Yang teaches at Hamline University’s MFA program and always recommends his students tackle the project that scares them a little bit.

Yang remembers, “I don’t remember who it was one of the big publishers predict that comics in America would go the way of poetry” sometime in the 90s.

My brother is a middle school English teacher, and he teaches this novel as part of his unit on graphic novels. I think this would be an important book to have in a library collection, and the ALA agrees seeing as it was a Printz winner.Īlso, fun fact.

To me, an American whose ancestors haven’t emigrated to America in hundreds of years, I felt deeply the weight of these stereotypes and how my country has stereotyped Chinese and other Asians. Chin-Kee is an extreme depiction of all the cultural, racist stereotypes that people have of the Chinese. At times the graphic novel is hard to read, especially the Chin-Kee and Danny storyline.

I thought it was really cool the way that Yang was able to tie together all three storylines. It’s not immediately clear how these three stories fit together which made it all the more satisfying when they intersected into one story.Īt its heart, American Born Chinese is about the struggle for identity, both physical and cultural. The final thread is about an American boy, Danny, and his Chinese cousin, Chin-Kee. The second and ultimately the main story is about a young Chinese-American teen boy, Jin Wang, and his struggles to fit in with American culture. The first is the tale of an ancient monkey warrior-god in Chinese mythology (or some imagined Chinese mythology). New York: Square Fish, 2006.Īmerican Born Chinese was an interesting graphic novel, one that I think I’m going to need some time to digest.

American born chinese by gene luen yang