Stereotypes In American Born Chinese By Gene Luen Yang

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American Born Chinese is a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang about various characters dealing with stereotypes, and prejudices. Two main characters that seem to struggle with this are the monkey king and Jinn. The monkey king is the king of all monkey's on his island. He is looked at as a god and respected by every monkey on the island. But when he is invited to a dinner party for all the gods, he realizes that nobody else has respect for him. By everyone else he is looked at as a dirty monkey. Jinn is a Chinese immigrant boy to America and struggles to fit in with the other american students. Jinn and the Monkey King have similar issues in that they struggle to fit in with people different with themselves. This causes them to try and change their ways in order to adapt to their environment. …show more content…
He immigrates from China to America very young, without any knowledge of American life and society. This puts him in a difficult position especially when trying to meet new people and making friends. Because this new environment seems very strange to him he developed a lack in confidence and shy personality. Jinn had to face the teasing, stereotypes, mockery form his fellow students. He views himself as an outsider so he even tries to avoid people of his own nationality. For example, Jinn meets a boy from also from China but he doesn’t want to seem weird or hurt his reputation even more by befriending him. Because of this he acts mean towards the other boy and avoids him. Eventually he realizes that the boy doesn’t deserve that and accepts him for who he his. This leads to a great friendship, Jinns first in America. As the story progresses Jinn becomes more comfortable with himself and his nationality. Jinn reveals that he has crush on an american girl in his class. He is still a very shy person so he doesn’t have the courage to talk to her. However Jinns new friend introduces them and they find out they both have feelings for each other. It seems that once Jinn finally accepted who he is, things started to go his way. He made friends, and even got an american

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