Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese is a book that utilizes effective and unusual art style and memorable characters to satirically dismantle the prominent stereotypes about Asian Americans. The three central characters, The Monkey King, Jin Wang and Chin-Kee are particularly interesting. Each of them is the protagonist of their own story, as the novel is comprised of the three separate tales. Despite the difference in the stories, the development of the central characters effectively highlights a common theme of the book: the racial struggle that characters experience.
The Monkey King is the protagonist of the first tale, which serves as a re-imagining of the Chinese folk legend The Journey to The West. He is a monkey that has lived for several millennia, and is now skilled with multiple martial arts, that, supposedly, should earn him universal respect. Yet when he attempts to join a fancy feast in Heaven, he is humiliated by the guard for being barefoot and being a monkey (Yang, 35). Symbolically, this episode represents the prejudice and mockery Asian people are met with in America. Although often extremely accomplished, they are gatekept from places their white counterparts of the same level of factual success are allowed into. The fit of rage that Monkey King experiences in response to rudeness is representative of the intense resentment a victim of prejudice is forced to deal with.
Jin Wang is the first-generation immigrant, who has recently moved with his family from Chinatown into a largely white neighbourhood. He struggles to fit in at school and feels isolated and out of place. In his tale, racism is explored primarily from an internalized perspective, with Jin Wang feeling inferior to his white classmates around them (Wanzo, 90). This sense of inferiority informs an corrupts both of his important relationships within the story: to his Taiwanese friend Wei-Chen, and an all-American girl Amelia Jin Wang is infatuated by. Throughout the second tale, Jin Wang is going out of his way to win Amelia’s attention, while several times humiliating and using Wei-Chen in the process. He is unable to reconcile with his own identity, as the dream of becoming white slowly consumes him.
Chin-Kee appears in the third tale, and, in contrast to the first two characters, acts as a deuteragonist and not the protagonist in the strict sense of the word. His visits trouble his white cousin Danny, as Chin-Kee represents the exaugurated version of American racial stereotypes about Chinese people (Wang, 3). He speaks with a strong accent, knows all the answers in class, is overtly interested in the white girls around him and has buckteeth. In the end of the tale Chin-Kee is revealed to be a trickster persona of the Monkey King. His role is to demonstrate that forsaking one’s true self is never worth it, even if some of the humiliating rumours about you are indeed true.
The three tales are deeply interconnected not only on a symbolical, but on a factual level. Jin Wang, unable to resist internalized racism and self-hated transforms into Danny, but even then is unable to escape the feelings that trouble him. The Monkey King assumes Chin-Kee’s persona is his avatar to teach him a lesson of radical self-acceptance. All three characters represent and experience different aspects of prejudice, but for each it is deeply transformative and harmful. Although they do arrive at a point of internal peace in the end of the novel, it is only achieved in spite of the unfair stereotypes they are faced with.
References
Wang, Yuechen. An experience of in-betweenness: Translation as border writing in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese. Neohelicon, 2021, pp. 1-6. Web.
Wanzo, Rebecca. “Identity Temporalities and American Born Chinese.” The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, 4 (1), 2020, pp. 82-100. Web.
Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. First Second Books, 2021.