American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
“It’s easy to become anything you wish…
…So long as you’re willing to forfeit your soul.”
(Yang, 2006, pg. 29)
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang follows Jin Wang’s pilgrimage through “the outsider experience” in his formative middle and high school years (Yang, 2006, Afterword). Through the weaving of multiple tales – parabolic, contemporary, archetypal – we learn how Jin unearths himself through a painful process of growing up as a child of immigrants, feeling unlike his peers and the world around him.
Within the myriad of storylines, I found myself on two parallel journeys while reading Yang’s amazing autobiographical story. As a white, heterosexual, cis-gender, 5th generation-born (give or take) American-identifying female, I learned the agonizing experiences Yin goes through feeling different, looking different, being different. Yet again, as much as I tried to fight universalizing Yin’s experience, I found myself relating over and over to the experience of being different and doing things to fit in…Things I would later regret. I am astounded by Yang’s ability to connect and inform.
I absolutely loved this story. I must admit, I found myself jarred early on by the different story paths. Confident the fractured reading experience I was having would soon pay off, I faithfully read on. I am grateful to learn the story of the Monkey King. The negative racial stereotypes of Chin-Kee caused me to flinch and feel deeply saddened for Chin-Kee and Jin. I wanted so badly for Jin and Amelia to go on a date, and I felt Wei-Chen’s, Suzy’s, and Jin’s heartbreak in my soul. Somehow Yang wove a tale that integrated story these lines with my personal side-by-side reading experiences so beautifully that I was sad when it ended.
While reading American Born Chinese, I often reflected back to my studies of multicultural education in graduate school, wondering if this tale voices and stories what Geneva Gay has referred to as a young person’s development of a “clarified ethnic identity?” (Gay, 1994, pp. 151-155). Yang’s story propels me to continue asking myself how we, as teachers, can support young people growing up in real-time in our classrooms. How can we foster sensitivity, empathy, and understanding in teacher candidates? How can we dissuade the view of a ‘universal experience’ that often, if not always, defaults into hegemony? How can we promote a mindset of humility and acceptance in our field and an endeavor to learn about our students and their families in what Jeffrey Andrade-Duncan might call ‘becoming an ethnographic researcher of the communities we teach in?’ (Duncan-Andrade, 2022, pp. 97-98).
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang Blog Post by Sunny Stubbs, Personal reading time: 0:47:48, Personal blog writing time: 1:22:13
References
Duncan-Andrade, J. M. R. 2022. Equality Or Equity: Toward a Model of Community-Responsive Education. United States: Harvard Education Press.
Gay, G. (1994). Coming of Age Ethnically: Teaching Young Adolescents of Color. Theory Into Practice, 33(3), 149–155. http://www.jstor.org/stable/147650
Yang, G. L., & Pien, L. (2006). American born Chinese. First Square Fish edition. New York, First Second.
