...I would've saved myself from five hundred years' imprisonment beneath a mountain of rock had I only realized how good it is to be a monkey.
- Monkey King, American Born Chinese
Don't ever be ashamed of who you are...
- Norman Osborne, Spider-Man (2002)
The quandary that confronts all immigrants is how to reconcile their background with the culture of their adopted country. This is a particularly acute problem to the second generation immigrants caught between the upbringing of their parents and the lure of the surrounding world. Do they assimilate into the new culture, even if it means abandoning many cherished customs and beliefs? Or do they continue to cling to their roots, even when it causes friction with the general population? Or is a third way possible that treats culture as a font of received wisdom to inform the individual, while avoiding the dangers of falling into the reactionism caused by rigid adherence to tradition or immutable identity? The last option sounds the most enlightened to me, but given America's tortured history of race relations, is the hardest course of action to implement. While appealing in its simplistic arguments, the first two options taken to extremes leads to mistrust and divisiveness.
Take Shortcomings protagonist Ben Tanaka. He has an allergic reaction to any assertion of ethnic identity, especially his own. He thinks he's wise and color-blind. He believes he is a well-adjusted American even when other people observe he is weighed-down by deep self-hatred. Not surprisingly his relationship with his more racially-conscious girlfriend self-destructs in a spate of mutual recrimination.
Ben would have hated reading American Born Chinese, the critical darling of 2006 by Gene Luen Yang. All three protagonists in this ambitious comic book are in various stages of denial about their racial identity. Each begins with their own separate narrative, but their stories eventually converge into the same revelatory experience. The first is a retelling of the origin of the legendary Monkey King (Sun Wukong). Snubbed by the rest of the gods and asked to leave a heavenly banquet, he takes his anger out on them.
Effectively declaring war on heaven, he begins his arduous training in order to meet whatever they throw against him. But along the way he also expresses a desire to be more like the very deities he is rebelling against. He begins to wear shoes and stand upright. He makes individual visits to each god in order to demand to be recognized by them as "The Great Sage, Equal of Heaven."
In the second narrative, American-born Chinese Jin Wang moves with his parents from San Francisco's Chinatown to Suburbia. Jin isn't too happy about being one of the few ethnic Asians in class. He endures the faculty's well-intentioned but ignorant attempts at friendliness, and the usual schoolyard bullying from his White classmates, in the hope that he'll one day be accepted by them. Ironically his best friend will turn-out to be Taiwanese-born immigrant Wei-Chen Sun.
He later develops a crush on a pretty girl called Amelia, but his own lack of self-confidence gets in the way of developing a relationship with her. This leads to a rift between him and Wei-Chen and a dramatic shift in the story.
The third narrative is about the very Caucasian-looking Danny putting-up with one of the regular visits from Chin-Kee, the very embodiment of every outrageous Chinese stereotype developed by Hollywood from the buck teeth down to the pigtails, and accompanied all the time by his own laugh track. The results are hilarious, but so horrible for Danny that every visit has resulted in his transferring to a different school to escape the shame of being Chin-Kee's cousin.
Given the differences in tone of the three narrative tracks (fantasy, slice-of-life realism, and comic farce) this could easily have been a big mess, but it isn't. Gene Yang keeps everything under control with clever pacing and fluid and clearly defined art. As one track gives way to another, their respective themes provide a counterpoint to each other, and eventually reinforce the central message without smacking the reader over the head with it. And it is an overall positive message of rapprochement with one's ethnic heritage without demonizing the mainstream culture.
While important, this rapprochement is only a provisional answer to the quandary of the immigrant experience. The book doesn't break-down the wall that keeps the mainstream and minority cultures apart. It doesn't go far enough to examine the very origins, uses, and effects of culture. As a result both American and Chinese cultures come across as unalterable, and even incompatible. This is mainly due to Yang focusing on each Chinese protagonist's individual problems. The Caucasians are strictly secondary characters, so there is no reciprocal experience on their part to question their own ethnocentrism, precluding any kind of final reconciliation. The limited focus may be a conscious choice on Yang's part. While American Born Chinese is not the most in-depth look at the issue of the immigrant and minority experience in America (It never claims to be), it succeeds wonderfully in mapping-out the smaller territory it explores.
