26 AMERICAN FLAGG!
friendship show both how delicate this bond of friendship is, and how necessary it is if
one is to survive adolescence. Th e particular interest that brings the two boys together
is not their ethnicity per se, but their attraction to Transformers—a popular American
toy in the 1980s, but also an echo of the Monkey King, renowned for his unmatched
powers of transformation.
Th e third narrative is a satire of an imagined American sitcom, framed by the ap-
plause and laughter of an invisible studio audience, entitled “Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee.”
Its protagonist, a white teenager named Danny, is subjected to repeated embarrassments
when forced to take his “cousin Chin-Kee” to high school with him. Chin-Kee is drawn
in the style of Chinese caricatures developed in American comedy theater and minstrel
shows from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries: yellow-skinned, squint-eyed, buck-
toothed, and pigtailed. He bursts in on the novel in a full-page panel, crying “HARRO
AMELLICA!” while his uncle takes his luggage —all in oversized Chinese take-out
cartons—to the bedroom. As he follows Danny to Oliphant High School —named
after the cartoonist Pat Oliphant, known for his ethnic caricatures —he continues to
display examples of stereotypically repulsive “Chinese” behavior, ranging from his “model
minority” tendency to outperform other students in the classroom, to eating “cat gizzards”
in the cafeteria (114), to going “to riblaly to fi nd Amellican girl to bind feet and bear
Chin-Kee’s children!” (120). Th is nightmarish character born of American popular cul-
ture is Danny’s own personal nightmare, “ruining [his] life” (205) even though, as he tells
the girl he’s interested in, “I don’t even know how we’re related!” (123).
Th e question of how Danny and Chin-Kee are related is answered only at the novel’s
end, which reveals how all three narratives are related. Danny and Jin are one and the
same: Danny is Jin’s ideal self, the perfect American boy he has always dreamed of
becoming, and Jin is Danny’s real self, the boy tormented by America’s long history of
racism because he is (though he doesn’t feel) ethnically Chinese. Chin-Kee is, in addi-
tion to an embodiment of the culture’s long-standing race anxieties, a disguise of the
Monkey King, who has been putting Jin / Danny through a series of trials comparable
to those the Monkey King himself faced on his own “journey to the West,” or toward
enlightenment. Wei-chen is the Monkey King’s son, sent to live among human beings as
a test of his virtue. Th is element of the Monkey King’s story is of Yang’s own invention,
replacing the original story’s Buddhist underpinnings with Christian ones. Consistent
with the novel’s theme of transformation, American Born Chinese ’s Monkey King has
thus been transformed from a Chinese to a specifi cally Chinese American god. In the
end, the signifi cance of Jin and Wei-chen’s friendship is heightened by the interplay of
these narratives beyond individual happiness to a kind of universal harmony; it gives
both characters the spiritual strength to endure the challenges of American social life.
Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins
AMERICAN FLAGG! A science fi ction satire that also draws from the We s t e r n , crime
comics and fi ction, and funny animal comics, Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! is
set in the year 2031, decades after a series of natural disasters and political upheavals
