American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang is a graphic novel about three different characters that just want to fit in. The three characters are: The Monkey King, Jin Yang, and Danny.
I think Danny faces the hardest problem. He is only a junior in high school and he's already been to three different schools. Every time he settles into a school, his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee comes for a visit and screws everything up for him. Danny is already going through enough trouble; he realizes that he wants to date his best friend Melanie, he needs to prove himself on the basketball court, and he needs to start making friends. Danny is basically facing all of the problems teenagers face, and then he has to deal with his psychotic cousin who won't let him live his life in peace. "By the time he leaves, no one thinks of me as Danny anymore. I'm Chin-Kee's cousin" (pg. 127). I can connect Danny's situation to the real world: If someone was trying to improve their social life, but they had a really annoying friend that screwed everything up for them, no one would want to associate with that person anymore.
The Monkey King faces a different problem: discrimination because of his appearance. The Monkey King is a deity in a magical world, and one night the Monkey King was not allowed into a dinner party at Heaven because he was a monkey. He was so angered by this, but instead of leaving with pride, he suddenly did not want to be a monkey anymore. "When he entered his royal chamber, the thick smell of monkey fur greeted him. He'd never noticed it before. He stayed awake for the rest of the night thinking of ways to get rid of it" (pg. 20). This quotation shows that the Monkey King was suddenly ashamed of being a monkey and now did not want to be associated with them. At one point, The Monkey King changes his appearance so that he still has the face of a monkey but the body of a man. He gets trapped under tons of rocks for disobeying his master, and finds that he could have saved himself 500 years of imprisonment had he realized how good it was to be a monkey. The message here is that you shouldn't have to change who you are to impress other people, if they can't accept you for who you are then it is their fault.
Jin Yang is a Chinese boy that has accepted that he will never be popular because of his race. One day, he sees a girl in his English class and basically falls in love with her. He is facing a normal teenage problem, but he thinks that he doesn't have a good chance of getting her because he is Chinese. Jin is so angry about this that he takes it out on his best friend Wei-Chen and is left with nothing. In a way, the story really revolves around Jin, because some magical woman transforms him into a white boy so that he can know what it feels like to not face discrimination. This new face turns out to be Danny, and Chin-Kee, his "cousin", turns out to be the Monkey King in disguise. In the end Jin accepts who he is and once again becomes friends with Wei-Chen.
