American Born Chinese Analysis

Identity, Shame and Confrontation:
„American Born Chinese“ by Gene Luen Yang

The graphic novel „American Born Chinese“ written by Gene Luen Yang is an award-winning combination of three parallel stories. One story is about Jin Wang, a young Chinese-American boy who only wants to fit in, another about an American student who is tortured by his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee, the personification of every negative Chinese stereotype. The last story is a re-creation of the legend of the Monkey King. The three characters Jin Wang, Danny and the Monkey King are world apart, but they share the same troubles, which they have inflicted upon themselves. The three characters are trying to establish their individuality. On the other hand they are ashamed of their culture as

He’d never noticed it before.”page 20 ) Tze-Yo-Tzuh, the creator of all, buries the Monkey King, under a pile of rocks, for his haughtiness, where he stays for five hundred years until he finally achieves his salvation from the hands of a monk and accepts his identity as an ordinary monkey. All main characters in „American Born Chinese“ face the problem of trying to change to gain a higher status in the social hierarchy. „I am a deity I am a committed disciple of the arts of kung-fu and I have mastered the four major heavenly disciplines, prerequisites to immortality.“ ( page 14). He desires to be more than a monkey. He wants to be called Great Sage. "You may be a king- you may be a deity-but you are still a monkey“ (page 16). The answer of the guard makes him feel that he is an ordinary monkey. The picture on page 16 shows his fierceness to the rejection of the entrance and the refusal of identifying him as a god. In conclusion Yang has presented the different emotions of the three different characters separately to highlight his theme of cultural identity and the shame associated with it. Yang seems to be presenting the tales