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ASK YOURSELF : Based on this information,would you say these demographics are accurate to Jin and his peers' circumstances? Knowing that the book is autobiographical, do you think Yang grew up with...

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Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (public library) is among my ten favorite books on writing - a treasure trove of insight both practical and profound, timelessly revisitable and yielding deeper resonance each time. Lamott adds to the collected wisdom of great writers with equal parts candor and conviction, teaching us as much about writing as she does about creativity at large and, even beyond that, about being human and living a full life - because, after all, as Lamott notes in the beginning, writing is nothing more nor less than a sensemaking mechanism for life:

One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

What makes Lamott so compelling is that all of her advice comes not from the ivory tower of the pantheon but from an honest place of exquisite vulnerability and hard-earned life-wisdom. She recounts her formative years and where she headed once she encountered that inevitable fork in the road where we can choose between being shut in and shut down by our traumatic experiences, or using them as fertile clay for character-building:

I started writing when I was seven or eight. I was very shy and strange-looking, loved reading above everything else, weighed about forty pounds at the time, and was so tense that I walked around with my shoulders up to my ears, like Richard Nixon. I saw a home movie once of a birthday party I went to in the first grade, with all these cute little boys and girls playing together like puppies, and all of a sudden I scuttled across the screen like Prufrock's crab. I was very clearly the one who was going to grow up to be a serial killer, or keep dozens and dozens of cats. Instead, I got funny. I got funny because boys, older boys I didn't even know, would ride by on their bicycles and taunt me about my weird looks. Each time felt like a drive-by shooting. I think this is why I walked like Nixon: I think I was trying to plug my ears with my shoulders, but they wouldn't quite reach. So first I got funny and then I started to write, although I did not always write funny things.

[...]

All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear that hat of belonging.

In seventh and eighth grades I still weighed about forty pounds. I was twelve years old and had been getting teased about my strange looks for most of my life. This is a difficult country to look too different in - the United States of Advertising, as Paul Krassner puts it - and if you are too skinny or too tall or dark or weird or short or frizzy or homely or poor or nearsighted, you get crucified. I did.

So she found refuge in books, searching for "some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in [her] head." To find that, she became a writer and began fantasizing about getting published, about "the thrill of seeing oneself in print," as the highest form of existential validation. When she published her first book, she awaited the affirming grandeur of public approval and secretly thought that "trumpets would blare, major reviewers would proclaim that not since Moby Dick had an American novel so captured life in all of its dizzying complexity." Of course, none of this happened - not with the first book, nor the second or third or fourth or fifth. Instead, what Lamott found was a deeper kind of reward - that sensation "unmerited grace" that Annie Dillard so eloquently captured in her timeless meditation on the writing life. Lamott echoes Ray Bradbury on rejection and reflects:

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do - the actual act of writing - turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

[...]

I tell my students that the odds of their getting published and of it bringing them financial security, peace of mind, and even joy are probably not that great. Ruin, hysteria, bad skin, unsightly tics, ugly financial problems, maybe; but probably not peace of mind. I tell them that I think they ought to write anyway.

But, one might wonder, why? Lamott answers beautifully:

My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.

But I also tell [my students] that sometimes when my writer friends are working, they feel better and more alive than they do at any other time. And sometimes when they are writing well, they feel that they are living up to something. It is as if the right words, the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out. Writing this way is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.

For her, the essence of writing is about something simple, something immutable about being human:

Good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.

[...]

Hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate. Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.

At the heart of writing, Lamott argues, lies a capacity for quiet grit and a willingness to decondition the all too human tendency to get so overwhelmed by the enormity of the journey that we're too paralyzed to take the first step. She recounts this wonderful anecdote, after which the book is titled:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

In this bird-by-bird approach to writing, there is no room for perfectionism. (Neil Gaiman famously advised, "Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving." and David Foster Wallace admonished, "If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.") Lamott cautions:

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.

[...]

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I'm sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here - and, by extension, what we're supposed to be writing.

Lamott echoes Susan Sontag ("That's what a writer does - a writer pays attention to the world." and offers a beautiful definition of what it means to be a writer:

Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on.

[...]

The writer is a person who is standing apart, like the cheese in "The Farmer in the Dell" standing there alone but deciding to take a few notes. You're outside, but you can see things up close through your binoculars. Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others.

