“I Have Enough Friends”
Exclusion, Assimilation and Critical Consciousness in Yang’s American Born Chinese
Sesh Joe
aug 2020
When I was in middle school, my uncle, who frequently visited from Korea, gave me a seemingly innocent birthday gift. The graphic novel had a bright yellow cover with an Asian adolescent’s face overlapping from the front to the book’s spine. The boy’s hair is cut in an old-school bowl-style and he holds a transforming toy robot as mountains rise in the background. Surveying my gift, my eyes finally came upon the title, American Born Chinese. Despite being too young to fully comprehend the work’s racial commentary, I read voraciously, finishing the whole novel in a single afternoon. Even then, I understood something of the meaning of my uncle’s gift, and how it might connect to my own identity. American Born Chinese (Gene Luen Yang, 2006) tells three seemingly unconnected stories, which converge to teach the importance of self-acceptance in the context of race and ethnicity. In the narrative that interests me most here, Jin Wang, an Asian teenager, navigates coming of age in a majority-white suburb as he struggles to fit into American culture. Despite initial reluctance, he befriends the other Asian students at his school and later has a falling out with them. In the novel’s other two narratives, an American boy named Danny and Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, undergo their own adventures. The three stories connect in the end to reveal that Jin transforms into Danny after facing persistent shame and rejection due to his race. His friend, Wei-Chen, is revealed to be the Monkey King, who functions to teach Jin the book’s key lesson: Jin (and, by extension, the reader) must embrace, not feel shamed by, his Asian identity.
Although my initial reading may have lacked a robust analysis of all the book has to offer, returning to it in the last few weeks, I have begun to consider a myriad of ways that the novel confronts white supremacy and its effect on non-white spaces. As scholars such as Sylvia Wynter have noted, whiteness marks some identities as belonging and others as violently excluded, which produces self-resentment in the victim of discrimination and creates a cycle of inclusion and exclusion (316). In the panels analyzed below (see figs. 1-4), Jin Wang deals with racial slurs, confronts European beauty standards, and struggles with his urge to assimilate into the norms of American whiteness. Taken together, these panels suggest how whiteness operates in both the physical spaces that Jin and his friends occupy and in their psychic lives, to the point where Jin himself perpetuates the same kind of racial discrimination once visited upon him. The genre of Yang’s novel, with its emphasis on spatiality through its nature as a visual medium, offers a well-suited form for Yang’s exploration of the psychic and physical spaces of Asian American exclusion.
Fig 1. Jin and friends encounter racial slurs. Afterwards, Jin walks home while thinking of Amelia and Greg.
While the novel clearly intends to educate the reader about the Asian American experience broadly, Yang’s illustrations also communicate the more subtle effects of racism. In one set of panels, Jin and his friends Wei-Chen and Suzy are joking with one another after school as two white students walk by and mock them (see fig. 1). The two employ the anti-Asian slurs “gook,” “chink,” and “nip” while making a joke about the weather, which causes Jin, Suzy, and Wei-Chen to become visibly upset. One way that this is expressed is through Jin and his friends’ physical reaction to the slurs; after the joke is made, the trio put their hands in their pockets, cross their legs, and look with humiliation at the ground. The three horizontal lines that are drawn across each of their faces communicate the silencing and mortifying experience of being racially stereotyped. Additionally, the movement of their arms and legs expresses the power that whiteness has to force them into fearful and reclusive physical insecurity. Although none of them speak to one another as a hush descends over their convivial laughter, they all move their bodies in a similar fashion as they share in the same embarrassment. While the actions of the white students are overtly and unmistakably racist, the situation reveals the complex truth of racial discrimination. One of the most significant details is the shift between the panels before and after the white teenagers walk by; their words invoke a powerful reminder for Jin and company of their racialized position. No matter how comfortable people of color may be at any given moment, white people possess the ability to unsettle them with words or actions.
These panels display the way that whiteness is able to alter the mental processes of people of color by making them hyper-aware of their own bodies in a given space. In the park, the Asian students are placed within a space that emphasizes their peaceful commingling prior to the arrival of the white teenagers. After the bullies walk by and insult them, Jin and his friends feel uncomfortable, angry, or otherwise troubled, which causes a shift in the physical space as depicted in the illustrations: Jin’s embarrassed facial expression, the movement of the trio’s arms and legs, and their silence. The bullies have weaponized white supremacy to affect the self-image of Jin and his friends. In fact, later on in the novel, Suzy notes that the times she has been called a “chink” have seriously affected her self-confidence. She is now always conscious of her marginalized position to the point where she “deep down inside… feel[s] like that all the time” (Yang 187; emphasis original).
