Week 12: Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese

I included American Born Chinese on the syllabus because I admire its construction--on every level, from the compact layouts to the slippery three-part plot--and because I thought my students would find its perspective on racial alienation and assimilation both familiar and enlightening. I've found in the past that works about racial identity by non-black authors can be a great tool for discussing representations of race in a black classroom with a white professor. They open a kind of third space that allows everybody in the room to approach the issue on more or less equal footing, without as much at stake.

All of those things played out exactly as expected, but I ended up looking at American Born Chinese a lot less favorably than my class did. Much as I admire its construction, I'm not sure I care at all for its message. Or the fact that it has a "message," which is surely part of the problem. Accept yourself for who you are is one of the most banal themes in popular culture (rivalled only by Follow your dreams!) but in this particular book it takes on a sinister insinuation. In this book, accepting yourself the way you are sometimes means accepting that your racial and ethnic identity is as immutable and inescapable as your species, your mortality, your very position in a great chain of being that stretches to the heavens.

The book follows three plots, with the story of student Jin Wang coming of age in 1980s California sandwiched between a retelling of the legend of the Monkey King and a horrific sitcom in which all-American white kid Danny is visited by his cousin Chin-Kee, a living embodiment of every Asian stereotype Danny has tried to suppress or flee. The book initially suggests that the Monkey King and Chin-Kee stories are meant to be taken as symbolic commentaries on Jin Wang's desire to assimilate--an interpretation that persists even after we learn they aren't strictly symbolic. 

In the course of condemning internalized racism and self-loathing, Yang analogizes Jin's dilemma to that of the Monkey King, who insists he's a god even after God Himself tells him otherwise and who suffers for his presumption until he learns to accept his simian nature, which sets him on the path to happiness and divine ordination. Working back to Jin, though, the Monkey King's acceptance implies that the ethnic, minority, or immigrant cultural identity is always the foundational one--Jin will always be Chinese, just as the Monkey King will always be a monkey. It's one of those classic comic-book analogies we can only pursue so far before we have to abandon it or accept some pretty unsavory implications, but American Born Chinese never tells us that it's time to bail out.

The best defense I can muster is to say that if you don't like those unsavory implications, you only have to wait a few pages. This is a book of contradictions--of realism and fantasy, cultural isolation and exchange--and every value it holds turns into its opposite. If the use of the Monkey King and Chin-Kee as symbolic commentaries on Jin's story seems trite or predictable, the final chapters will throw you a major curveball. If their essentialism grates, you only have to remember that this is a book in which no identity is stable for long. If you think the finale emphasizes ethnic isolation at the expense of cultural fusion, the book is still filled with characters and stories that cross cultures.

Although that can be a problem too, particularly when Yang takes the Buddha out of the Buddhist epic Journey to the West. Buddha is missing from the Monkey King's story, replaced by a distinctly Christian god (complete with shepherd's crook!) who's served by the animal symbols of the four evangelists. The original journey to the west (to retrieve the Buddha's sutras) is gone too, supplanted by a journey to celebrate the nativity of Christ. Maybe it's supposed to be syncretism, but it sure looks like subordination. Yang spoke about his intentions for the story in a Comics Journal interview, which Ng Suat Tong quotes here: he describes the Christianized myth as a simple combination of stories, but I think the work deviates quite a bit from his stated aims.

That lack of self-consciousness may be the root of the problem. I realized, after my last class on the book, that American Born Chinese didn't rankle because of its analogies or the friendly face they put on their essentialist view of race. This isn't the only book we've read that raises some troubling implications; it's just one of the few that doesn't know what to do with them. Maus has some pretty suspicious metaphors too, and Fun Home trots out its stereotypes in more realistic fashion, but those works invite readers to pick apart their assumptions--Spiegelman pretty much forces us to with all those devices that explode the artificiality and the implicit stereotyping of his animal avatars. American Born Chinese, like Nat Turner, doesn't invite us to question its implications; it may not even know they're there. It's the difference between a book in which the metaphors are supposed to break down and a book you just aren't supposed to think that much about. One can sustain or reward the most rigorous critical analysis, and the other just can't.

None of this rules against teaching American Born Chinese again, by the way; I find these dilemmas a lot more fascinating and productive than the trite messages of self-acceptance that the book advertises as its themes. But I will need to come up with some new ways to problematize this book for classes that have been taught to recognize the expression of racial and ethnic pride as the noblest aims of art--the most unimpeachable way of accepting yourself for who you are.

