It’s Children’s Book Week! To celebrate, I’m reviewing American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. It’s more correctly in the age group of “Young People” literature, but it’s my blog and I make the rules. So there. Note: Click on the images for (slightly) larger versions. For bigger versions still, go buy the book.

American Born Chinese is recognized as not just a great graphic book (“comic book” doesn’t quite fit it), but in the literary world as well. It was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in the category of Young People’s Literature, and the recipient of the prestigious Michael L. Printz Award in 2007. For some reason, book awards are more meaningful than other media awards and this is no exception.

American Born Chinese tells three stories that are thematically unified but distinct from and compliment each other. Alternating chapters so you don’t get to the end of one story before you start another, the book is tightly woven together with a common thread that makes it all work. It’s hard to describe but easy to follow, and Yang pulls off well. There’s a massive twist at the end of one of the stories that I’m going to ATTEMPT not to give away. Let’s start with the first story. (These two pages are not in sequence.)

We begin with Jin Wang, a young boy with Chinese parents (the titular American Born Chinese) who learns how to deal with racism, both subtle and stark, after he moves to a predominately white area from San Fransisco’s Chinatown. As his teacher mispronounces his name and other kids make fun of him, Jin distances himself from the one Asian girl in his class and later, the Taiwanese boy (Wei-Chen Sun, above right) who moves to town. As Jin tries to integrate into the class, he makes changes that deny his heritage.

The rejection that Jin feels is present from page one of American Born Chinese and his decisions are childish. Interesting, though, that adults make the same mistakes. If I look and act like everybody else, we think, maybe they’ll accept me. In Jin’s case, he goes so far as to perm his hair like a popular white student’s. It looks silly on him, but his hope is that people will forget, or maybe not even notice, that he’s different.

The second story is a charming re-telling of an old Chinese story first told in Journey To the West by Wu Chen-en in the 1500s. Gene Luen Yang’s version focuses on the Monkey King, who is dissatisfied with being “just” the King of Flower Fruit Mountain. He masters twelve forms of kung-fu and learns the four major heavenly disciplines, thus achieving status of deity. Things get complicated when the Monkey King is kicked out of a dinner party in heaven. Eventually, he is visited by Tze-Yo-Tzuh (above) and things do not go well.

The Monkey King’s rejection is similar to Jin’s, but he has the power to force people (and other gods) to accept him. Yang leads the young readers (and us old guys) of American Born Chinese to explore the universal power fantasy, the “I’ll Make Them PAY” daydreams that Ralphie has in A Christmas Story. He shows us that even if you could beat others into submission, the ultimate good that must be achieved is for you to accept yourself as you are. Others’ acceptance is secondary.

Finally, we come to the Danny’s story. It’s offensive on purpose, running through the list of bad Asian stereotypes and a few good ones to boot. He comes to visit his cousin Danny, a blond-haired, blue-eyed High School student who, though he is an All-American type of guy, has to deal with the funny looks and mean-spirited jabs when his cousin Chin-Kee comes to town. Danny is just getting settled in his new school when Chin-Kee visits and ruins everything.

About the offensiveness of Chin-Kee’s story: Yang put it in there for a reason. One of the saving graces of Chin-Kee’s story is the running gag of the studio audience reaction at the bottom of the panels. It effectively pulls the offensiveness from being taken seriously and pushes it over into farce.

Danny’s afraid of people not accepting him, but not because of something in himself, but from an outside source. The lesson remains the same, though; hide from people, whether it’s your ethnicity, your family, or whatever else, and you’re in for trouble. Accept who you are and let the chips fall where they may, even if it means you might face negative consequences. It’s an important lesson that everyone need to hear.

There’s a line from near the end of American Born Chinese that I really want to quote here, but I can’t because it would give everything away. I’m betting that people who’ve read the book know which one I’m talking about, and when you read it, you’ll be able to pick it out too. It’s one sentence that has literally changed my life. I hope it has the same effect on you.

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A few weeks ago, I read Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. I was so impressed that I immediately started going back and re-reading passages. What an amazing book.

I've started and restarted this post several times, and it keeps ending up like a ninth grade book report. So in the interest of not writing said book report, I shall fall back on the time-honored blogging tradition of the non-ordered bullet list. To mix things up a bit, I shall intersperse the list with several of my favorite short quotes from the book.

Let's get started, shall we?