Although Jin and his friends’ body movements are an important indicator of the role race performs in the panel, the bullies’ use of slurs is also of principal interest. The two (loudly) employ the terms “gook,” “chink,” and “nip” while making a joke to upset Jin and his friends—three words that arm the racist bullies with the power to entirely upend a social space. However, these words are not inherently powerful. Rather, terms like “gook” express the way that white supremacy operates by contextualizing or historicizing a given moment. Not only do the white youths have the power of current social dynamics on their side, but their words serve as a reminder of a long and arduous history of discrimination. The term “gook” has many possible origins, but it indisputably arose during wartime where US imperialism allowed (often white) troops to wreak havoc on East/Southeast Asian peoples (Pearson). When discriminatory language is used violently it forces people of color into pre-defined categories, which inhibits their ability to genuinely define themselves. This historical function of language allows the young and ignorant white bullies to disrupt Jin and his friends’ moment of laughter and “return” to the same sort of racism that their grandparents faced decades ago.
In addition to its effect on consciousness, the first four panels also convey the way whiteness invades and co-opts social spaces. In the first panel, Suzy and Wei-Chen are making fun of Jin for having a crush on his classmate, Amelia. As their laughter fills the park, the two white students walk by and make their remark, causing Jin and crew to fall silent. Immediately after, Yang illustrates the white teenager’s laughter with the same font and bolding in addition to more “ha ha”’s at the end. The white students mark Jin and his friends as inferior through their laughter—they have claimed the courtyard as their own, refusing to allow Jin any momentary relief from discrimination. In this way, whiteness fragments social landscapes by forcing the pre-existing dynamic of the non-white group into the immutable frames of racism. The bullies are initially irritated by the fact that Jin and his friends seem calm and unbothered, which is reflected in their disgruntled facial expressions. However, the bullies’ faces shift from slight frowns to relieved and jovial smirks as they actualize their power and take over what was once a cheerful gathering. Evidently, in their minds there is always the latent possibility that their racist remarks will upset Jin and his friends. This trouble-free functioning of the bullies is exemplary of how scholars understand white people’s movement in social spaces. They lack concern for how those spaces might affect them, interested only in how they can disrupt or take control of a given social dynamic. At the same time, white supremacy functions to restrict people of color, as they often become passive recipients of violence.
Although the actual illustrated content of American Born Chinese may communicate the way that whiteness affects physical space, there is perhaps no greater asset to my investigation than the book’s format itself. While scholars have noted the stigma against graphic novels in academia (they are often seen as “juvenile”), the genre is particularly helpful in considering race and racism’s effect on social spaces (Llorence 31). Graphic novels force the reader to consider the dynamic nature of space: when the bullies walk by and call Jin a “chink,” the next two panels are able to simultaneously communicate the dismay of all three Asian teenagers. Although the traditional novel might push the reader to consider each character’s feelings or thoughts, the graphic novel signals those feelings visually by emphasizing space and physicality, enabling the author to “drive home a major point through images” (Duncan 23). As Randy Duncan and Matthew Smith note, the visual nature of graphic novels’ content means that the reader is always contemplating how the plot plays out in literal embodied areas (8). In the context of race, this aids the reader in better understanding how discrimination may affect people of color by encouraging careful consideration of physical space and each character’s movement throughout. Racism is concerned with appearances (skin color, eye shape, facial structure, hair color, etc.), and graphic novels are most apt in connecting the reader with each character’s physical features. So, illustrations are well-suited to express how structural violence is enacted upon bodies.
For Asian Americans, this structural violence takes some specific forms. As scholar Min Zhou has noted, we are often seen as “perpetual foreigners,” struggling to fit in to American culture and constantly treated as the “ethnic other” (13). Yang’s panel reminds us of this exclusion in the simple clothing differences between the two groups. The two white teenagers don a basketball jersey, shorts, and a graphic t-shirt, with spiked-up hair, their pale skin plainly in sight and highlighted by Yang’s artwork. Jin and his friends, however, are seen in a 90s-style rugby shirt, a striped yellow-and-black turtleneck, a burnt orange polo, and Bruce Lee-esque striped yellow sweatpants (complete with bow-tied strings). American style may come easily to the white students, who have grown up surrounded by a certain culture that tells them what to do, wear, and look like, along with rewarding them for such behavior. However, the Asian students are left without much recourse—either they wear what they think is appropriate, in which case they are marked as out-of-touch foreigners, or they attempt to assimilate to American tastes, appearing as something that they are not. These clothes signify how our respective ethnicities shape us into different and clashing life paths in even the most minute ways. Suzy and Wei-Chen, particularly, are wearing stereotypically unfashionable clothing, with bright yellows, oranges and clashing blacks, as they are much less “Americanized” than Jin. The effect of whiteness is inescapable, to the point where even the clothing on one’s body can unconsciously communicate a glaring distinction.
