something cruel to Wei-Chen, the friendship collapses. Wei-Chen becomes disgusted with humanity and refuses to serve the creator. He also refuses the Monkey King's visits.

The reconciliation

The ending is quiet. The Monkey King leaves Jin a business card for a Chinese restaurant. Jin goes there after school every day for a month and orders pearl milk tea. Eventually Wei-Chen arrives, driving a flashy car, playing loud music, smoking. He has become a version of the cool kid he thought he needed to be. Jin tells him about the Monkey King and apologizes. He can see the small, frightened monkey inside Wei-Chen. That recognition is the book's emotional climax. Jin is not just apologizing for one cruel remark. He is recognizing a shared fear.

Wei-Chen says he knows where they can get better pearl milk tea. The friends reconcile by talking and laughing late into the night. The final epilogue shows them recording a music video together, based on the Back Dorm Boys. It is silly and ordinary and hopeful. The book does not end with Jin becoming a perfect person or with racism disappearing. It ends with two friends choosing each other again.

What the book is doing

American Born Chinese is about assimilation, but it is smarter than a simple message about being yourself. Jin's desire to be white is not presented as a random flaw. It is a response to a culture that tells him his Chinese identity is funny, foreign, or shameful. The Monkey King's story mirrors that response. He tries to become more human, more powerful, more acceptable, and he loses himself. The mountain is the cost of that attempt.

The three-strand structure is the book's formal argument. The myth, the realistic school story, and the sitcom are all stories about the same thing: a person trying to escape what he is. Yang uses different visual languages for each. The myth is epic and colorful. The school story is quiet and realistic. The sitcom is flat and bright, with borders and canned laughter. The form tells you how to feel before the plot does, and then the plot makes you question the form.

The criticism I understand is that the book can make racism seem like an individual problem with an individual solution. Jin learns to accept himself, and the story ends with a friendship restored. The school culture that produced the stereotypes is still there. The kids who made the jokes are not transformed. The book does not show us a world where the system changes, only a boy who learns to live inside it. That is a fair limitation. It is also the limitation of a short graphic novel for young readers. Yang gives us a starting point, not a blueprint.

The Chin-Kee material is deliberately ugly. Some readers may find it hard to get through, especially before the reveal. That is the point, but it does not make the reading experience easy. The book trusts the reader to stay with the discomfort long enough to understand it. I think that trust is mostly earned. The reveal does not erase the stereotypes. It shows how they were constructed and who was wearing them.

I would recommend American Born Chinese to readers who want a smart, funny, painful graphic novel about identity. It is a good book for classrooms because it gives students a way to talk about race and representation without starting from a lecture. It is also a good book to read alone, because the last thirty pages make you want to go back to the first thirty and read them again. That is the mark of a story that knows what it is doing.