Literary Analysis American Born Chinese

Chin-Kee Throughout American Born Chinese In Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese he uses the character of Chin-Kee to argue that you can’t run from who you are. This whole graphic novel is about accepting yourself and everything that you are. No matter who anyone else thinks you are and accepting that will make life so much easier. The Monkey King even says to Jin, “You know, Jin, I would have saved myself from five hundred years’ imprisonment beneath a mountain of rock had I only realized how good it was to be a monkey” (Yang 223). This is stating how once you accept who you are, this is the moment that you learn how great it is to be yourself. The Monkey King is also telling Jin that no matter how people view you, who you are is what’s most important. Not accepting who you are is the Monkey King’s and Jin Wang’s problem. Wong Lai-Tsao talks to the Monkey King about this problem, “Returning to your true form is not an exercise of kung fu, but a release of it” (Yang 145). The Monkey King took a long time to realize this. He tried to become something he wasn’t because of how the gods viewed him. The one thing that the Monkey realized is that you should not worry about how other people view you. Be who you are and the Monkey King tries to show Danny that he should accept who he is. That
Jin Wang becoming Danny; Monkey King becoming The Great Sage, Equal of Heaven; and the Monkey King’s son becoming Chei Wang. The problem was accepting who they were created to be. When they weren’t accepted with who they were, they tried to change who they were. They wanted to fit into society. Then towards the end of the book we see that they realize their mistake and the characters attempt to embrace who they are. It took the Monkey King five hundred years to finally accepted how great it is to be a monkey. It took till Chin-Kee showed himself as the Monkey for Jin Wang to embrace his Asian culture and apologize to Wei