In a sentiment reminiscent of E. B. White's timeless words on the responsibility of the writer, Lamott considers the core of being a writer:

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

That is, one needs to have a moral position. (I myself have long believed that the role of a great writer - or editor, or "curator," or any other custodian of cultural values - is to frame for people what matters in the world and why.) George Eliot famously observed, "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?" - a notion Lamott considers in the context of that necessary moral position:

As we live, we begin to discover what helps in life and what hurts, and our characters act this out dramatically. This is moral material. ... A moral position is a passionate caring inside you. We are all in danger now and have a new everything to face, and there is no point gathering an audience and demanding its attention unless you have something to say that is important and constructive. My friend Carpenter says we no longer need Chicken Little to tell us the sky is falling, because it already has. The issue now is how to take care of one another.

She finds in writing what Carl Sagan found in science - profound awe, deep reverence, a source of spiritual elevation:

In order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? ... Think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. Think of those times when you've read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone's soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of - please forgive me - wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious.

[...]

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness. . .

Most of all, however, Lamott sees in writing not a selfish act of personal gratification but an act of warm generosity - which is, after all, what drives all of us who wake up in the morning to put something we love into the world and go to bed at night glad that we did:

If you give freely, there will always be more. ... It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.

This mutual gratification is where the mesmerism of literature lies:

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Bird by Bird is an absolute must-read, and must-reread, in its entirety. Complement it with Annie Dillard on writing, which inspired Lamott, and Dani Shapiro on the pleasures and perils of the creative life, which was inspired by Lamott.

For more notable advice on writing, see Elmore Leonard's 10 rules of writing, Walter Benjamin's thirteen doctrines, H. P. Lovecraft's advice to aspiring writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald's letter to his daughter, Zadie Smith's 10 rules of writing, David Ogilvy's 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller's 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac's 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck's 6 pointers, and Susan Sontag's synthesized learnings.

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Anne Lamott on Writing and Why Perfectionism Kills Creativity

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Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (public library ) is among my ten favorite books on writing - a treasure trove of insight both practical and profound, timelessly revisitable and yielding deeper resonance each time.

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Children's Books

Scenes of tribulation from "American Born Chinese." Credit... Gene Luen Yang

Is it so bad to grow up Asian in America? One might be forgiven for asking upon encountering "American Born Chinese," a graphic novel that, with its dark exploration of Asian-American adolescence, won last year's Michael L. Printz Award for young adult literature and was also a finalist in its genre for a National Book Award.

After all, Asians are widely perceived to have it easier than other minorities in the United States, especially African-Americans, whose coming-of-age struggles have been chronicled for decades by writers like Walter Dean Myers, Jacqueline Woodson and Sharon G. Flake. But in "American Born Chinese," Gene Luen Yang makes growing up Chinese in California seem positively terrifying.

The narrative is divided into three parts: the coming-of-age tale of the Asian-American Jin Wang, which centers on his relationship with his best friend, Wei-Chen Sun; the fantastical tale of a Monkey King who does not want to be a monkey; and the deeply disturbing story of Chin-Kee, a grotesque who takes every Chinese stereotype and wraps it into a leering, drooling package.

Yang seems to use Chin-Kee to express his deepest fears of how others perceive Asian-Americans. In the book's more realistic sections, Wang's friend Wei-Chen is embarrassingly "fresh off the boat"; Chin-Kee is less embarrassing than monstrous. He comes to the United States for an extended visit with Danny, his blond, blue-eyed cousin, and enters with a shout of "Harro Amellica!" (The author uses Chin-Kee's L/R switch to great effect - at one point he says he's having a "lorricking good time" in his new school.) He wants to bind the feet of Danny's attractive study partner. His eyes are pupil-less slits. And he dominates Danny's classes, reminding us that the image of a Chinese student filling out all the SAT bubbles correctly can be as damaging as one eating "flied cat gizzards."

From "Stuck in the Middle." Credit... Daniel Clowes

More disquieting than Chin-Kee himself is the reaction of his American peers. They accept him with blank, idealized political correctness. Only when he begins to engage in truly disgusting behavior do they turn on him. It is as if Chin-Kee is trying to make others despise him.

