American Born Chinese is a story of three, although it is really about two characters, who learn that it is better to be themselves then to try to be someone else. A few panels that spoke to me were the ones from the bottom left on page 13 all the way towards the end of page 20. These pages spoke out to me because these panels showed a change of character and it showed a violent reaction because of that change. This change could have prevented most of the stories told in the novel. On the following panels, The Monkey King of Flower-Fruit Mountain is eager to enter in the dinner party in heaven. Before entering the party he is stopped by the guard telling the Monkey King that he may not enter because he is a monkey without shoes, to which the …show more content…
He does so by adding in the characters Chin-kee and Danny. Chin-kee is the Monkey King, Emissary of Tze-Yo-Tzuh (the big god in the novel) disguised as a very stereotypical Chinese immigrant who often visits his American “cousin” Danny. Danny is a regular American with a wacky cousin from China, who is secretly the second main character the reader meets in the novel, Jin after he forfeits his soul to become “normal.” Jin perceives Chin-kee as a nuisance that ruins his social life whenever he comes to America. He sees Chin-kee as the person he essentially never wants to see again because of his grotesque way of life, although ironically being Asian is not as bad as Jin sees it. Most of the other characters see Jin as a typical American and do not really care that he is Asian. Wei-Chen, on the other hand, had seen Jin as his hero and only friend. He was loyal to Jin even risking to lie to Jin’s mother when Wei-Chen was told not to by his father, the Monkey King. Jin on the other hand, sees himself as an F.O.B. (fresh off the boat) and only wants to be like everyone else by becoming a wannabe-white boy. When Danny/Jin finds out who Chin-kee really is, he reverts to looking like Jin and hears the Monkey King’s plea to apologize to Wei-Chen which resolves the two’s friendship once more. Gene Luen Yang shows that even though you, the reader, may be able to change yourself into