Fig 2. Jin performs “defensive othering” and tells Wei-Chen he doesn’t want to be friends.
By “white people,” I don’t necessarily mean that only people of Caucasian descent can commit such acts, though—anyone can, in their actions, perpetuate white supremacy. As shown in an earlier panel, Jin himself is pushed to engage in these self-destructive practices in order to fit in. When Wei-Chen is introduced to Jin’s fifth-grade class as “Chei-Chen Chun from China,” Jin proclaims that “something made [him] want to beat [Wei-Chen] up” (36). Later on, Wei-Chen approaches Jin and asks him, in Mandarin, if he would like to be friends. Jin goes on to reject Wei-Chen, telling him that he is “in America” and should thus “speak English” (see fig. 2). Here, Jin parrots a traditionally white nationalist trope, turning it around on another Asian student as a way to distinguish himself. Additionally, Jin proclaims that he has “enough friends,” as he points to a group of three white kids. In order to fit in, Jin is encouraged to bully or pick on his fellow Chinese American students to solidify his position as almost-white. Jin is able to momentarily attain white privilege so long as he engages in certain practices deemed desirable by white social dynamics. This focus on particular actions is what differentiates the racism Jin faces in the earlier panel from his exclusion of Wei-Chen; while the bullies are both the original beneficiaries of white supremacy and its momentary perpetrators, Jin is simultaneously the victim and the culprit of the oppressive system. In fact, when Jin first moves to Mayflower Elementary School, he faces the exact same embarrassing and insensitive introduction to his fourth-grade class, which causes him to feel uncomfortable and excluded. By later drawing a distinction between an “integrated” Asian like himself, who eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and speaks fluent English, and “fresh-off-the-boat” immigrants like Wei-Chen, Jin reifies the same structure that once (and still) discriminated against him.
The social machine of racial domination affects Jin in two distinct ways: the first, as we’ve seen in previous analysis, is a more simplistic exclusion where Jin is pushed to the margins and made inferior. This stirs anger in him as well as causing him to befriend a group of people who share a similar fate. However, the two-pronged process of racism also produces envy and internalized inferiority. In the second panel, Jin is walking home from school after the slur incident and thinks of Amelia. At the same time, he begins to think of Greg, an American boy in his class who has been getting in the way of his relationship. Greg had approached Jin previously and asked that he stopped dating Amelia because she needs to “start paying attention to who she hangs out with,” in addition to calling Jin a “geek” (Yang 179). Yang draws Jin’s face growing progressively more disgruntled, settling finally into a frown as he continues to think of Greg, ending his illustration with a panel of Jin thinking solely of Greg’s blonde, curly hair. Greg’s hair attains metonymic status here, becoming the attribute to which Jin attaches his racially-inflected anxiety about his attractiveness. The next day, Jin comes to school with his hair cut and styled in a perm.
These panels gesture toward how people of color fetishize white traits due to European beauty standards and cultural norms. Jin is certainly upset by Greg’s specific actions, but the final drawing isolates Greg’s physical features as the more important part of the issue—if Jin was white, blonde, and blue-eyed, he wouldn’t be such a “geek” in the eyes of his peers. This dangerous self-perception, where Jin sees himself as an outsider who needs to behave or look a certain way to be accepted in society, evokes W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of “double consciousness.” In his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois describes double consciousness as “a peculiar sensation… [the] sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (8). For Du Bois, double consciousness forces Black Americans to be consciously aware of their “two-ness…two warring ideals in one dark body,” always fighting to form their own identity despite the imposition of negative labels (8).[1] While acknowledging that Du Bois’ focus on the experiences of African Americans means that his theorizing does not entirely apply, it is clear that non-Black people of color do, in practice, experience a similar self-fragmentation. Asian Americans must confront stereotypes, European beauty standards, and discrimination which renders their sense of self conflicted.
Fig 3. Jin transforms into Danny after isolating himself from his Asian classmates.
