Graphic Novel — American Born Chinese

Last Sunday night, I stretched out on the couch, turned on a reading lamp, and read Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese in one delighted sitting, engrossed and elated by the book's fresh look at growing up as a Chinese boy in America. It was a terrific read.

I was rather amazed the next day when I read Nezua's latest post in his series on The White Lens, because his poignant inner journey clearly seems to intersect with the journey of Jin Wang, the Chinese American boy at the center of ABC.

[ SPOILAGE AHEAD ]

The story unfolds in three parallel threads. The novel opens with the beloved Chinese legend of the Monkey King, whose mischief and exploits among gods and humans are recorded in the 16th century novel Journey to the West. The Monkey King was a powerful warrior whose problem was (take a guess) his arrogance. He believed himself to be a god; the gods insisted that he was not a god but a monkey. This infuriated him and drove him to work tirelessly on developing god-like powers in order to forcefully assert his status as a god.

The Monkey King's dedication pays off: he achieves the Four Major Disciplines of Invulnerability, which consist of invulnerability to fire, to cold, to drowning, and to wounds. Then he achieves the Four Major Disciplines of Bodily Form, which include the powers of giant form, miniature form, shape shift, and turning strands of his own hair into clones of himself. Having mastered his new powers, the Monkey King emerges from his retreat and declares his new title: the Great Sage Equal of Heaven. Anyone who refuses to address him as such, or who calls him a monkey, gets beaten and abused by the Monkey King's formidable powers. It gets so bad that eventually Tze-Yo-Tzuh himself is compelled to intervene.

You know what comes next: an ass-whupping. The Monkey King gets buried under a mountain of rocks, where he remains trapped for 500 years.

The novel's second thread follows the growing pains of Jin Wang. In the first frame, we see Jin sitting in the back seat of a car, absent-mindedly playing with a tranformer toy, with a tear rolling down his cheek. Jin silently endures the loneliness and isolation of being a racial minority in a predominantly white school.

One day as Jin is sitting in the herbalist's shop, waiting for his mother to have a prescription filled, the herbalist's wife asks Jin what he wants to be when he grows up. He answers that he wants to be a transformer, but that his mother says this is silly. The herbalist's wife replies, "Oh, I wouldn't be so sure about that. I'm going to let you in on a secret, little friend":

Thread number three is a surreal dive into racist anti-Chinese imagery. It's the story of Danny, a white boy who is haunted by his cousin Chin-Kee.

Yes, Yang is playing with fire here. Cousin Chin-Kee's grinning bucktoothed yellowface is obviously offensive, and it's supposed to be. He's an amalgam of common anti-Chinese stereotypes which have so often expressed themselves in the Western imagination. He says things like, "Such a pletty Amellican girl wiff bountiful American bosom! Must bind feet and bear Chin-Kee's children!" and "Would cousin Da-nee rike to tly Chin-Kee's clispy flied cat gizzards wiff noodle?" And Danny is continuously devastated with embarrassment; he desperately wants to get rid of Chin-Kee but can't; everywhere he goes, there's cousin Chin-Kee. Danny is convinced that Chin-Kee is ruining his life.

Meanwhile, jumping back to the second thread, Jin eventually hits puberty and develops a crush on Amelia Harris, a girl at school. But he's too shy to do anything about it. Except get a perm in hopes of looking more like Timmy, a blond boy who hangs out with Amelia.

Until one day...

Ah yes, sweet teen romance.

And what's better yet, the date goes well: Jin puts his arm around Amelia's shoulder in the movie theater; Amelia responds positively, by leaning against his body. It's heaven.

Until the next day, when Timmy approaches Jin at school: "Hey, Jin! Can I ask you favor? Can you not ask Amelia out again? ...It's just that she's a good friend and I want to make sure she makes good choices, you know? We're almost in high school. She has to start paying attention to who she hangs out with... No hard feelings? And can you do me the favor?"

Caught completely off guard, confused and unsure of himself, Jin says, "I guess."

Ouch.

Later in the day, Jin replays the scene in his mind over and over, getting angrier and angrier. He imagines responding to Timmy's request by punching him in the face. His world starts to crack up. He freaks out. He tries to kiss his best friend's girlfriend. Then he gets into a fight with his best friend. He goes to bed in a huff, with two shiners and a gutful of rage. That night...