While Chin-Kee's coolie outfit harks back to the 19th century, Yang - who teaches high school computer science in San Francisco - also takes from modern sources. In one scene, Chin-Kee dances on a table singing "She Bangs" in the style of William Hung, the Berkeley student who turned a ridiculed "American Idol" audition into a brief singing career in 2004. Hung's hooks were his geeky appearance and accent; his music video soaked him in bling and surrounded him with backup dancers to drive home the point that he would never have bling or backup dancers.

"American Born Chinese" blends Chinese and American cultures in inventive, unexpected ways. Structurally, its interwoven stories form a trilogy - a familiar Western construction - but the tale of the Monkey King is dominated by groups of four: four Major Heavenly Disciplines of kung fu; four emissaries of Tze-Yo-Tzuh, creator of all existence (an invention of Yang's). Thus four, a cursed number in Chinese numerology, dogs the Monkey King until he comes to terms with his identity. At the end of his story, in the book's most clever ethnic synthesis, he turns four to his favor, becoming one of four emissaries to the West who replace the wise men in their pilgrimage to see Jesus.

This image of the blending of Asian-American and white cultures will be tested in the coming years. As the white population in America falls below 50 percent, around 2060 (according to census projections), the definition of "white" is once again set to expand as it did for Italian- and Irish-Americans. Who will get to join the club? Or will the club finally fall to pieces?

Caught up in these complex questions, it is easy to forget that "American Born Chinese" also functions well as a comic book. (Many graphic novelists are taking back this once-disparaging term.) The art blends the clean lines of anime with a bold American palette. Yang is equally adept at depicting a high school cafeteria and the Monkey King's fantastical realm.

"American Born Chinese" is sometimes needlessly crass - it opens with a joke about breasts and peaches - and it is hampered by a confusing ending that stretches to resolve the three tales. But with Chin-Kee's striking embodiment of ethnic confusion and self-betrayal, Gene Luen Yang has created that rare article: a youthful tale with something new to say about American youth.

Questions of identity are also at the heart of "Stuck in the Middle," a collection of comics about junior high school edited by Ariel Schrag, a writer and artist. Here, though, instead of race, issues of morality and sexuality dominate the narrative.

Some of the stories - Lauren Weinstein's horrible time at a horseback-riding camp, Daniel Clowes's detached memories of summer with his grandparents - are hilarious. Others, like Eric Enright's tale of self-hatred, remind us that the concerns of junior high are often far from funny. Schrag cleverly plays up this contrast by alternating the stories, suggesting the mood swings of adolescence itself.

The anxieties of sexual and social identity are to be expected in "Stuck in the Middle." What surprises is that one of the best of the stories, Aaron Renier's "Simple Machines," tackles the search for one's professional self. In telling how he came to make comics, Renier reminds the reader that discovering what you're good at is perhaps the greatest teenage joy.

"Stuck in the Middle" is weakest when its contributors ignore the structure of the short story and instead present what seem like excerpts from longer works. But by and large it is excellent, and the variety of the art ensures that the reader never gets bored.

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Children's Books Is it so bad to grow up Asian in America? One might be forgiven for asking upon encountering "American Born Chinese," a graphic novel that, with its dark exploration of Asian-American adolescence, won last year's Michael L. Printz Award for young adult literature and was also a finalist in its genre for a National Book Award.

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Welcome to Using Graphic Novels in Education, an ongoing feature from CBLDF that is designed to allay confusion around the content of banned books and to hel p parents and teachers raise readers. In this column, we exami ne books that have been targeted by censors and provide teaching and discussion suggestions for the use of such books in classrooms
This month, we take a closer look at American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang.

American Born Chi neseis a 2006 National Book Award Honor Book for Young People's literature, the 2007 winner of the Michael L. Printz Award honoring literary excellence in Young Adult literature, the winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album, and a 2007 Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year. In this work, Yang skillfully weaves three seemingly independent stories of Chinese folklore, a teenager's need to fit in, and adolescents' balancing of their Chinese American heritage.
SUMMARY
In an effort to show and tell the effects of racial stereotyping and assimilation, Yang presents one particularly egregious Chinese character, Chin-Kee, who has just arrived from China to visit his cousin Danny. Chin-Kee embraces all the negative Chinese stereotypes into one monstrous exaggerated whole. Chin-Kee's eyes are pupil-less slits, he is drawn with a cartoon-like round face with two buck teeth. He wears traditional Chinese garments and speaks with the L/R switch ("Harro Amellica!").

