A double take for Gene Yang's American Born Chinese

When Gene Yang's American Born Chinese came out in 2006, critics and readers received pretty it favorably; since then, I've seen it on many a 'must read' list of graphic novels, contemporary biography, graphic novel biography, and so on with the composite subgenres/ media. When I found myself wandering my local comic shop after pay day, I finally picked up a copy. On the back cover, Derek Kirk Kim, a friend and colleague of the author, was quoted "As an Asian American, American Born Chinese is the book I've been waiting for all my life." Now I'm not Asian, but with a statement like that, I felt quite secure that I had picked a winner.

I read the book a couple nights ago and it breaks down about like this: Yang tells three stories, alternating between them with each new chapter. In the first, he relays a folk tale of a monkey king who strives to be human, and he includes lots of other archetypal myth/ legend type themes and figures. And kung fu (whoooa.) In the second, the reader follows an Asian-American boy, Jin (a.k.a. probably the author), through his adventures and mishaps in third and fourth grade with his best friend Wei-Chen. The third story recalls a TV sitcom (laugh track and all) in which an all-American high-schooler, Danny, is visited and inadvertently terrorized by his inexplicably Chinese cousin, Chin-Kee, himself a grab bag of Asian stereotypes.

When I finished the book, I can't lie, I was a little disappointed. Not that it wasn't a diverting read, I did blow through the whole thing in one sitting. And there were parts that made me laugh, others that made me cringe with that wonderful mix of sympathy for the marginalized characters and guilt for being a white devil myself. But that's a whole blog in itself. My point is I definitely engaged with the book, just not as much I thought I would. I'd had all these expectations, not just from the anonymous background murmur of criticism, but from Derek Kirk Kim. Derek! This book was not as life-altering as you led me to believe. I noticed on the ever-provident facebook that I wasn't alone in my disillusionment. But as I scanned the reviews on the living social visual bookshelf app, I found that I had qualms with the comments people left. Could be I'm just antagonistic. Or maybe what I (and others) failed to realize is that the real brilliance of the book doesn't come across without some thought and analysis after closing the back cover. English major to the rescue!

One example of Yang's story-telling innovation lies in the fact that he doesn't weave his three narratives together, as one might expect from a multiple narrative text. Rather, at the last minute, he pulls the proverbial curtain aside so the reader finds that the Monkey King, Jin, Wei-Chen, Danny, and Chin-Kee are sort of all the same character or at least related in unexpected ways. And not in a metaphorical, character foil sense; literally, Yang draws one character morphing into another. Or pulling off his head to reveal his true identity. And, good heavens, that's what this whole yarn is supposed to address in the first place. Identity I mean, not self-decapitation.

The moment all three stories come together marks another pretty awesome element of American Born Chinese that didn't dawn on me until after I'd set it down: the mythical folk tale, the personal history, and the caricature collide, and any sense of realism/ continuity within each story goes right out the window. When one of the mythic characters shows himself to be one of the main characters from the present, who was an analog for ANOTHER character all along, the divisions the reader had developed between those parts of the book are just obliterated. There's this serious rupture, but the story goes on, accepting everything that's happened as it ends. As I've studied biography (just a bit), especially of the graphic variety, I've found that writers and artists do some really amazing things with blurring and/ or exposing the lines between the factual things that happened to them over the course of their lives and the internal feelings and memories that accompany those experiences. In these terms, just wow- Yang has integrated not just personal history and memory/ internal experience, but CULTURAL history and experience into one biography. Now I'm no expert on the biographical genre (if genre is the right word), but I've never seen this particular mish-mash narrative technique pulled off quite the way Yang does it. It's brilliant. Ok Derek Kirk Kim, you've got me there.