A couple of weeks after being hired by Champlin Park, I was invited to their staff breakfast in order to meet the department, get supplies for the upcoming school year and get situated in my new classroom. When I got home, I noticed that mixed within my textbooks was a brightly colored book that had all the signs of a comic. On the front page was a note that told me to read this over the summer because the author was coming to visit in the fall. I have to admit that in the craziness of those quick months, this text was all but forgotten. Almost as an after-thought I finally opened it in the week before school began. I had read only a couple of graphic novels up to this point and didn’t have the highest of expectations. To my surprise, this text asked profound questions of racial identity and did not provide easy answers.

Gene Yang’s visit was nothing short of awesome. A fantastic storyteller -he captured my students’ attention and held it for the entirety of his 85-minute presentation. However, they were already deeply intrigued by the book, as was I from the very beginning. The first vignette of the text, where the Monkey-King attempts entrance into a party in heaven and was denied based on the fact that he wasn’t wearing “shoes” unfortunately reminds me of a story my friend told be about a club in downtown Minneapolis. My friend is the bouncer and is in charge of who gets in and who is rejected. He told me that the job is much harder than kicking out drunk people because the club’s owner watches on the security cameras and will contact my friend with specific instructions. My friend will get reports like “don’t let them in, they’re Asian” or “Too many blacks man, slow it down” or “Our Indian Quota is all maxed out”. As a result, my friend will be forced to make up some innocuous reason to turn them away. Maybe he’ll say their shoes aren’t right even though the white person that just got in is wearing the same pair. The end message always being the same, “you are just not good enough the way you are”. This idea is masterfully explored in American Born Chinese.

From a critical perspective, American Born Chinese, directly speaks to the feeling of racial shame that plagues people of color in the United States. Forced to compete in a society that puts an inherent premium on whiteness, people of color are confronted with the notion that the only way to succeed is to deny their own identity and transform. The Monkey-King never noticed his monkey-ness until he was othered by the deities on the hilltop. The psychological turmoil of this experience of shaming disconnects the Monkey-King from his own community and nearly destroys him.

In a similar fashion, the protagonist Jin so strongly wants to rid himself from his racial identity that he is transformed to the popular, white, Danny. Of course this level of psychological tearing creates internal conflict. To this end, Yang creates Chin-Kee, the personification of the darkest Chinese stereotype in order to force Danny to confront his deepest fears and feelings of inadequacy. Chin-Kee, the caricature of the Chinese immigrant upholds all of America’s ignorant assumptions of asian culture and is in effect an example of Yellow-face. Like the Black-face that pervaded minstrel shows in the early 20th century, Chin-Kee reifies what is and what is not white and therefore what is and what is not rewarded. Traditionally used as a method of social oppression, Yang flips the script and reappropriates this stereotype as a way to make Danny understand exactly what he is and what he is not, as the Monkey-King explains, Chin-Kee is a “signpost to [Jin’s] soul”. Danny realizes the mask that Chin-Kee wears is the mask thrust upon him by American society.

Suzy says, “Today, when Timmy called me a chink, I realized . . . deep down inside . . . I kind of feel like that all the time.” As does the Monkey-King when he is sickened by the smell of monkey fur. As does Jin when he perms his hair and later transforms into Danny. Ultimately, In American Born Chinese Gene Yang asks us to consider the ways in which we are made to feel less than human.