It is this rampant stereotyping that has caused objections. Ironically, it is these exaggerations that empower readers to feel the shame of racial stereotyping from all sides - those who embrace the stereotypes, those who abuse and make fun of them, and those who are stuck in the middle, uncomfortable with these actions and reactions, and often uncertain how to respond.

While this book has not been banned - to a large extent as a result of the tremendous support it has received from librarians and educators - it has often been deemed inappropriate because of its blatant stereotyping. American Born Chinese is a brilliant weaving of cultural mores, expectations and racial stereotypes all battling assimilation and inherent justice, with ones' need to fit in. It is a testament for all readers who struggle with developing and maintaining individual identities while fitting in with their larger more diverse communities.

American Born Chinese is much like a poem for three voices. It tells three stories in three parts which come together at the end.

Story 1 - The Monkey King begins "One bright and starry night" and introduces the Monkey King, who has been the leader of Flower Fruit Mountain since he was "born of a rock." He hears a party in the heavens and as a deity in his own right rises through the heavens to join them, only to be laughed at because while he "may be a king...even a deity [he is] still a monkey." The Monkey King returns to his home and lays awake, thinking of how he can change his fate.

The Monkey King, angry at his rejection decrees that all his subjects wear shoes (they have an awful time of it in the trees), and he retreats to master various disciplines of Kung Fu. After years of practice and fervent study, he emerges transformed, larger than life, with a mission to show the other gods that he is now "a great sage equal of heaven." He bullies and beats the other gods, who cry to Tze-Yo-Tzuh (He Who Is) for help. Tze-Yo-Tzuh asks him why he is such an angry monkey. The Monkey responds in anger that he is not a Monkey but a god. Part II ends with the Monkey King being trapped by Txe-Yo-Tzuh under a mountain of rocks for 500 years. The last part of his story is a tale of a hero's trial / quest, acceptance, and redemption.

Story 2 - Jin Wang's Story begins with, "My mother once told me an old Chinese parable..." and shows Jin Wang in the backseat of his family's car looking sad while playing with a transformer, and retelling the parable. They are moving (again) and he is upset. He later tells his mother's new herbalist that one day he wants to be a transformer, and she responds, "It's easy to become anything you wish...so long as you're willing to forfeit your soul."

When Jin Wang gets to his new school, his teacher makes false assumptions about his personal information when introducing him. She introduces him as "Jin Jang" and tells the class he's from China. He meekly and embarrassingly corrects her: his name is Jin Wang, and he's from San Francisco. At school Jin is always alone. His classmates make fun of his food and Chinese heritage, and the only kid who befriends him is the school bully who merely taunts him. A few years later another boy, Wei-Chen Sun, who has just come from Taiwan, is introduced to the class with a different teacher making similar false assumptions and mistakes (he is introduced as Chie-Chen Chun, from China). Unlike Jin Wang, Wei-Chen has a thick accent and even though Jin is sitting alone with no friends, he wants nothing to do with Wei-Chen...until he sees him playing with a transformer.

Jin-Wang's story continues with him in junior high-school. He has a crush on a girl in his class, Amelia, and is shy. His friend, Wei-Chen calls him a "turtle." Eventually, Jin decides that the only way he'll be able to successfully woo Amelia is if (like the Monkey King) he changes his appearance - to look more like the others. He "transforms," and the rest of his story depicts the strains he puts on his friendship with Wei-Chen as he courts Amelia along with the challenges of young love.

Story 3 - Danny and Chin-Kee's Story, Part 1 opens with an image of Chin-Kee's face - a cartoon-like caricature of a Chinese face with slits for eyes, two buck teeth, braided hair, and cap, with the title splashed across the page: "Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee." The story then unfolds in the pages to follow. Danny, about to ask his lab partner, Melanie, for a date finds out Chin-Kee is arriving for his annual visit. Danny is horrified. Chin-Kee arrives, sees Melanie and wants to bind her feet and to meet another girl like her in Danny's school for a bride of his own.

Danny and Chin-Kee's story continues with Danny taking Chin-Kee to school. Danny is constantly embarrassed by Chin-Kee, who sometimes gives valid reason for this response and sometimes does not. As Danny tries to integrate into his new school and blend in, Chin-Kee is constantly making sure everyone is aware of his presence. He sings loudly in the library (in his thick Chinese accent), he plays a prank on a "jock" Danny is trying to impress, and in each class Chin-Kee immediately shouts out the correct answers before anyone else can respond.

