Pop Quiz

• In American Born Chinese, there are three main story lines. What are the three main story lines?

• What does Jin do to his hair?

• Why does Danny dislike his cousin so much?

• Who is Wei-Chen’s father?

• “[Geraldine] had seen this little girl all of her life. Hanging out of windows over saloons in Mobile, crawling over the porches of shotgun houses on the edge of town, sitting in bus stations holding paper bags and crying to mothers, who kept saying, ‘Shet up!’ Hair uncombed, dresses falling apart, shoes untied and caked with dirt. . . . They were everywhere. They slept six in a bed, all their pee mixing together in the night as they wet their bed. . . They sat in little rows on street curbs, crowded into pews at church, taking space from the nice, neat, colored children; they clowned on the playgrounds, broke things in dime stores, ran in front of you on the street, made ice sliders on the sloped sidewalks in winter. . . . Like flies they settled. And this one had settled in her house.” (Morrison, 97-8).

Hypotheses

• Being monstrous has something to do with being disordered and out of order.– that is to say a monstrosity is that which has no proper or recognizable place in our understanding of nature (think kinship), society (think le genre humaine), language, and human perception.

• Growth is out of order.

• Adolescence is so susceptible to the monstrous and to producing monstrosities because it is a time in which the growth is volatile, dynamic, and harder to regulate.

AdolescenceVictor Turner introduced us to rites of passages and the idea of:• Liminality ; a “Betwixt and Between” stage.

• In which the novice is both and neither in and/nor out and is exposed to a mixing of cultural signs and experimentation (with family ties, social hierarchies, belief systems, and ideas of community.)

Baxter argues that the category “Adolescence” meant to:• Combat the risk of improper growths (the increased danger of the “real

teenager.”)

• In order to regulate and ensure the developmental promise (of the “ideal adolescent” who is the nation’s future.)

Monstrosity• Monstrous – late middle English (coming from the Latin

monstrosus) meaning “strange or unnatural”; or as we have come to realize that which defies categorization.

– The problem with the monstrous is that it has no recognizable place in the proper order of nature (think kinship) , society (le genre humaine), language, and human perception.

• Monstrosity – mid 16th century (coming from the late Latin monstrositas)“denoting an abnormality of growth.”

– That which grows but does not develop correctly (into the order of things).

American Born ChineseMonstrous Mixings and the Young

Adult Graphic Novel

Monstrous Mixings

• Gene Leun Yang• Published 2006• First Graphic Novel to be a

National Book award finalist

Mixing• Identity• Transformation• Assimilation vs Tradition• Storytelling

Monstrous Mixings

• In Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives, Monica Chiu discusses the reception of Yang’s graphic novel, American Born Chinese, in China compared to the US.

• According to Chiu, the novel while positively received in America has been less than favorably received in China.

Monstrous Mixing

Chiu explains that part of the barrier to receiving Yang’s novel in China has to do with Yang’s revision of the image of The Monkey King.

Monstrous MixingChinese Academics have regarded the symbolism and importance of The Monkey King as a “heated topic.” The Monkey King has been interpreted as:

• A “leader of peasant uprisings, especially when he declares, ‘Emperors are made by turn; next year it may be me.’”

• “a symbolic supporter of the landlord class in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644)”

• “an able and talented high-ranking subject who is sober-minded about the corruption of the court yet loyal to the monarch

• “a hero who desires freedom but is controlled by deities”

• “a creature who is defiant and contemptuous of authority but is reliant on divine right at the same time.”

• “a monster who ranks among the saints after suffering many hardships.”

– (Chiu, 112)

Monstrous Mixing• In traditional versions of the

story (especially those post Han Dynasty):– The all powerful deity is

Buddha– The mission is to go West to

India to recover the Buddhist sutras.

– The Monkey King (or ) is seen as extremely nobly rebellious and critical of power (though scholars debate this interpretation).

Mixing Myths• In Yang’s version of the Monkey King

story– The all powerful deity is not Buddha but

rather an old man named Tze-Yo-Tzuh.

– The mission is to “Journey to the West” but not to receive the sutras but rather to be guided by a star and deliver three packages. The allusion to the nativity here is reinforced visually by the image of what looks like a nativity scene later.

– The Monkey King’s rebellion is not seen as noble but rather as a result of self hate, insecurity, and an immature response to prejudice.

Monstrous Mixing• According to Gene Luen Yang, “ ‘Tze-Yo-Tzuh’ is actually a transliteration of ‘I AM’ in

Chinese.” He explains that in Chinese, the phrase connotes “ ‘self-existence.’” “[That] is the best way I can describe it. An existence independent of any other.”

• Yang goes on to explain that “The original Monkey King tale, first written down in a novel called Journey To The West, was Buddhist at its core.”

• However he continues, “I wanted to do an Asian-American retelling of the tale, so I added Western, Judeo-Christian elements to my version.” He visually reinforces this allusion to a Judeo-Christian version of God by depicting a figure who does not look Buddha, but who looks more like a combination between Moses and Jesus.

– Yang, “The Blog of Gene Leun Yang.” April 2010

Monstrous Mixing

• According to Chiu, the hardest aspect of Yang’s revision of The Monkey King for Chinese readers is the fact that The Monkey King takes the form of Chin-kee.

• Chin-kee’s character is a “monstrous” amalgamation of every 19th century (mostly American) stereotype of Chinese people.

Monstrous Mixing

“The Coming Man”

May 20, 1881

George Frederick Keller

The San Francisco Wasp.

Monstrous Mixing• Chinese Exclusion Act (May 6, 1882)

– (not repealed until 1943 with Magnuson Act.)

• Plays to the fears of white men about Chinese monopolies and Chinese takeovers.

• Chinese people in America at that time made up .002 percent of the population.

• Representing American workers worse nightmare and then inscribing it in every way possible within visual rhetoric that communicates to American viewer, Chinese.

Monstrous Mixing

• What’s so monstrous about Chin-Kee?

• How does Jin’s transformation compare to Pecola’s transformation?

• If being in and out of (natural or social) order, has something to do with what is monstrous, what do we make of the Monkey King’s final statement to Jin: – “I would have saved myself from five hundred years’

imprisonment beneath a mountain of rock had I only realized how good it is to be a monkey” (233).

• “Now, Augustine, what upon earth is this for? Said miss Ophelia. ‘Your house is so full of these little plagues, now, that a body can’t set down their foot without treading on ‘em. I get up in the morning, and find one asleep behind the door, and see one black head poking out from under the table, one lying on the door-mat,--and they are mopping and mowing and grinning between all the railings, and tumbling over the kitchen floor! What on earth did you want to bring this one for?’” – Miss Ophelia in response to the arrival of Topsy in the St. Clare

household in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe, 498).