Racism and Popular Culture Theme Analysis

Racism and the idea of the foreign “other” are woven in throughout the book in a variety of ways, one of the most significant of which is the way that the book handles the intersection between racism and popular culture, specifically when it comes to television media. The chapters telling Danny and Chin-Kee’s story are set up to read like a sitcom, Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee with elements like a laugh track and organization that follows that of a classic television show. Through this, American Born Chinese makes the case that the racism espoused by white characters in Jin’s story doesn’t emerge out of nowhere. Rather, those characters likely internalized their racist beliefs thanks to an American media landscape that casts Asian characters on the whole as little more than punch lines because of their perceived differences.

Nearly everything Chin-Kee does and the entirety of his appearance were inspired by real world pop culture happenings. He sings a song that a Chinese American Idol contestant auditioned with, he eats “crispy fried cat gizzards with noodle” like a Chinese character from a 2001 political cartoon, and he also resembles the lone Asian character from the film Sixteen Candles, Long Duk Dong. Drawing inspiration and elements from this wide variety of sources, from cartoons and reality television to American-made kung-fu movies, and even stereotypical dishes from American Chinese restaurants, begins to make the case that Chin-Kee isn’t someone whom Yang created out of thin air. Rather, Yang shows that Chin-Kee himself doesn’t exist as an actual person—he’s the product of non-Asian creators who continue to bring Asian characters to life and present them as nothing more than stereotypes.

When it comes to the specific element of the sitcom setup in Chin-Kee’s chapters, American Born Chinese then forces readers—especially white readers—to step into the role of a viewer of the sitcom Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee and confront the fact that characters like Chin-Kee are, by design, only supposed to exist as jokes. Having the laughter and applause right there on the page in the form of the laugh track also means that whether the reader is laughing or not, someone is, and the laugh track is supposed to tell the reader (or sitcom viewer) when they, too, should be laughing. This, in turn, means that the reader has to acknowledge that even if they might not personally find Chin-Kee funny (and indeed, they shouldn’t), the media landscape in which he exists finds him hilarious—and presumably, so do audiences of that media.

The chapters concerning Jin show the consequences of a pop cultural landscape that, through Chin-Kee-like representations of Asian characters, presents the idea that all Asian people, regardless of their country of origin, sex, or any other qualities or identifiers, are just like Chin-Kee. Kids at school accuse Jin of eating dogs and warn him to stay away from their pets, while being called a “Chink” is what causes Suzy Nakamura to realize that on some level, she feels constantly embarrassed about being Asian—that is, she’s embarrassed that in the eyes of her racist white peers, she appears as nothing more than a female version of Chin-Kee. In spite these stereotypes, of course, the novel makes clear to the reader that Jin, Wei-Chen, and Suzy all experience the exact same normal teenage things that their white peers do, from awkward movie dates to conflicts with their parents about dating or personal hygiene. In other words, the novel’s Asian characters are people just like anyone else—but they’re people who must deal with the constant expectation that they, like Chin-Kee, will know all the answers, eat people’s house pets, and sexually prey on vulnerable white women.

While American Born Chinese offers no real remedy or redemption for individuals like Greg, Timmy, and Jin’s teachers who act in racist or offensive ways, it does imply more broadly that the best way to begin to tackle racism like this is to challenge and dismantle the stereotypes that fuel it. Within the novel itself, this happens quite literally when Danny knocks the head off of Chin-Kee. In particular, the fact that Chin-Kee was never a real person (he was a puppet of sorts, created and manipulated by the Monkey King) drives home the fact that what he represents is a fiction that exists nowhere in real life—the stereotypes that make him who he is are simply ideas that other people apply to Asian individuals, whether those individuals are fictional or real. Recognizing that all individuals are people with rich inner lives of their own, and being aware of how media can negatively shape one’s perception of a group of people, Gene Luen Yang suggests, are the first steps to creating a pop culture landscape in which Chin-Kee no longer exists.