American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang has been added to the middle school curriculum at my local public school district. The choice is a controversial one, and I am so glad that I’ve been given the opportunity to give a talk on this book in front of teachers and provide my perspective as a 1.5-generation Chinese American.
In this article, I’ll first give some background info pertinent to Chinese American history,
In Part 2, I’ll dive into a list of references to Chinese culture in the book.
The importance of American Born Chinese to Chinese Americans
I got this book when it first came out in 2006. Well, I actually bought it in 2007. I had just started my neuroscience graduate program at the University of Michigan. My whole life was completely immersed in research and study. I was so cut off from the rest of the world that I didn’t even know Obama was running for president until after he was elected. And yet, somewhere between doing research in windowless labs and reading papers on sleep-deprived nights, American Born Chinese came onto my radar. I immediately went to the Ann Arbor Borders and bought it. That’s how impactful it was at the time for me.
Finally, the Chinese American experience was depicted in a popular medium!
And being in Michigan, where the majority of Chinese people around me are immigrants who came to the US as adults, I was feeling especially out of place as a Chinese American who grew up in America. Having not grown up in China, I do not have shared experience and understanding of cultural norms and expectations as the first-generation Chinese immigrants who came here as adults (aka FOBs: Fresh Off the Boat). Yet unlike the American Born Chinese kids (the ABCs), I remember what life is like in China as a little kid, and Chinese was my first language. They call people like me the 1.5-generation immigrant. Those who are stuck between worlds. And books like American Born Chinese finally gave society a glimpse of what the world looks like to someone like me. (Though in this case, the perspective from which the story was told turned out to be very different from my own.)
A bit of history
Media depiction of Asians at the end of the 20th century
Growing up in America in the ’90s, the only depiction of Chinese people in media was from kung fu movies. Sure, the Joy Luck Club was out, but that’s not what people think of when they look at the only Asian kid in class.
I was 9 when I moved from the metropolitan city of Shanghai to Buffalo, NY, which is much more of a Midwest town than a city. While I felt like I had been dropped into the middle of nowhere, where everything was so… quiet, people looked at me and assumed rice paddies. The people around me also seemed to have never seen straight black hair before. African Americans were widely represented in TV shows, movies, sports; but Asians? The best we’ve got at the time, I reckon, was Sulu from Star Trek, and he’s Japanese.
It comes down to a matter of access and exposure. Because of post WW2 American bases in Japan, and anime, Americans had many points of access and exposure to Japanese culture. But China? The borders were mostly closed. (See Chinese Exclusion Acts, Chinese Immigration: Past and Present, Chinese Immigrants in the United States. The History of Chinese Immigration to the U.S. gives a nice concise description of the three waves of immigration, whereas the History of Chinese Americans Wikipedia page gives a very detailed account.)
Then starting in the late 1980s, the best and brightest Chinese scholars were allowed to come to America.
Chinese Language in the United States
Prior to my parent’s group of well-educated Chinese immigrants in the late ’80s and ’90s, those who spoke Chinese in America were mostly historically poor workers from Fujian and Guangdong provinces of China, or educated professionals from Hongkong or Taiwan. Cantonese was the predominant Chinese dialect spoken in America in the 20th century, since it’s the local dialect of Hongkong and Guangdong province.
The official language of China is actually Mandarin Chinese, which is based on the Beijing dialect. Mandarin Chinese uses a different romanization spelling system, called pinyin. In pinyin, the capital of China is spelled Beijing, as opposed to Peking, (which the world finally realized after the 2008 Beijing Olympics.)
However, due to Cantonese being the predominant Chinese language spoken in the US during the greater part of the 20th century, English has adopted the Cantonese spelling of Chinese words.
Words like:
- kungfu instead of gongfu (pronounced g’own foo)
- Chow mein instead of chao mian (pronounced ch’ow man)
- Dim sum instead of dian xin (pronounced dan she-in)
This is also why Americans associate the sounds of “Ching Chang Chong” with Chinese people. Those are sounds a bystander might glean from a Cantonese conversation. As a Mandarine Chinese speaker, hearing people make those sounds at me was extremely insulting as I was growing up.
Representation of language is important to me. That’s why in my books, I include the original Chinese characters, the pinying with accents, as well as how an English speaker would pronounce the words. I did an interview about this on Creative Cafe. (I’ll find the link later). Even in the YA novel I’m working on, I made sure Chinese words are written in Chinese and pinyin. Language is part of what defines a culture. Hopefully, it won’t get cut during the editing process since I’m going for traditional publishing this time around.