Towards the end, however, Danny and Chin-Kee's story merges with Jin Wang's and the Monkey King's. We find out how they are all related, and are left to contemplate life's choices, cultural and self-identities, assimilation, acceptance, and friendship.
TEACHING/DISCUSSION SUGGESTIONS: Cultural Heritage, Cultural Diversity, and Character Development

In short this is a story a of heroes, large and small, who must learn how to best fulfill their destinies while maintaining their identities and self-worth in communities that don't always appreciate their strength and value.
Language, Literature, and Language Usage
Throughout American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang discusses:
Modes of Storytelling and Visual Literacy

Tolerance and intolerance of those who are different;

Self-concept versus group identity;

Cultural definitions and boundaries;

Folklore and its influence in cultures, customs, and values;

Irony and justice;

Concept of "hero" and his / her personality traits versus physical characteristics

Means of achieving acceptance and redemption.

Discuss the similarities and differences between American and Chinese folklore (along with any other cultures represented in your classroom / community / reading group).

Discuss what it feels and looks like to be "different" from others and the importance of "fitting in." Are there differences among looking different, acting different, and feeling different? If so, what are they and why? You may also want to address when it is worth changing to to fit in and when it is not.

Divide the class into groups, each one representing a different racial / social / religious minority. Have them research the folklore of their target group and select their favorite tale. Then, have them write a script and reenact that story for the class. After group presentations, discuss the different folktales, in particular their similarities and differences, their lessons, and their impact.

Discuss the pursuit of dreams and what the herbalist meant when she said, "It's easy to become anything you wish...so long as you're willing to forfeit your soul."

Discuss when one should forgive and forget and when one should fight or at least stand up for themselves and their community.

Discuss how cultural values, folklore, styles, and preferences are woven into each of Yang's three stories.

Compare and contrast the White students' reactions to Chin-Kee versus Danny's reaction to Chin-Kee. Are there differences? Should there be differences?

Compare and contrast how the characters of Jin Wang, Wei-Chen, and The Monkey King develop and grow. How are their courses similar and how are they different?

Point out that Yang leaves us to wonder about the path and life choices Wei-Chen will take. Discuss the options he might take and the probability of his taking them. Discuss why Wei-Chin's character is the one least resolved.

Define and discuss "stereotyping"

Why we do it

Pros and cons

How prevalent it is in our daily lives

How hurtful it can be

How it has influenced, shaped, and determined by national and international incidences and reactions

Discuss rationale for racial profiling for "security" - its pros and cons

What we can do to fight it

Suggested Prose Novel and Poetry Pairings

Yang's three stories are told much like poetry for multiple voices. Compare and contrast the structure and effectiveness of his storytelling versus that of multiple-voice poems. [Note: See suggested multiple-voice poetry links below.]

Search for and discuss the many instances of irony across the three stories and how Yang uses it to shape the stories.

Search for and discuss Yang's use of idioms, slang, colloquialisms, and similes throughout American Born Chinese.

Plot and compare the author's use of language (vocabulary, slang, similes, idioms, etc.) and images as he relates and separates the three stories in the beginning and then relates and merges the stories towards the end. Discuss how Yang uses these tools as he weaves his story.

Create a working definition of "hero." Then, plot and compare the heroes in each of the three stories. Compare and contrast how well each hero fits the definition, and why there may or may not be discrepancies. You may want to introduce Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey" and analyze how Yang's characters "fit" into Campbell's template. [See links in resources below.]

Have students research and share their own cultural folklore. Compare and contrast how the stories are told / written.

In graphic novels, images are used to relay messages with and without accompanying text, adding additional narrative and dimension to the story. Compare and contrast Yang's use of verbal versus visual imagery. Discuss with students how images can be used to relay complex messages. For example:
Common Core State Standards

Compare and contrast the opening images and words for each of the stories (page 7, page 23, and page 43). How do the words and the images help distinguish the stories and set their respective tones?

Have students hunt for visual and verbal examples of stereotyping throughout the book. Compare and contrast the visual and verbal means Yang uses to portray these stereotypes.

On page 23, we see a young Jin Wang in the backseat of his parents' car, crying while playing with a transformer and introducing a Chinese parable told by his mother. Discuss how the author relates Jin's sadness and the flashback to the parable through image.

