American Born Chinese Quotes

If you've ever been in the same online or real life spaces as I have you might have seen a lot of people harassing or bullying others. But some cases of this might stand out because its people in a community harassing or bullying others in the same community, like when people play into stereotypes or isolate parts of a community. This is a something we see a lot in the graphic novel American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang, while he weaves the story of th Throughout his work, Yang uses artistic choices and characterization to convey how a negative environment and oppression can often lead an individual towards negative change, like isolation from community or physical/mental changes.
Yang conveys how the environment having an effect on people is a key and recurring part of the story in a metaphorical way via a

“Long ago a mother and her young son lived near a marketplace. Everyday when the son played, he pretended to buy and sell sticks he found on the street, haggling over prices with his friends. The mother decided to move.[...]She found a home across the road from a university. The son now spent all his free-time reading books about mathematics, science, and history. The mother and her son stayed there for a long, longtime”(Yang 23- 24). This short parable is never mentioned by Jin again, never looked back on. This doesn't make it void of purpose though because it's not there for Jin, but for the reader. It gives the reader context to the culture Jin grew up in but more importantly it foreshadows Jin's future character arc. This parable is followed up by the information that Jin spent his first 9 years of childhood in Chinatown San Francisco, an area which has a big Asian population. Then he moves to an area that is seemingly predominantly white. This is evident by the fact that his classmate Suzy is the only other Asian in his class. And just like in the parable we see Jin reflect