American Born Chinese

By Aaradhana Natarajan

To read Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese is to be thrust back into the tail end of the 20^th century. Published in 2006, Yang’s graphic memoir takes the struggle to fit in and find acceptance as a “perpetual foreigner” comes to vivid, dynamically illustrated life using visual language of 20^th century sitcoms and cartoons/comics.  Yang never shies away from the fact that prejudice is learned, and self-consciousness is taught. We are party to his characters’ emotional journeys – one of whom, the eponymous ABC Jin Wang, stands in as an avatar for the author’s own experiences and thus forms the emotional core of a three-strand story rooted in parable.

That parable is a retelling of an iconic Chinese folktale – that of the Monkey King. Chronicled in the 16^th century Chinese epic Journey to The West, this first thread of Yang’s tale begins when the Monkey King hears that there is to be a great banquet for celestial beings and pedigreed mystical entities, he is eager to attend. However, the Monkey King is told that none of his many achievements are enough to earn him a literal seat at the feast table because he “is still a monkey [pg. 15]”. And that no matter how hard he works, how many more achievements and skills he amasses, he will always be seen as a monkey.

The metaphor is not subtle. Nor is the response the marginalization provokes – the Monkey King’s story as Yang adapts it has an arc taken straight from cape crusader comics – as the character proceeds to punch out those who wronged him before going on a journey to transform himself into a shoe-wearing biped the rest of the celestial beings will finally acknowledge as an equal. He also orders the other monkeys to follow his quest to remake himself. Unfortunately, as the panel accompanying this edict shows, the shoes constrain and limit the monkeys from climbing, eating, living. The panel on page 55, showing these limitations, is an excellent example of Yang’s ability to make thoughtful points while using visual comedy to prevent the tone from seeming too dark, dour or paternalistic for younger readers.

Much like the folkloric Monkey King, the aforementioned Jin Yang is a fictionalized representation of the author’s experiences, going so far as bearing his name. We watch Jin struggle with making friends and fitting in at school, finding himself on the wrong side of classic racially-charged taunts about his lunch food and appearance on pages 30 through 34. It quickly becomes clear that the petty insults of the Monkey King’s celestial court are paralleled in the much more mundane but no less fraught social hierarchy of Jin’s school. But instead of brute force at a banquet table, Jin finds himself quietly dissuaded after asking one of his blonde, blue-eyed classmates on a date.

And much like the Monkey King, Jin reacts to being othered by trying his hardest to fit in, and lashing out at the people who care about him when he isn’t entirely able to (36, 37). Where the Monkey King sees shoes and upright mobility as keys to acceptance, Jin hones in on hair perms and movie dates. Yet when even, both Jin and the Monkey King end up redirecting their ire at the people that care about them, hurting those only who want to help with selfish and self-destructive actions. While the Monkey King defaces a hand extended to help, Jin’s response to having his crush’s friend imply that he isn’t someone she should hang out with is to kiss his best friend Wei Chen’s girlfriend Suzy out of a sense of self-loathing poorly compensated for by a belief we’ve seen metastasize throughout the book – that his attempts and relative successes at assimilation mean that even though Suzy is “not [Jin’s] type”, he thinks Wei Chen – Wei Chen with his pronounced accent, occasional grammar mistakes and fashion faux-pas – is not “right for her”, “worthy of her”, and finally, saying out loud the derogatory name he’s been thinking for most of the story so far. He calls Wei Chen a FOB (fresh off the boat) and promptly finds himself KOed.

The Monkey King and Jin both cope poorly with feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness resulting from bullying and marginalization by attempting to hurt those who have even less power than them in a desperate bid to feel better about themselves. The two of them will have to learn lessons in humility and self-compassion before their arcs can be ended, and it is the third narrative thread that ties them all together.

This third narrative is the story of Danny, a blond boy with light eyes who finds himself in a bind when his heavily caricatured “cousin Chin-Kee [46]” comes from China to visit his sitcom-perfect suburb. A pastiche of every yellow-faced, oriental-minstrel figure from pejorative stereotypes in American film, television and illustration since the late 1800s follows. Chin-Kee disrupts Danny’s high school idyll with a series of gratingly accented vulgarities ripped straight from Yellow Peril propaganda and reconfigured to the stakes of a high school cafeteria. Again and again, Danny does his best to distance himself from this specter, yet his difficulties are cast as comedic, the panels framed by an onomatopoeic laugh track that is tonally at odds with Danny’s expressive embarrassment and frustrations.

Together, the three sub-stories show a conflict stemming from the tensions between the grand, mythologized way Jin wishes to be and the unsettlingly caricatured way he is perceived by others – and the more mundane but complicated truth embedded alongside both these contexts. While the Monkey King and Chin-Kee serve as archetypes and allegories, it is Jin with his all too human relationships and conflicts who connects them, bridging past and present, East and West, prose and visuals to arrive at a sense of self that would