On page 30 and then again on page 36, Jin Wang and Wei-Chen are introduced by well-meaning but clueless teachers to their classmates. Discuss how the images and text interact relaying the diverse actions and reactions of the students and teachers.

On page 67, we see various gods, many of them bruised and battered and complaining to Tze-Yo Tzuh about the Monkey King. Discuss how these gods are portrayed in this folktale. Compare and contrast these gods with other gods of myths, such as those found in Greek pantheon. Discuss how Yang is able to incorporate Chinese cultural aspects into his portrayal of the gods.

For greater discussion on literary style and/or content here are some prose novels and poetry you may want to read with American Born Chinese:
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths by Ingri and Edgar D'Aulaire: An introduction to the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece. Note that George O'Connor (First Second Books) is also putting out an exceptional collection of graphic novels accurately and creatively retelling the stories of the Greek gods.

Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices and Poems for Four Voices,both by Paul Fleischman: Poignant, playful, powerful poetry for multiple voices.

Dragonwings by Laurence Yep: An award-winning (Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association and runner-up for Newbery Medal) historical novel depicting the Chinese American experience in San Francisco shortly after the turn of the twentieth century.

The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie: About a bright motivated young Native American who must decide between a long commute to a better all-white school off the reservation (and face ridicule from white kids he must befriend and from his local friends he leaves behind) or to remain with his friends at the reservation's limited high school and head nowhere fast.

A Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston: A memoir about their family's internment at the Manzanar concentration camp during World War II, where upstanding and honorable Japanese Americans were sent during the war simply because they shared a cultural heritage with our enemy.

So Far from the Bamboo Grove by Yoko Kawashima Watkins (semi-autobiographical memoir): This work takes place during the last days of World War II as Yoko and her family flea from their home in Nanam, North Korea and end up, eventually in the United States, and must face hardship and ridicule throughout their arduous journey.

All images (c) Gene Luen Yang.
This book of identity, self-worth, assimilation, and racial tolerance is full of advanced vocabulary, simile, slang, idioms, and cultural folklore. It promotes critical thinking, relates a hero and a coming of age story laden with issues of cultural and self-identity, justice and friendship, all done through verbal and visual story telling that addresses multi-modal teaching, and meets Common Core State Standards including:

Craft and structure: Determining the meaning of words and phrases including figurative and connotative meaning; analyzing how particular sentences, chapters, scenes or stanzas fit into the overall structure of a text; explaining how a point of view is developed; analyzing how a text's structure or form contributes to its meaning; analyzing a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work of literature from outside the United States; and describing how a text presents information.

Integration of knowledge and ideas: Comparing and contrasting texts; distinguishing among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text; analyzing how a modern work of fiction draws on themes, patterns of events, or character types from myths, traditional stories, or religious works describing how the material is rendered new; analyzing how an author draws on and transforms source material in a specific way.

Vocabulary acquisition and use: Determining the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases; demonstrating understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in world meanings; and acquiring and using accurately grade-appropriate general academic and domain-specific words and phrases.

Research to build and present knowledge: Drawing evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.

Meryl Jaffe, PhD teaches visual literacy and critical reading at Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth OnLine Division and is the author of Raising a Reader! and Using Content-Area Graphic Texts for Learning. She used to encourage the "classics" to the exclusion comics, but with her kids' intervention, Meryl has become an avid graphic novel fan. She now incorporates them in her work, believing that the educational process must reflect the imagination and intellectual flexibility it hopes to nurture. In this monthly feature, Meryl and CBLDF hope to empower educators and encourage an ongoing dialogue promoting kids' right to read while utilizing the rich educational opportunities graphic novels have to offer. Please continue the dialogue with your own comments, teaching, reading, or discussion ideas at meryl.jaffe@cbldf.org and please visit Dr. Jaffe at http://www.departingthe text.blogspot.com.

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Using Graphic Novels in Education: American Born Chinese

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Welcome to Using Graphic Novels in Education, an ongoing feature from CBLDF that is designed to allay confusion around the content of banned books and to hel p parents and teachers raise readers.

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I included American Born Chinese on the syllabus because I admire its construction--on every level, from the compact layouts to the slippery three-part plot--and because I thought my students would find its perspective on racial alienation and assimilation both familiar and enlightening. I've found in the past that works about racial identity by non-black authors can be a great tool for discussing representations of race in a black classroom with a white professor. They open a kind of third space that allows everybody in the room to approach the issue on more or less equal footing, without as much at stake.

