American Born Chinese Themes

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Orientalism and Asian Americans The United States of America was founded and occupies by a group of immigrants from other countries and has rich and variety of people who migrate and move to and from the United States from all over the country. Among those types of people are the people from the East land known as the “orient”. Some of the biggest issues that the United States has had in the past is a sense of racism to the Asian American community. What seems to be clear in society today is that the racism is still around today and can take many forms and may include themes from gene Yangs book on orientalism, yellow peril, and the model minority. American Born Chinese is a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang, it shows a great comparison between…show more content…
And this tale is based on a folk lore tale by Sun Wukong and is based on the character he monkey king from the Chinese novel journey to the west. The second part of the book is a specific portion of the story about an American Chinese child born of Chinese immigrants. The character’s name is Jin Wang and this story starts off with Jin moving from San Francisco to a mostly white suburban neighborhood. The short graphic novel depicts Jin having a tough time adjusting to the new life and new school and trying to find a place in the white American culture. In this part of the short story novel Jin has a hard time with his identity and background culture. The third and last portion of this book is about a white American boy named Danny who has a cousin to visit from china. This cousin’s name is Chin-kee. In this third part of the graphic novel Chin-kee shows what appear to be the most common forms of known stereo types that most common Americans are familiar with. Some of these stereo types include wearing clothing from an 19th century time period slanted eyes, big front teeth, a heavy “Chinese” accent (or what is perceived to be) his physical appearance and presence and even his eating habits seem to indicate all to the reader that he is a typical stereo type if the basic Chinese person from the east…show more content…
The American stereotypes of Chin-Kee's are closely characterized by the style of the illustrations and the style of the drawings of him. Before World War II and even around the early 20th century, Asian Americans were seen as aliens, unfit to become proper models of society. They were called the “pig tailed coolie” a term for the Chinese male who was considered an unskilled laborer or worker. There was a great fear that because their culture was so different then the American counterparts and the amount of Asian immigrants coming over to the states the congress instituted the Chinese exclusion

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