American Born Chinese

There a very good reason why this graphic novel received a Michaell Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature but it didn't take till near the end for me to take notice on why. I won't lie; I didn't quite enjoy Yang's American Born Chinese at first because I found the range of characters very distracting. First I'm given a tale on a Monkey King and all of a sudden the narrative changes to a completely different story. The lack of connection between the three is the reason why I found each chapter hard to grasp. But that all changed towards the end (personally that change was dramatic for me because I let out an audible gasp when it all clicked).

Like I mentioned above, the graphic novel begins with the story of the Monkey King but this whole story is about an American-Chinese boy named Jin. The graphic novel switches to his story from his, to the Monkey King’s and to another—an American boy named Danny and his whacky Chinese cousin named Chin-kee who visits Danny annually (much to his annoyance). 

 The Monkey King crashes a party going on in the heavens but is denied entrance due to him being a monkey and none of the stuck-up gods and goddesses don’t want him around. Though readers see that Monkey considers himself a victim, the real villain for Monkey is his self. Instead of accepting who he was, he fough to become someone who he was not, just to prove to the other deities that he wasn’t just a monkey (I should have caught onto this  because looking back, it was a huge sign for foreshadowing!!).

Next is Danny. He’s that typical, blonde, All-American teenager in high school who’s trying to become a jock. And for Danny, life seems to be going pretty great. Good social status and has somewhat of a girlfriend; then Chin-kee enters (quite dramatically too). Like the name implies, Chin-kee is the embodiment of every Asian stereotype put together and he just so happens to be related to Danny. How? Neither the reader nor Danny knows. His presences is much of a nuisance for Danny, causing him to frequently change high schools because at the end of each visit, Danny was no longer known as Danny but as “Chin-Kee’s cousin”. But Danny gets fed up and instead of leaving yet another school, he snaps. He fights Chin-Kee only to realize that Chin-Kee was the Monkey King in disguise! This is where the stories began to merge

Jin, the Chinese American kid is in a majority white school, whose only friend is a guy named Wei-Chen. Readers begin to see that life isn’t so easy for Jin, especially when it came to girls. With the help of his buddy Wei-Chen however, Jin manages to snag a date with the popular (white) Amelia. Things seems to go smoothly for awhile but in comes another character (a friend of Amelia’s) who “kindly” asks (demands) Jin to stop dating Amelia because he’s worried Jin’s not the right kind of person for her. Jin complies because subconsciously, he agreed. He then finds himself kissing Wei-Chen’s girlfriend because why not. Wei-Chen finds out and it ruins their bromance. This seemed to only worsen Jin’s hate towards his own ethnicity and after waking up from a dream; readers see that he magically becomes a white boy…Danny. BAM! Everything came together and this is where I let out the gasp. Danny, who's actually Jin, finds out that Chin-Kee is actually the Monkey King, who's actually Wei-Chen's father come to serve as a guide, first to his son, and now to Jin.

Jin finally returns to his rightful body and follows Monkey's tip: he finds Wei-Chen and they make up. We don't know what happens to the girls in their lives, but that's not the point anyway. The end is all about the boys and how they resolve, not just their fight, but also their feelings about being Chinese American boys. This could relate to adolescences that also find themselves conflicted with their own ethnicity. As a first generation in my family of emigrants, I can confirm that hardship of figuring which side one should stick too. But that’s the problem; you don’t have to split the races/ethnicities. I’m Ethiopian-American and that’s that. Instead of stressing on how to conform, acceptance is the key to freedom (as cheesy as that sounds). But hey, it worked out for Jin.

Grade: A