*I did not include pinyin accents in the examples above because I was showing how words accepted into the English dictionary are not spelled. Just like how French words lose their accents when they become English words.
Modern-day depiction of Chinese Americans in the media
After getting my PhD, I ended up in Vancouver BC where I met a number of Chinese Canadian actors. At the time, a famous director (I wish I remember the name) reportedly said that Hollywood couldn’t cast Asians because no one wanted to watch Asian characters. It was a catch-22 issue. No one watched movies with Asian main characters, because there were no American movies with Asian characters, and so Hollywood wouldn’t cast Asians as main characters, because they didn’t have an audience who watches movies with Asian characters.
Things have since changed. Especially since Crazy Rich Asians saw much success at the box office.
There are now TV shows like Fresh Off the Boat, movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Invincible, Glen in the Walking Dead, to name a few off the top of my head.
It’s a huge step in the right direction.
Over-exaggeration of Asian stereotypes in comedy
And yet… most of these roles characterize Asian Americans through comedic stereotypes. (See Why Won’t Hollywood Cast Asian Actors?) This is a choice not made only by Hollywood, but by Asian American comedians themselves. Take Tai Mai Shu raps in the early 2000s, to Uncle Roger on Youtube today. Or Ken Jeong. Their claim to fame all stems from the over-exaggeration of Asian stereotypes. It gets laughs. It gets views. American Born Chinese does the same. And that’s where the controversy of including this book in the middle school curriculum comes into play.
Controversy of American Born Chinese
Most people focus on Cousin Chin-Kee as the point of controversy for this book. This topic has been discussed in many other articles. Yes, it’s a gross exaggeration of racial stereotypes. As I mentioned above, such exaggerations are common in comedy. From Gene’s NPR interview and other interviews, I understand that he chose to do this to point out how ridiculous the stereotypes are.
What I find troubling is that society seems to accept the stereotypical caricatures more than real Asian Americans. Sure, people are disgusted, but they also find them funny and one can always use a funny friend or a comedic sidekick. Horrible as they are, the stereotypical caricature character fully accepts themself and is thus accepted by others.
Real Asian Americans on the other hand? And this is what I find more troubling with the book. Not its depiction of racial stereotypes, but the self-hate. The rejection of one’s cultural identity. The shame of being Chinese American. This is why upon finishing this book in 2007, I didn’t pick it up again from my bookshelf until now.
I have heard similar sentiments from other Asian American authors who decided to write a book about Chinese culture because they’ve rejected their culture growing up, but as adults, they’ve come to embrace their identity, and writing a book is proof of that.
I respect their journey.
But personally, I’ve always been proud of my heritage. Perhaps this is because my early life in Shanghai was so rich and fulfilling that it formed a solid foundation for my sense of identity. Coming to America, it was the ignorance that I faced daily that I rejected. It was the blatant non-existence of the Eastern Hemisphere in my American education. No, the printing press was not invented by Gutenberg. No, 10,000 years of Chinese history should not only be covered for less than a week during Global History class in 12 years of public education. Yes, I did already learn exponents and was solving for x in 3rd grade in China.
I felt bad for my fellow Americans who were missing out on so much. People in China got to enjoy all the media coming out of the US, plus all the stuff in Asia. All the rich stories, mythologies, history, across the world. Yet here in America, audiences are limited only to American shows, some European mythology and fairytales. But we should know by now that people in stories don’t have to have the same skin color as you, for you to be emersed in the story. (Why does the American version of the Netflix Three Body Problem have a white cast?)
I promised myself as a kid that I would share the love I have for Chinese mythology and wuxia, xianxia worlds with the American audience by writing novels. And that’s just what I’m going to do.
Back to American Born Chinese. I wish something like Invincible would gain more attention. But I can see why American Born Chinese has garnered so much accolades and attention. Why it seems to have more educational value. It checks the boxes: coming of age, cultural identity, navigating relationships, middle school setting, inclusion of cultural references…
Just as with the many TV shows and movies with Asian characters, it’s a great step in the right direction. However, a lot of background information needs to be provided in order to fully appreciate the story.
And that’s where Part 2 of this article comes in. (To be written after my conference).
And after answering some questions about the book at the teacher event, I realized that it may be helpful to identify the middle school audiences based on their cultural identity and familiarity with the subject matter. And so, here’s my Middle school audience breakdown for Chinese Born American.