I feel bit of a Johnny-Come-Lately introducing this wonderful young adult graphic novel called American Born Chinese by Gene Yang. PaperTigers has already done a lot with this ground-breaking Asian American graphic novel; for example, you can see Yang’s work featured in the PT gallery. But the book really only came to my attention through this blog called An Introduction to Comics by Paul Moffett.
When my son was younger, he sometimes requested a comic book for me to read to him at bedtime. He developed an appetite for the form quite early. Now, he reads to himself at night and he prefers graphic novels or comics. I picked up American Born Chinese, more or less, hoping that he would read it on my recommendation. But then, I got hooked! And then my husband got hooked, too. What I found compelling about Yang’s novel was its incorporation and intertwining of the Judeo-Christian story with the mythical one of the Monkey King. While the Monkey King struggles with his identity as a monkey, so too, does the boy Jin Wang struggle with his identity as Chinese American. Although at first these stories seem unconnected, they join up at the end in an unusually satisfying way. Monkey King’s advice to Jin Wang? — “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.”
May is Asian Heritage Month or Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and if there’s ONE book you might consider reading for it, I would recommend American Born Chinese. It’s destined to become an Asian American classic. Soon after my husband and I were finished with the book, I saw my son casually pick it up, peruse its pages, and carry it off to his bedroom for his own night-time reading.