American Born Chinese

It should be called, 'American Bored Chinese' by Gene Luen Yang. I liked the message, which is to 'just be yourself, and life will be good.' Sound trite? It is!

The art is pretty, but has little of the emotion and feeling of what makes the sequential art form (comics) great for me, as a newly converted fan of the genre. Yang writes 2 somewhat parallel plots, one of the kid (Jin) referred to in the title, and one myth about a Monkey King. The Monkey King tries to change his stripes and become less of a monkey, more of a god or human, so he can have greater power and distance himself from his humble monkey beginnings. He is self taught and powerful, but never satisfied, and tends to let his anger control him as he destroys things.

Jin is not like the monkey, but has bad feelings about his non-whiteness in a society of whiteys, somewhere in the US. Yang shows what seems to me a type of old-fashioned racism I remember from reading crappy world war 2 GI Joe type hate comics, full of xanthophobes and xenophobes. Jin has some issues, such as self hate, the need to distance himself from his culture, and desire to assimilate to avoid persecution by the uncomically stupid and ridiculous bully. The bully is a poor character with no developement at all, and the scenes with him in it are not heart wrenching enough for the reader to feel empathy toward Jin. The bully role must be good in a novel or film so that you hate them and want to smash their face in, hoping you could just insert yourself into the scene and beat the f'@#$ out of him and get your justice! Yang fails here because the characters and images are one dimensional.

This book won a lot of praise: Printz prize winner, ALA top ten, SLJ Best Book, NPR Holiday pick? Wow, just shows you how wrong the experts can be and that you should all trust your friendly teacher librarian right here on the BBB.

CMB