With respect to American Born Chinese, it’s fair to frame Jin’s struggles in the context of double consciousness. Throughout this essay, I have identified a number of moments where Jin attempts to suppress double consciousness through “internalized racism”—“feelings of self-doubt, disgust, and disrespect for oneself” due to the “implantation of racist stereotypes, values, images […] and ideologies by white society” (A&M). When Jin tells Wei-Chen that he doesn’t want to be friends, that the two are “nothing alike,” and that Wei-Chen is an “F.O.B.” (an immigrant “fresh off the boat”), he is perpetuating what A&M, the editor of Medium’s Asian American section, calls “defensive othering.” In defensive othering, those with internalized racism “[attempt] to become a part of the dominant group or [distance] themselves from those who are the same as them” (4). Jin has built up years of self-hatred stemming from stereotypes in pop culture, his peers’ discriminatory behavior, and his attempts to navigate Eurocentric beauty standards without any racial solidarity. This causes him to alienate himself from his own ethnicity in order to grapple with the hard truth of white supremacy. Additionally, his desire to “look white” is an attempt to assimilate into the dominant group in hopes that his peers will treat him as they do his white classmates. Jin further experiences double consciousness by betraying his Asian identity—that is, brown eyed, dark-haired, and yellow-skinned—to become more palatable to white society. The version of himself he attempts to portray is the result of a mental fragmentation where Jin is uncomfortable in his own skin yet unable to escape the fundamental truth of his identity.
Fig 4. Chin-Kee, Danny/Jin’s cousin and the Asian American stereotype.
In fact, the author makes Jin’s struggle with internalized racism even more explicit in the second half of the novel, where Jin transforms into “Danny,” an all-American blonde-haired boy (see fig. 3). Despite his transition, “Danny” is plagued by his cousin “Chin-Kee,” Yang’s rendition of the Asian immigrant stereotype. Chin-Kee (a play on the slur “chink”) follows Jin (now Danny) around everywhere, embarrassing Jin/Danny by replacing his L’s with his R’s (“Harro Amellica!”) or answering every math question his teacher asks (see fig. 4). Chin-Kee represents the other half of double consciousness for Jin—everywhere he goes, he feels he is haunted by the stereotypical specter of Asianness as imagined by the U.S. popular discourse. Just like Suzy, Jin feels like he can never escape being seen as a “chink” or shed the hateful perceptions of others. So, in this sense, Jin is confronting the same sort of “second sight” described by Du Bois, which “yields him no true self-consciousness,” leaving him to only “see himself through the revelation of the other [White] world” (8).
However, Jin eventually has a change of heart. In the last few pages of the novel, Jin tries to reconnect with Wei-Chen and apologize for his hurtful remarks. Jin sits in a Chinese family bakery after school for weeks until, eventually, Wei-Chen comes to hear him out. The two bond over milk tea and converse in Chinese as the novel ends with a panel of their laughter and “餐廳餅家 Bakery Café” written above (see fig. 5). These panels signify Jin’s transition towards self-acceptance. This is a process that scholar Keith Osajima, borrowing from Paulo Freire, terms “conscientization” or “critical consciousness” (61). For Osajima, conscientization is the process Asian people go through as they begin “to see themselves in larger social structural contexts, not simply as individuals but as people whose lives intersect with and are shaped by race and racism” (66). Jin has spent nearly the entire book internalizing racial hatred, struggling with self-esteem, and rejecting solidarity by pushing his Asian friends away. However, Yang’s choice of ending indicates that Jin has much more ahead of him, likely in the direction of conscientization. In fact, Osajima describes conscientization as an “interlocking, iterative process” that begins when Asian Americans are mobilized towards self-awareness and begin to resist white supremacy (73).So, the final panel ends the novel on a hopeful note, indicating Jin’s commitment to embracing his identity and understanding his struggles through the lens of an Asian American experience.
Not long ago, I was watching Quentin Tarantino’s most recent film, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019), with my girlfriend at the time. As Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt navigate 160 minutes of mid-20th century Los Angeles, there is but one Asian character that appears in the film: none other than the late Bruce Lee (played by Mike Moh). In his approximately five-minute cameo, Lee goes on a long, arrogant rant before facing off against stunt man Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Lee’s characteristic exclamations and mannerisms are juxtaposed against the white stuntman’s cool, “rational” demeanor as Lee ends up rudely tossed into the side of a classic car. While the theater erupted in laughter, I was left feeling nothing short of uncomfortable—looking around, I noticed that I was the only Asian person in the vicinity. Inevitably, I thought, anyone viewing the film would, in one way or another, associate me with the scene. Even worse, I worried my girlfriend would now see me in the context of Tarantino’s depiction of Lee: a loud, farcical, and out-of-place foreigner.
Fig 5. Wei-Chen and Jin at the end of the novel. The brackets represent Wei-Chen speaking Chinese.