And so the threads begin to crash together. Jin transforms into Danny. And Danny, as you'll recall, is trying to get rid of his embarrassing cousin Chin-Kee.

We come back to the Monkey King. He freed himself from the mountain of rock by becoming the disciple of the Buddhist monk Wong Lai-Tsao and protecting him from demons and other enemies during his journey to the West, through Central and South Asia, on a dharma mission to collect sacred Buddhist texts and transport them back to China for the dissemination of that radical doctrine of liberation and enlightenment. The fulfillment of this task redeems the Monkey King and he becomes an emissary of Tze-Yo-Tzuh.

He tells Jin, "I came to serve as your conscience — as a signpost to your soul. You know, Jin, I would have saved myself from five hundred years' imprisonment beneath a mountain of rock had I only realized how good it is to be a monkey."

There's plenty more to the story that I haven't touched upon in this summary€” — like the poignant and wonderful story of Wei-Chen. So if you or any young adults you know enjoy graphic novels, you might want to pick up ABC and immerse yourself in the full experience.  It's a good one.

Comments

[Nezua Limón Xolagrafik-Jonez]

damn that looks amazing. i kind of felt it happening as you laid it out. what a great story and i KNEW that stereotype he was haunted by was his own! and i love that monkey king fable. that is just hilarious. that's the part that reminds you of my life right? ;) I'M NO MONKEY! I'LL PROVE IT! god i love that little fool.

you know what really gets me? i was, about a week ago, thinking of trashing my blog bio and doing one in graphic novel format instead. i felt it was too wordy talky. and look at this! life sure can be amazing.

[Elayne Riggs]

I can't recommend Gene's book enough. Back when ABC was first serialized as a weekly webcomic, I introduced him via email to Alan Davis, a fairly well-known comics artist and friend who is really into Monkey King mythology. When Gene first switched from the Monkey King stories to Jin's story, I was very disappointed because at the time I didn't realize how he was going to intertwine everything later on, and I wanted to read more Monkey King. :) I adored the finished product, and can't wait to see what Gene does next. He's immensely talented!

[Kai]

Nezua, yeah one can't help but love that little fool. He was my superhero as a boy before I ever heard of Superman or Spiderman. And he talks back to Tze-Yo-Tzuh, calls him "old man", hehe now that's a bad attitude. And yeah, one thing I'm really digging about the graphic novel format is that it's not wordy talky thoughty at all; and it's visual but not splashy bedazzly visual. (Hehe, that was a very silly sentence.)

Elayne, yes he is talented. Yeah everybody always loves the parts about the Monkey King...and what's funny is that this is even the case in Peking Opera; everybody is hungry for the scenes with the Monkey King because those are the most fun, with acrobatic martial arts displays and lots of exciting action and loud fast-paced cymbal-crashing music. When I was a kid going to see Chinese opera or Chinese puppetry, I remember dreading those long mournful wailing songs reflecting on life's ten thousand sorrows in the sea of bitter tears and such; I wanted to see the Monkey King do some magic and whup some ass!

[Nezua Limón Xolagrafik-Jonez]

yeah. i'm down with finding alternatives to the wordy talky. i mean...that's sort of one of the awarenesses my Skin of my Soul series has angled toward. the funny thing is i do it the most, but wordy/talky is really my least favorite form of art-erances. it just comes the easiest. i've been working on music a little lately, and really am feeling a buildup to painting. perhaps this summer, when i get my new ink. it will be a painterly summer. or something. full of monkey king doings. maybe i'll adapt a mexican monkey king. jeje.

[Kai]

Mexican monkey king, hehe sounds fun. Wouldn't it be weird if it turned out the monkey king was a macaca?

[Nezua Limón Xolagrafik-Jonez]

somehow that feels cosmically sound.

[Yolanda Carrington]

"You know, Jin, I would have saved myself from five hundred years' imprisonment beneath a mountain of rock had I only realized how good it is to be a monkey."

This is true. But some of us still have to learn this the hard way.

[Sylvia]

That last panel you posted brings back memories of undergrad and how many people LOVE those videos. Which was...only last year.

I'm loving the heavy self-discovery of this novel; a creative medium lets you play with and explore so many complex subjects if you wield it correctly. And Yang clearly does. My reading list is becoming depressingly long and expensive as a result.