Comments

[Alexandre Su]

It's been quite a while since I read the book, but I definitely had some of the same issues with the work. I read it much closer to its publication, when Gene Yang was making the rounds, and at the time it struck me as very strange that he didn't at least anticipate some of the criticism regarding the Christian appropriation of a Buddhist story or some of the other reactions. As it is, elements that might have been as a points of debate of artistic choice, come across as shortcomings in a story so personalized it read to me as myopic. Mind you, there's a certain leeway that it had because of being an entrant in an identity literature that's less formed, where there's a paucity of comparison even if one were to look beyond comics. Maus had a creator who was definitely conscious of making a work that was going to be compared to other takes on the Jewish experience, whereas American Born Chinese isn't really dialoguing with anything else.

How did the students take the appropriation of Journey to the West? I'm guessing that it's not a super-familiar work, but I imagine how the author picks, chooses, and alters a work to suit his purposes could be a big topic. The fact that trading in the Chinese with stereotypes narrative for the Christian one doesn't actually leave much room for identity seems in sharpest relief there.

[Marc]

None of my students showed any familiarity with Journey to the West, although one did recognize the four animal symbols and was wondering what they were doing in a story she thought was authentically Buddhist. Most of the class seemed surprised to learn about the Christianization of the Monkey King's story but I don't know if that problematized the book for them as it did for me. A lot of the class seemed perfectly willing to approach the book on its preferred terms as a feel-good ethnic parable, something I'll need to work on before I teach it again.

I'd also say that there's enough of a tradition in Chinese American literature that Yang could certainly have chosen to interact with it if he wanted to. I'm not certain that he needed to--for that matter, I'm not certain that he hasn't, if only indirectly, since he works some of the same magical realist territory as Kingston and company--but he seems more interested in responding to American popular culture's view of Asians. That's fine with me; I thought those parts worked well (although the pop-culture references have dated quickly enough that many of my students didn't get them--authors beware). I see what you mean about the myopic focus, but if Journey to the West didn't correct it I don't know that The Joy Luck Club would have fared any better.

Thanks for writing, Alexandre.

[Alexandre Su]

Thanks for writing this series, I've been enjoying it. Growing up Chinese American, this entry is the one I relate to personally, so it gets my affectionate dander up.

I probably muddled my ideas up there. I don't actually think Yang needed to reference other works directly. I was thinking more about how familiar your students might be to the Chinese American experience and so on, and how those thoughts would dialogue with the book. It's not so much that Maus speaks directly about other works, but that even if it didn't, the audience might be familiar with The Diary of Anne Frank or other things that even without a personal relationship, it has some base to build off. You're absolutely right that there is some literature it could have referenced, but as you say Joy Luck Club isn't any more likely to be known. I imagine that beyond something about railroads, American Born Chinese is received so well in part because for most, it's the first approach to the topic Chinese American identity. It's building it whole and not contrasting with anything, mostly. I could be underestimating people's exposure thought, overweighting my own personal expectations and experience.

I wish I could come up with an example of a familiar story changed that changes its point
just so, and alters something as deeply held as religion and its tenets--even if Journey to the West isn't really equal to the story of the resurrection. Still, while not Christian and I can imagine how it can supersede all other aspects of one's identity, even if the act of altering a story feels like an act of denial, almost like passing. But the American Born part means Jin Wang is 2nd generation, and his homeland's culture can feel just as distant and invisible to him as it is to strangers. The strongest scene to me is the one where the one insult puts Suzy, Wei-Chen, and Jin Wang all in the same box. The rest, the magical realist part, is more the flow of how Jin constructed his self. I think maybe Suzy and Wei-Chen need their own books.

[Marc]

Ah, I see what you mean--I agree, American Born Chinese probably gets some leeway for being the first book about Chinese American identity (or certainly the first comic about it) for many of its readers. I wouldn't hold that against Yang as that's hardly his fault, but it means things like the Christianization of Journey to the West will slip right by a lot of people.

In the end I don't think it's fair to Yang to burden him with the responsibility of being The Only Chinese American Graphic Novel, but I do wish he'd paid more attention to the implications of his metaphors, and I can only hope more readers will do the same.