Many have criticized the overtly problematic representation of Bruce Lee (his daughter, Shannon Lee, has referred to the cameo as “disrespectful”) and the general lack of people of color in Once Upon A Time (Yamato). However, setting this aside, what I find significant about my discomfort is how it fits in the frames of conscientization. For Osajima, “converted Asians” almost always “[point] to moments when new information and perspectives profoundly affected” their worldview (64-65). Put otherwise, Asians in the process of conscientization often experience revelatory moments where they are made aware of their position in larger social structures. Du Bois echoes this claim when he describes how “in the early days of rollicking boyhood…the revelation bursts upon one” that they are “different from the others,” as double consciousness begins to set in (7). As I sat in the movie theater, I was not simply embarrassed at the thought of being associated with Bruce Lee— I was being forced to consider how unfair (and sparse) representations of Asian Americans affect our community. In this “double consciousness,” I experienced a splitting of the self where I was hyper-aware of what the white moviegoers might have thought of me—including a person who should have known me very well—while simultaneously trying to cohere my identity in the context of the scene. Both Du Bois and Osajima describe this experience with precision, that is, a moment that “[exerts] a transformative impact” on one’s life (Osajima 65).
One can also understand Jin’s frustration with Chin-Kee through this intersection between double consciousness and conscientization. For Jin, his mortification in being associated with Chin-Kee is like a wound permanently attached to his body: no matter what he does, the racist Asian stereotype he accepts as fact will never go away. However, it is precisely this inescapability that pushes him to reconnect with his own identity and the friends from whom he had isolated himself. In understanding that no matter how hard he tried, including perming his hair, excluding other Asian students, and vying for the acceptance of his white classmates, he would always remain an Asian American, Jin has finally begun the process of conscientization. As the caricature of Bruce Lee haunted me in the movie theater, just as Chin-Kee did Jin, I too was ushered into the important critical reflection necessary to embrace my racial identity as an Asian American.
Works Cited
A&M. “Internalized Racism Among Asians.” Medium: Asian Identity, 12 Jun 2017. Web.
Chung, Jezzika. “How Asian Immigrants Learn Anti-Blackness from White Culture, And How To Stop It.” Huffpost.com, 24 Aug 2017. Web.
Du Bois, W.E.B. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” The Souls of Black Folk. Ed. Brent Hayes Edwards. OUP: Oxford, 2007.
Duncan, Randy and Matthew J. Smith. “How the Graphic Novel Works.” The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel.Ed. Stephen E. Tabachnick. Cambridge UP, 2017. 8-25.
Llorence, Jeremy J. “Exploring Graphic Literature as a Genre and its Place in Academic Curricula.” McNair Scholars Journal 15.1.6 (2011).
Osajima, Keith. "Replenishing the Ranks: Raising Critical Consciousness Among Asian Americans." Journal of Asian American Studies 10.1 (2007): 59-83.
Pearson, Kim. “Gook.” The Writers Den, Rhetoric of Race. Copyright Eric Wolarsky. 2003. Web.
Wynter, Sylvia. "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument." CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257-337.
Yamato, Jen. “Bruce Lee’s family calls ‘Once Upon a Time’ ‘a mockery.’ Is it insult or homage?” Los Angeles Times. 31 July 2019. Web.
Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. Color Lark Pien, New York: First Second, 2006.
Zhou, Min. “Asians in America: The Paradox of ‘The Model Minority’ and ‘The Perpetual Foreigner.’” 43rd Annual Sorokin Lecture. University of Saskatch-ewan, Saskatoon. 9 Feb 2012.
[1] There is some tension inherent in applying Du Bois’ double consciousness to Jin’s experience as an Asian American. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk was explicitly intended to address the struggles of the African American community, and double consciousness is based on Blackness as antagonistically opposed to Americanness (Du Bois 9). This cannot be said of other minority groups, who did not endure slavery or years of Jim Crow as the foundational violence of America. Furthermore, the well-documented issue of anti-Blackness in the Asian American community renders the application of double consciousness even more problematic than it already is for other non-Black peoples. Older Asian Americans are often overtly discriminatory against Black members of predominantly Asian areas, and Asian American literature has historically pushed aside issues of antiblack racism (Chung). However, this dilemma expands far beyond the focus of this paper—I intend to apply Du Bois’ double consciousness to Jin’s experiences while simultaneously recognizing the inherent issue in doing so. Although the term itself may have been coined in the context of anti-Black racism, it provides an important theoretical framework with which to understand the plurality of Asian American experience. This is neither to equate the struggles of the two groups nor to misappropriate Du Bois’ writing for a malicious purpose.
Sesh Joe is from Austin, Texas, and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.