• Loved Scout's narration. It was so natural, not just in the Southern accent and phrasing, but also as the voice of a young child.
• Of course, race relations are central to To Kill A Mockingbird. Published in 1960, the message was controversial and absolutely necessary. The recognition that racism is so complex, but that despite its complexity we must overcome it, was an important stage in our nation's development.

As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.

• It was a brilliant decision to tell Jem's story through Scout's eyes, the eyes of someone who doesn't understand what's happening but is trying to make sense of it all.
• Also the way Lee allowed them to not be good children all the time. The screw ups and inventive mischief helped the book from becoming too bogged down in the heaviness of the subject at hand.

With these facts in mind and Halloween at hand, some wicked children had waited until the Misses Barber were thoroughly asleep, slipped into their livingroom (nobody but the Radleys locked up at night), stealthily made away with every stick of furniture therein, and hid it in the cellar. I deny having taken part in such a thing.

• There are so many characters to love in To Kill A Mockingbird, and so much more to it than a rape trial (more on that in my film review). From Miss Maudie's fire to singing in church with Calpurnia, from replaying the Radley family history with Dill to serving tea with Aunt Alexandria, the Finch's neighborhood is a fully realized community.
• Mrs. Debose was a particular favorite of mine, mostly because I've known people like her, and because Lee made her more than a charactere of that kind of person.

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

• And then there's Atticus. A wiser, more confident, more humble man you wouldn't find, and yet he's kept from being so heroic as to be inhuman.

I wish Bob Ewell wouldn’t chew tobacco," was all Atticus said about it.

According to Miss Stephanie Crawford, however, Atticus was leaving the post office when Mr. Ewell approached him, cursed him, spat on him, and threatened to kill him. Miss Stephanie . . . said Atticus didn't bat an eye, just took out his handkerchief and wiped his face and stood there and let Mr. Ewell call him names wild horses could not bring her to repeat.

"Too proud to fight, you nigger-lovin' bastard?" Atticus said, "No, too old," put his hands in his pockets and strolled on. Miss Stephanie said you had to hand it to Atticus Finch; he could be right dry sometimes.

I'm glad I finally got around to reading To Kill A Mockingbird. Truly insightful and refreshingly honest, it's a book I'll surely be returning to regularly.

SIMPSONS SIGHTING!

Season 9, Lisa the Simpson
Lisa: "And please don't deprive yourselves of wonderful books like To Kill a Mockingbird, Harriet the Spy and Yertle Turtle -- possibly the best book ever written on the subject of turtle stacking."

Season 11, Bart To The Future
Bart's band from the future: Tequila Mockingbirds

Season 13, Jaws Wired Shut
Itchy and Scratchy cartoon entitled To Kill a Talking Bird.

Season 15, Diatribe of a Mad Housewife
Homer: "I'll have to read Marge's book. And I swore never to read again after To Kill a Mockingbird gave me no useful advice on killing mockingbirds. It did teach me not to judge a man based on the color of his skin, but what good does that do me?"

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I'm not quite sure what to say about Shaun Tan's The Arrival. It's an exceptional book, but I have neither the education nor the vocabulary to put it into words. Not that that's ever stopped me before.

Let's start with a summary. The book follows a man (nameless) as he leaves home to prepare a new home for his wife and daughter (also nameless). We follow the man as he boards a ship and travels across the ocean into his new home. When he gets there, he's surprised by a stunning development.

The astonishingly creative twist here is that everything in this new place is vaguely familiar, but different enough to cause problems. Not just different to the man, but different to the reader. The food he eats, the shape of the houses, the birds, the clock on the wall; everything's different, right down to the eating utensils.

The book is wordless, told completely in images. Tan goes so far as to invent a new written language for the street signs, and except for spelling his name once never offers a translation. But even though we can't peek into the man's words, we know with such intimacy what the man is feeling.

By denying the reader the simple tool of language, Tan forces us to put ourselves in the man's position. And by giving us an unfamiliar world, he makes us figure out with the man how to eat the fruit that replaces bread and how to navigate the streets with a map in a foreign language that neither of us understand. Tan does a wonderful job of it, making each page its own little story.

I really don't know what else to say about The Arrival. It was published in 2006 in the author's native Australia, where he's apparently fairly successful, as well he should be. I don't usually prod people into buying anything on the blog, but please consider getting this one. You should also visit ShaunTan.net and read his comments on the book.

(Please note that for this post I have limited myself to a few of the illustrations that Tan has made available on his site. See New York Magazine for preview images that are considerably larger.)

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