While contemporaries exploring similar themes of identity, community and the mental toll of prejudice in second generation AAPIs (Asian American or Pacific Islander) had prose-first approaches aimed at adults, Yang’s was one of the first to make it illustrated and accessible to young adult readers. By commingling inherited myths such as those of the Monkey King with modern superhero and action media iconography in the way the Monkey King’s fight sequences are depicted and the mentions of the Transformers franchise in Jin’s arc, the cultural touchstones communicate who this story is meant to speak to and locates it in a unique intercultural nostalgia. It’s interesting reviewing this graphic novel today, years after shows like Fresh Off the Boat and animated movies like Turning Red and Over the Moon garner acclaim and a wide viewership that is encouraged to empathize with creators and characters that were once relegated to the background or the punchline. One can suppose that the truest mark of assimilation is having a seat at the sitcom family’s table rather than being positioned as the accented/caricatured outsider hovering on the edges of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Yang textures that truth with loving specifics. For example, it is notable that the classic teen movie staple of heartfelt diner conversations over milkshakes is here done over bubble tea, which originated in 1980s Taiwan, and is here suggested by the Chinese American (Jin) protagonist aiming to reconcile and reconnect with his alienated Taiwanese American friend Wei Chen, who has adopted the fast car, cigarettes and big jackets that signified a certain disenchanted, asocial rebel archetype in the previous half-century of teen films – an aesthetic adoption that occurred after Wei Chen felt profoundly betrayed by the community and relationships he’d invested his dreams into.

In his historiography of teen movies in the 20^th and very early 21^st century, Bruce Handy writes about “the mythologizing that goes on inside the closed circuits of modern high schools”, a process that goes hand in hand with “self-consciousness” and teens’ growing understanding of their place in the world through references to existing tropes and narratives. Handy observes that while this socialization-by-story occurs, the genre is marked by a) a pointed absence of authority figures in most of the scenes and b) the presentation of authority figures as either responsible, wise counselors or bumbling punchlines who are unable to provide the emotional support and instruction their children need from them. While the tropey authority figures are entertainingly utilized in Danny’s arc, it is their absence in moments of internal conflict that recurs throughout the book. Along with the aforementioned herbalist’s wife, American Born Chinese has no shortage of sagacious elders who provide frustrated younger characters with grounded advice based on lived experience. These elders are not trying to be authoritarians, but instead to offer insights about self -acceptance or even self-appreciation. But in moments of self-reflection and self-consciousness, it is only the memory of these elders’ words that helps the protagonists make meaning out of their experiences.

At its heart and core, American Born Chinese encourages young (and older!) readers’ acceptance of themselves. To define themselves outside the specter of stereotypes or course-correcting by attempting to erase histories and relationships that can support you.  A telling scene from earlier in the comic has young Jin telling the wife of an herbalist his mom frequented every Sunday that he wants to grow up to be a Transformer. The gray-haired woman responds by telling him that “It’s easy to become anything you wish…so long as you’re willing to forfeit your soul [29].” It’s the sort of dramatic mic drop that would be equally at home in a Xianxia movie or Bronze Age comic.

In American Born Chinese, the past is not entirely oppressive, nor are heritage and legacy. In moving through and past stereotypes, bullying and the emotional turmoil of trying to reject a negative self-image that has been thrust upon them by said bullies, Jin, the Monkey King and Danny all find a sense of belonging rooted in their hyphenated identities and the insights of grown-ups who do not condescend to them, but instead seek to meet them where they are. Again and again, Yang’s characters are drawn testament to how overcoming the mental and emotional tumult caused by marginalization depends on the support of community, and the insights of those with experience to help pave a path to healing and healthier self-image. We learn from our histories, and learn to create new ones of our own, blending fact and fiction, past and present, in order to imagine better futures.

Yang’s themes remain topical, even as American Born Chinese has become canonized as a definitive influence for newer creators (see Messy Roots by Laura Gao). I was a bit struck when some high schoolers and college first years told me, a little awkwardly, that they either hadn’t read or heard of Yang’s book. They explained, however, that this was because they had a greater surfeit of choice. There are a number of Asian American coming-of-age comics these days – including ones that with hyper-specific focuses on different ethnic communities and intersectional identities within the broader AAPI umbrella – and webcomic platforms have further increased access both to and for readers, allowing greater narrative and cultural diversity (as well as more culturally (and generally) specific representations of mental and physical health struggles) that would have been much harder to distribute two decades ago. After all, 2008 saw Drawn and Quarterly mirroring and re-positioning the panels of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s seminal works from the original right-to-left manga format in order to localize to an American readership. But today, I walk into major bookstores and see people browsing shelves of translated manga that have retained both their original formatting and more of their cultural specificity through transliteration and glossaries/appendices.

Yang’s book remains an important cultural and artistic touchstone, particularly as bullying over unfamiliar lunch ingredients, accents and appearance remains an unfortunate part of growing up for many AAPI people. Much like sitcom laugh tracks, Yang’s approach feels almost quaint in some of the visuals it employs – though the resentments it gives form to remain relevant. Its topical insight into the mental and emotional tolls of marginalization, as well as the ways cultural myths and folklore can provide young adults comfort and a site for reconnecting with their histories, maintains it as an excellent starting point to have conversations with younger people around identity formation and personal mythographies.

CITATIONS

• Handy, B. (2025). Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies. Simon and Schuster.
• Wilmot, A. G. A. (2008). Gekiga into English: translating the words, images, and culture of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life.

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Aaradhana Natarajan is currently a student at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. She is interested in medical history, medical humanities, science communications, and the ways different experiences of embodiment are represented in written and visual mediums. You can find her other reviews on the Ripple Magazine, Rutgers University Libraries and the East Coast Asian American Students Union websites, while her science writing can be found on Medium @aaradhana.natarajan.