The herbalist in American born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang, says, “It’s easy to become anything you wish, so long as you are willing to forfeit your soul” (29). This partially agrees with the traditional American idea that a child can grow up to be whatever they want. It agrees because it allows the person to be whatever they want to be, but it also disagrees by adding in an additional restriction. The traditional American idea implies that being whatever you want can simply be achieved by working towards the change, while the herbalist says that you also have to lose some aspect of what you were before. “So long as you are willing to forfeit your soul” can be interpreted in a variety of ways. These interpretations depend primarily on the reader’s definition of the soul. If the reader thinks of the soul as the entirety of a person’s being, they might think the herbalist is saying that once you become something new you can never return to your previous state. If the reader thinks of the soul in a more spiritual or religious way, the herbalist could be interpreted as saying that a person loses access to eternal life after death if he or she becomes something other than themselves. A third way to interpret the phrase would …show more content…
Both characters undergo a dramatic change from their original state. These changes are that the Monkey King becomes more humanoid and Jin becomes more American. The Monkey King, in the process of becoming more humanoid, gives up enough to qualify for two of the three interpretations of herbalists words. Not only does he give up almost every aspect of who he was before, but he also gives up his morals about the treatment of the monkeys by creating and enforcing unfair rules. Jin, on the other hand, only gives up his previous identity. He does, as Danny, become angry and attempt to fight his cousin, but anger does not necessarily indicate abandoned