All of those things played out exactly as expected, but I ended up looking at American Born Chinese a lot less favorably than my class did. Much as I admire its construction, I'm not sure I care at all for its message. Or the fact that it has a "message," which is surely part of the problem. Accept yourself for who you are is one of the most banal themes in popular culture (rivalled only by Follow your dreams!) but in this particular book it takes on a sinister insinuation. In this book, accepting yourself the way you are sometimes means accepting that your racial and ethnic identity is as immutable and inescapable as your species, your mortality, your very position in a great chain of being that stretches to the heavens.

The book follows three plots, with the story of student Jin Wang coming of age in 1980s California sandwiched between a retelling of the legend of the Monkey King and a horrific sitcom in which all-American white kid Danny is visited by his cousin Chin-Kee, a living embodiment of every Asian stereotype Danny has tried to suppress or flee. The book initially suggests that the Monkey King and Chin-Kee stories are meant to be taken as symbolic commentaries on Jin Wang's desire to assimilate--an interpretation that persists even after we learn they aren't strictly symbolic.

In the course of condemning internalized racism and self-loathing, Yang analogizes Jin's dilemma to that of the Monkey King, who insists he's a god even after God Himself tells him otherwise and who suffers for his presumption until he learns to accept his simian nature, which sets him on the path to happiness and divine ordination. Working back to Jin, though, the Monkey King's acceptance implies that the ethnic, minority, or immigrant cultural identity is always the foundational one--Jin will always be Chinese, just as the Monkey King will always be a monkey. It's one of those classic comic-book analogies we can only pursue so far before we have to abandon it or accept some pretty unsavory implications, but American Born Chinese never tells us that it's time to bail out.

The best defense I can muster is to say that if you don't like those unsavory implications, you only have to wait a few pages. This is a book of contradictions--of realism and fantasy, cultural isolation and exchange--and every value it holds turns into its opposite. If the use of the Monkey King and Chin-Kee as symbolic commentaries on Jin's story seems trite or predictable, the final chapters will throw you a major curveball. If their essentialism grates, you only have to remember that this is a book in which no identity is stable for long. If you think the finale emphasizes ethnic isolation at the expense of cultural fusion, the book is still filled with characters and stories that cross cultures.

Although that can be a problem too, particularly when Yang takes the Buddha out of the Buddhist epic Journey to the West. Buddha is missing from the Monkey King's story, replaced by a distinctly Christian god (complete with shepherd's crook!) who's served by the animal symbols of the four evangelists. The original journey to the west (to retrieve the Buddha's sutras) is gone too, supplanted by a journey to celebrate the nativity of Christ. Maybe it's supposed to be syncretism, but it sure looks like subordination. Yang spoke about his intentions for the story in a Comics Journal interview, which Ng Suat Tong quotes here: he describes the Christianized myth as a simple combination of stories, but I think the work deviates quite a bit from his stated aims.

That lack of self-consciousness may be the root of the problem. I realized, after my last class on the book, that American Born Chinese didn't rankle because of its analogies or the friendly face they put on their essentialist view of race. This isn't the only book we've read that raises some troubling implications; it's just one of the few that doesn't know what to do with them. Maus has some pretty suspicious metaphors too, and Fun Home trots out its stereotypes in more realistic fashion, but those works invite readers to pick apart their assumptions--Spiegelman pretty much forces us to with all those devices that explode the artificiality and the implicit stereotyping of his animal avatars. American Born Chinese, like Nat Turner, doesn't invite us to question its implications; it may not even know they're there. It's the difference between a book in which the metaphors are supposed to break down and a book you just aren't supposed to think that much about. One can sustain or reward the most rigorous critical analysis, and the other just can't.

None of this rules against teaching American Born Chinese again, by the way; I find these dilemmas a lot more fascinating and productive than the trite messages of self-acceptance that the book advertises as its themes. But I will need to come up with some new ways to problematize this book for classes that have been taught to recognize the expression of racial and ethnic pride as the noblest aims of art--the most unimpeachable way of accepting yourself for who you are.

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Week 12: Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese

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I included American Born Chinese on the syllabus because I admire its construction--on every level, from the compact layouts to the slippery three-part plot--and because I thought my students would find its perspective on racial alienation and assimilation both familiar...